As I blogged elsewhere a couple of days ago, I’ve recently purchased the most recent (and maybe last?) album from the folk rock Québécois band Les cowboys fringants, whose music I’ve been listening to since 2011. Their lead singer, Karl Tremblay, passed away far too young from cancer last November, which made this album a bit of a surprise, but Tremblay had managed to contribute to some of the songs before his death, and the rest of the band managed to put the rest of the album together in their grief.

Lundi matin, une amie et une collègue à moi est décédee bien trop jeune suite à un cancer. Ce n’est que quelques jours plus tard que j’ai appris l’existence du nouvel album des Cowboys fringants, un album posthume de Karl Tremblay qui lui aussi est décédée bien trop jeune suite à un cancer.

Je suis content de pouvoir entendre Karl chanter sa propre mort pendant que je pense à la disparition de mon amie Melissa. Je ne sais pas ce que Melissa aurait pensé de « La fin du show », vu qu’elle était croyante comme Karl ne l’était pas, mais ça me fait du bien au moins.

Recently, an idea has been bubbling in my head that’s the culmination of months—even years—of thinking about how I assess in my courses. I’ve typically taken the pretty-standard approach that assessment is the process of students’ proving that they’ve learned something. What if, though, assessment is itself the proof of the process of students’ learning something. That is, what if we doled out points for students’ proving that they appropriately participated in learning activities and then trusted the learning to happen on its own?

This morning, Mormon studies scholar Dr. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye passed away after a years-long struggle with cancer. Melissa was an amazing scholar, fantastic mentor, and just great person, and I think a lot of people—even just those who knew her professionally—are going to be spending time writing, thinking, and crying about her today and in the weeks to come. Other people will have more, and more important, things to say than I do, but I’m deeply grateful for Melissa, and I want to show that gratitude by sharing a few thoughts of my own.

Back in early March, as part of my flurry of posts about the Kirtland Temple, I wrote something about some of the dubious historical bits associated with Latter-day Saint beliefs about the significance of a purported visitation of the biblical prophet Elijah to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland Temple. That post has gotten a lot of hits over the past few weeks: According to my excellent, privacy-conscious analytics provider, it’s up to 70 hits over the past 30 days, 55 of which were over the week leading up to April 15th, when I got my last email digest.

Hier, j’ai regardé pour la première fois le clip de « Coup de vieux » de Bigflo et Oli. C’est une chanson que je connais depuis quelques semaines et un groupe que je connais depuis quelques mois, et j’ai beaucoup apprécié le clip :

Je n’ai jamais été un grand amateur du rap, et ça fait donc un peu bizarre de trouver que j’aime tant ce groupe. Pourtant, j’ai beaucoup écouté leur album « La vraie vie » car j’aime bien les paroles de plusieurs chansons sur cet album. « Coup de vieux » me marque particulièrement. Je suis plus âgé que ces frères, mais pas trop, et il m’est intéressant de comparer leur nostalgie de leur jeunesse avec la mienne. Je reconnais beaucoup des références qu’ils font dans cette chanson (preuve de l’influence américaine dans le monde), et même si moi, je n’ai jamais goûté de Chocapic, je peux quand-même reconnaître l’expérience de se réfléchir sur une jeunesse maintenant lointaine.

On the way home from work today, I listened to the latest episode of the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast, recapping the recent LDS General Conference. The two guests—Emily Jensen and Patrick Mason—were both great, and even though I have no interest in watching General Conferences myself, I’m really grateful for the Tribune’s coverage.

Patrick Mason made a comment about possible Latter-day Saint temple theologies that struck me as interesting in the context of what I’ve been writing recently about Community of Christ Independence Temple theology, and I wanted to capture it here. Here’s how it’s rendered in the transcript (which is a neat benefit from supporting the Tribune’s religion coverage on Patreon):

I’ve been a big fan of webcomics since I first discovered they existed in the early-to-mid 2000s. I’ve been following Order of the Stick for about twenty years(!), I’ve read the entire web run of Dr. McNinja, xkcd makes frequent appearance in my lecture slides, and there are other comics that I’ve jumped in and out of over time. It hasn’t been that long since I started following Dork Tower again, but last Fall, it did a crossover with Dumbing of Age, which I mentally noted I should check out sometime.

This past week, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the opening of RLDS (now Community of Christ) priesthood to women, the Community of Christ YouTube channel posted a video that was originally recorded back in 1984, during and after that year’s World Conference. From the very first second, it is very clearly a product of the 1980s, and I love it for that. Here’s a link, but I have more to write afterwards on a specific part of the video:

Just over a month ago, I found and blogged about a Thomas Römer quote that I had been trying to hunt down for quite some time. I’m continuing to listen to Römer’s lectures, and in the one I’m currently listening to, he revisits the idea from before. As before, I don’t want to miss the chance to write it down for future reference, and I figure a blog post is as good an opportunity as any to do so.

This week, I decided to see if it was worth relistening to the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. I’m having trouble committing to things to listen to right now, and I’ve found in recent years that I don’t enjoy H2G2 as much as I once did, so it’s hard to say whether I’ll follow through with this. However, I did get far enough in to the first episode to enjoy Arthur Dent’s confrontation with Mr. Prosser, the man who wants to knock over Dent’s house to build a bypass.

I am not great at observing the different seasons of the liturgical year. A good friend of mine once responded to this complaint with “Welcome to living a liturgical year life,” so I gather that to a certain extent, this is how everyone feels about it. It always feels a little frustrating to me, though, because I love the idea of the liturgical year.

I attended a spiritual retreat sponsored by my congregation last Saturday, and one of the activities we did was to string together some painted wooden beads representing the different liturgical seasons as we read about what each of those different seasons represents. I love the sense of “waiting for something great to happen” of Advent. I love the bursting forth of the spirit associated with Pentecost. I even appreciate the invitation of Ordinary Time to make the everyday sacred in its own way. I’m just bad at making those areas of focus when those seasons roll around (maybe the prayer beads I have up in my office now will help).

As I hinted at in a recent linkpost, something really interesting happened this week that serves as a sort of microcosm of my research interests related to online Mormonism and religious authority. Here’s a rundown of what happened, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune (and republished here via MSN).

First, a leader of the official Latter-day Saint women’s organization gave a sermon last Sunday, one quote from which was uploaded to the official Latter-day Saint Instagram account:

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level:

My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits. If my department started to use generative AI as a note-taking tool in faculty meetings (the specific focus of this survey), we would probably benefit from it!

I’ve been (very slowly) digitizing old journals, letters, and other text-based keepsakes over the past few years. This involves both scanning the original documents but also typing them up to enter into my Day One journaling app (and make them searchable). Because a solid majority of the letters and keepsakes that I had were related to my time as a Mormon missionary, I’m still chipping away at that era of my life. Fifteen(ish) years later, it’s fascinating to go back to this formative part of my life and see what’s changed.

As I’ve written before, I don’t necessarily believe that the dubious historicity of a particular religious event ought to undermine its theological significance, but I do strongly believe that dubious historicity undermines the ability of an individual or organization to insist that others agree with their theological conclusions. To take a major example, the unlikelihood of a literal resurrection in scientific terms isn’t going to stop me from finding value in the resurrection story at Easter, but it sure as heck is going to stop me from insisting that my atheist spouse make that story an important part of her life.

One of my favorite academic anecdotes to share in conference rooms and university hallways is for my dissertation defense, two of my committee members were there via telepresence robot. This is less impressive post-2020, when a lot of defenses happen entirely over Zoom, but it’s still different than an online-only defense, so the story still attracts some interest. At any rate, as good as I thought my story was, I got a real kick out of this bit in the prologue to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:

Membership in one of my local libraries includes access to Freegal, a kind of janky, third-tier music streaming service. The selection isn’t fantastic, but my tastes in music aren’t exactly mainstream, and over the past four years, I’ve found a lot of music I like available through the service. In fact, because you can download a limited number of tracks per week, I have Indochine songs, Gérard Lenorman albums, and even the Stranger Things soundtrack all saved to my phone so that I can bypass the jankiness of the service and the official app.

I have spent far too much time blogging this week (even before the sale of the Kirtland Temple was announced), but weeks like this don’t come often, and I feel like holding onto this week’s thoughts will be important in the years to come. So, here’s another post!

A friend recently suggested that I subscribe to the daily meditations sent out by Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, and today’s was lovely, focusing on finding God in all things. Here’s the passage that stood out to me in particular (and perhaps you’ll see why):

For as quickly as I felt like I came to peace with the sale of the Kirtland Temple, I’ve had conversations and encounters since yesterday’s post that make it clear that I still have a lot of work to do processing all of this in the weeks, months, and years ahead. I’ve heard from a lot of people in pain: people who have been to Kirtland dozens of times but never want to go again, ordained women in Community of Christ who are angry that the new owners of the temple can’t respect their ordination, and yet more. It would be wrong of me to lean on the peace I’ve come to and not be present for others’ pain. I’ve also seen at least one petty Mormon comment arguing that Community of Christ’s recent history with schism and financial instability is proof of Brighamite superiority (buddy, do I have some bad news about 1830s Kirtland for you!). It would be inaccurate of me to argue that I’ve already fully come to peace when that kind of comment makes me so angry.

Yesterday, Community of Christ and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced that the former had sold the Kirtland Temple, other historic sites, and some important documents and artifacts for $192.5 million dollars. As the title to this post suggests, I’ve pretty quickly come to peace with the decision, and I want to explain some of that process in this post. However, there are some conflicted emotions lingering beneath that peace, and I want to make clear that the goal of this post is not to tell anyone how to feel about this.

My unit is currently hiring three new faculty members, which means that we’re right in the middle of nine(!) campus visits. We’re all getting well practiced at talking about the strengths of our unit and why people might want to work here. One thing that we’ve said over and over in meetings and interviews with candidates is that we work together well and get along with each other, too (we also acknowledge that this is not true 100% of the time, but that the exceptions prove the rule).

Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve also (mostly) appreciated the work of Humble Bundle over the past decade. When I learned this weekend that there’s an ongoing bundle of Doctorow’s fiction, I was ecstatic. The only thing that I was disappointed about is that I’ve already bought so many of these titles… however, that still wasn’t enough to stop me from buying all 18 items (it helps that while I own many of these already, most of the ones I own are in formats rather than epub, so now I’m a multimodal owner). As a plus, this bundle benefits the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great organization that Doctorow has done a lot of work for.

Il existe à Grenoble un magasin des jeux nommé « Les contrées du jeu ». Il y a seize ans cette semaine, alors que j’habitais à Grenoble, j’y suis entré m’offrir le jeu « Wings of War ». J’ai toujours une carte de fidélité comme preuve de cette transaction :

Il n’y a rien de profond dans ce souvenir, mais j’ai beaucoup de petits souvenirs du temps que j’ai passé en France et en Suisse qui semble avoir une grande importance malgré cette manque de profondeur. Dans le cas de ce magasin, c’est peut-être que mes deux petites visites là-bas (la première pour trouver un jeu à acheter, la deuxième pour l’acheter) me semblent relier bien d’autres moments dans ma vie. Par exemple, c’était dans ce magasin que j’ai appris le mot « costaud » pour la première fois (pour décrire les avions dans le jeu qui demandaient plus d’effort pour abattre), et même si je ne prononce que rarement ce mot, c’est impossible de le faire sans penser à ce jeu.

There are a couple of weeks before the deadline to submit abstracts for the Mormon Social Science Association’s sessions at the 2024 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so I’ve been filling some nooks and crannies of my busy work week by looking at some Twitter data. Last year, I published with my colleague Amy Chapman a qualitative look at the #DezNat Twitter hashtag, which blends Mormon orthodoxy with far-right and anti-feminist thinking.