I’ve recently followed a couple of bots on Mastodon that promise to show “Random Magic: The Gathering Cards” or “Every Pokémon Card.” Following both of these reminds me how much I like trying to think through how the unique abilities of different cards (or miniatures, or whatever else) can be combined to win a game. The last time that I’ve really scratched that itch was when I was in grad school and got really into the X-Wing Miniatures Game. After spending a ton of money on the First Edition and realizing that I still wasn’t great at the game because I couldn’t be bothered to follow “the meta,” I got disillusioned when the Second Edition came out and made all my purchases semi-obsolete and the little skill I’d built up totally obsolete.

Several years ago, while I was sharing a Bible story with my daughter, she interjected with an urgent thought: “I hope that Jesus knows that I have a pig.”

As I wrote in my journal at that time:

She’s been big on showing people her stuffed piggy recently: the movers, the plumber, anyone we’re Facetiming with, it doesn’t matter. So, it makes sense that if she got the chance to see Jesus, she’d want to show Him her pig, too.

A number of years ago, I read this blog post, which linked to this podcast episode about intertextuality between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. The post and episode both focus on the work of Nick Frederick, a BYU professor who argues that:

If we’re comfortable saying that the New Testament is an antecedent text for the Book of Mormon, for the King James English 19th century Book of Mormon, then that opens up some wonderful avenues of inquiry. We can look at how those passages were understood in the 19th century and say, “Okay, is the Book of Mormon pushing back against something? Is the Book of Mormon affirming one of these ideas? What was the impact of these passages on early converts? How might this have changed through trajectories of 19th century theology?” Whereas if we just say, “No, no, no. It couldn’t be. There’s no way the New Testament was on the gold plates,” that just ends the conversation. If we see these as two different texts that are related through translation, then I think that helps us bridge this at least question of the New Testament in the Book of Mormon a little bit easier.

I have recently been (slowly) getting back into my exploration of what a modernized Book of Mormon might look like, which has meant spending some time in the opening chapter of the Book of Mormon and some commentaries on that chapter. One of the most interesting things about I Nephi 1 (by the original and Community of Christ chapter breaks—LDS editions split this into 1 Nephi 1-5) is that the reader is almost immediately forced to deal with a tension between our protagonist and narrator Nephi’s insistence that he is a good guy of whom God approves and Nephi’s willingness to murder a passed-out drunk to steal his clothes and con his way into taking control of some of his property. One of my favorite things to come out of critical readings of the Book of Mormon is trying to understand this episode: not to dismiss it or to justify it, but to wonder how there might be more to the story than our narrator might be letting on.

It’s now been over six months since the transfer of the Kirtland Temple from Community of Christ to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and there’s still a lot to process for folks on the Community of Christ side of things. I remain committed to what I first said after hearing the news: that I have no interest in telling people how to feel about things, and that even if I did, I wouldn’t be on solid ground doing so. Yet, a thought occurred to me this morning that has helped contextualize some of my other thoughts over the past six months, and I did want to go ahead and share that.

After being ordained earlier this summer, I was added to my home congregation’s preaching rotation. Today was supposed to be the day that I gave my first sermon there, but once I started to make plans to attend a family funeral, I reached out to ask if someone could sub for me. Before getting the bad news, though, I’d already written most of the sermon, and so I figured I should post the text here so that I get some use out of it. That said, I don’t want to post the text as my last draft had it—while reading the news today, I came across a story about the 2024 U.S. presidential race that would have made a better addition to my sermon than what I had written at the time, and I want to think about that connection.

I. With Siblings in a Sibling-Only Chat Separate from the One with Parents and Partners

We process the news together (I’m not the one to start the conversation but glad for the sibling who did). It’s not a deep processing, but I’m not sure we would have done this much even a few years ago. We plan to send flowers to the widow, decide who’s going to write the note, and settle up over Venmo. We coordinate flights and talk about travel logistics, especially while our parents are waylaid with a surprise surgery that is making a hard week even harder. We talk about how other family members are doing. It shows that we’re all well into adulthood now, and that sometimes we even act like it.

introduction and history

I’ve experimented for a while with consuming a range of media through an RSS reader. I don’t remember how long I subscribed to Feedbin, but being able to follow both Twitter accounts and email newsletters in the same app as my RSS subscriptions was a real game-changer. Eventually, I jumped ship for NetNewsWire—I don’t remember all the reasons behind the switch, but knowing that I could keep subscribing to Twitter and start following some subreddits was definitely a major factor.

Il y a deux ans, j’ai avoué que malgré mon amour pour la musique francophone, il faut parfois beaucoup de temps avant que pouvoir vraiment suivre les paroles. Ce n’est pas forcément une question de compétence en français—un peu, quand-même, mais j’ai souvent le même problème en anglais, où j’écoute une chanson sans vraiment la comprendre.

Tout ça pour dire que malgré avoir entendu la chanson « Secret » de Louane plusieurs fois grâce à la radio digitale DKL, ce n’est que ce matin que j’ai vraiment saisi le sens de la chanson. Étant moi-même papa d’une fille, les paroles m’ont vraiment bouleversé, et je suis sûr que je vais y penser bien souvent. C’est une belle chanson, et c’est dommage que je n’ai pas reconnu sa beauté avant, mais j’imagine que je n’arriverai plus à entendre cette chanson sans larmes aux yeux.

This isn’t a particularly deep post. There’s not a thesis to it, I’m not critiquing what I’m describing, and I don’t know that there’s anything to really take away from it. I just had a memory come to mind last night related to Book of Mormon Christology that I wanted to hold onto by sharing.

When I was a Latter-day Saint missionary, the Preach My Gospel missionary manual that we used had a suggested activity encouraging missionaries to read through the Book of Mormon and record “each reference to Jesus Christ (any of His names or pronouns related to Him).” The point of the exercise was to demonstrate just how central Jesus is to the volume of scripture, and early on in my service, I decided that I would give it a try.

I come from settler colonial stock and, more specifically, from a religious tradition that was (and still is!) pretty keen on imposing a particular identity on Indigenous peoples. I am the kind of person who really ought to be reading more Indigenous perspectives, but I’m also cautious about promoting those perspectives in my writing, lest I rely on a superficial, misguided understanding and then pat myself on the back for the great job I’m doing.

Prominent among my assorted shortcomings as a spouse and parent is a near-total ineptitude in the realm of home maintenance and repair (as evidenced by my previous posts on the subject). So, a few years ago, when our house’s carbon monoxide detector started its dystopian shrieking in the middle of the night to let us know that its battery was low, I blearily woke up, tore it out of the wall, disassembled it until it stopped sounding like something out of 1984, and decided to worry about it in the morning.

Earlier this month, I was ordained an elder in Community of Christ, an event I anticipated in an earlier post. A couple of weeks later, I carried out some of my first duties as a member of the denomination’s priesthood by performing the confirmation for a friend of mine who was joining Community of Christ, also from a Latter-day Saint background.

There’s a lot that I could write about these two events (my ordination and her confirmation), but there’s one thing that I want to share in particular: I was almost late to the confirmation service. Well, not really—I had hoped to be there 30-45 minutes early and was only 20 minutes early, so I was later than I meant to be, but I wasn’t late late. The point that I want to make here still stands, though: I was later to the service than I had planned to be largely because I was coming from a family outing.

I am, unbelievably, preparing my fourth offering of my department’s ICT/LIS 661 Intro to Data Science class, and this time around, I’ve decided to add a new section to my “about the class” page in Canvas to head off some concerns that I’ve seen over the past few years. I have a lot of students with no background in either statistics or programming who take my class, and it can be really intimidating for them. I’m not convinced that the advice I give below is everything that I ought to say (or exactly how I ought to say it), but this semester, I want to get out ahead of a lot of the one-on-one pep talks I give throughout the semester.

When I was slowly making my way through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything last month, I was having trouble processing all of the ideas in the ambitious, dense book, so I was surprised when one idea sounded familiar: schismogenesis. A few years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay using schismogenesis as a theme. Here’s Doctorow’s explanation of the concept from the original book, and the beginning of his thesis in the post:

This summer, I attended a Community of Christ “Reunion” camp for the third time. All three times have been at a campground in Southern Indiana owned by my local “mission center” (a regional grouping of congregations, not dissimilar to an LDS stake or a Catholic dioceses). I’ve wanted to write this post since getting back from Reunion in mid-June, and it probably would have been a better post if I had written it right away. That said, we’ve been doing a lot of family travel since then, and I’ve been trying to process exactly what I want to write about Reunion, so it’s only happening now.

One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.

For the past few years, my family has been getting into the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which is a lot of fun. In the three years that we’ve watched it, at least one of us has always been cheering for Switzerland. This is perhaps because of my own personal bias toward Switzerland, having spent some time there, but it’s also that the songs stand out to (at least one of) us. I was bummed in 2021 when Tout l’univers narrowly lost out (though Måneskin’s winning song has grown on me), and my kid was a big fan of 2023’s Swiss entry, Watergun, even if the rest of us (including the Eurovision judges and audience) weren’t huge fans.

I recently got a chance to be recorded as part of a video that my unit’s Information and Communication Technology master’s program put together for recruitment purposes. I feel weird about participating in marketing in an increasingly corporate university environment, but I like our program, I believe in what I had to say about the program, and I was pleased to hear what students (including one I advised!) had to say about what they got out of the program, so I’m pretty happy with the final product:

A few months ago, some colleagues reached out to ask if I would be willing to record a guest lecture for our library science program’s LIS 600: Information in Society. In particular, they were interested in having me record something for a week on the digital divide. I am conversant on that topic, but it’s not an area of specialty for me, so I was unsure about it until I realized that some of the readings for that week touch on topics like platform design that I am really interested in through my work on social media communities.

It’s that time of year (again) for signing the acceptable use policy for kiddo’s school, and I’m again grumpy about a lot of the details in here. Some of these details are me being a nitpicky academic, like the use of the word “technology” to refer to digital technologies alone. Others strike me as more serious, though.

Let’s take a look at this paragraph, listed under a “Roles and Responsibilities of Parents/Guardians” header:

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of providing the sermon for the Toronto Community of Christ congregation’s Beyond the Walls online ministry. Like when I preached last summer, the congregation is working its way through the parables associated with a particular gospel (Luke last year, Matthew this year), and I preached on the parable of the Sheep and the Goats.

The parable’s reference to visiting prisoners—combined with having recently read Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle—made me think about a decade(ish)-old memory that I hadn’t thought of for a long time. I also got to think about a Gérard Siegwalt book I recently reread and a recent experience at a spiritual retreat I attended a few years ago. I enjoyed thinking about this text and putting the sermon together and wanted to link to it here. I also really enjoyed the contributions from Estaban (who, it turns out, has some professional overlap with what I do!), Ron, Leandro, Mike, and John, which all tied together into a service that did a lot for my Sunday.

Two books that I’ve recently (re)read have been helpful in making sense of some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for the past few weeks. Let’s begin with my rereading of Gérard Siegwalt’s La réinvention du nom de Dieu (“Reinventing God’s Name”). At a few points in his book, Siegwalt makes some points about “rationalism” having replaced God in the modern world and the need to keep rationalism but put it in its place as we develop a new conception of God that this world needs better.

I’ve been reading up on (and aspiring to) non-violence recently. As I noted in a series of posts almost a year ago (here’s the one that wrapped up the series, and it links to the two earlier ones), I’ve been trying to figure out what that means for playing games and consuming media. I don’t necessarily believe that a commitment to non-violence means that you can’t play through an epic battle in D&D, but I think the question is worth thinking about.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley about work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the reactionary DezNat movement within Mormon Twitter. Our conversation largely focused on the article that Amy and I published last year on far-right and anti-feminist influences within DezNat, but I got to pull in some observations from an article on DezNat perceptions of religious authority that is currently under review and some work on broad patterns in DezNat activity between early 2019 and late 2022 that we’ll be presenting at October’s meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (more specifically, within a session organized by the Mormon Social Science Association).