Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Flunking Sainthood

Wikimediaorg
Marooned in their homes, many Americans made the best of the early days of the pandemic by sorting through old boxes of family artifacts. One Saturday morning in March 2020, Dan Larsen and his wife were doing just that when they discovered the world’s only verified photographic image of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr. Larsen,…

“First Mitt won Iowa, then he lost Iowa? That’s a classic Romney flip-flop.” –Stephen Colbert     Working with the theory that there hasn’t been nearly enough attention to Mormonism and politics this year, what with it being in the news every single day and all, Randy Balmer and I are co-organizing a scholarly conference…

Friends, I will be offline until January 23 for a writing retreat. I’m bringing my computer, but the place where I am going doesn’t have email access, which is one of the reasons I love it. So if you are of a praying mind, please pray that this week is both productive and restful. I…

Actually, no. That title was just a teaser. There really aren’t any fun moments in the Book of Lamentations, which is why I had to make my own with the Twible. As you’ve probably guessed, Lamentations is a bit of a downer. Walter Brueggemann has described the book as Israel’s post 9/11 wrestling. Just like…

I have an article today in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog, tackling the question of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and how it fits into American political history. Now that the Republicans seem to be holding their noses and voting for him instead of continuing their desperate search for a Romneydote, the question arises: If Romney…

I’ve been editing a superb book recently by Lynne Baab on spiritual practices. (Called Joy Together, it’ll be out in the fall.) After exploring what congregations and churches can do to grow with God together by trying contemplative prayer, Sabbath-keeping, fasting and the like, she poses an important question: why do we do spiritual practices…

I caught an interesting episode of the Diane Rehm show today featuring Lori Andrews, author of I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did,a new book releasing today about social networks and the rapid erosion of privacy. Andrews and fellow guest Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center…

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be interviewed live today on Michel Martin’s NPR show “Tell Me More” at 11:20 a.m. This is all thanks to Kelly Hughes, the best book publicist ever. (She even flies around in an invisible jet, but I am not supposed to reveal its location.) We’ll be talking…

PW and Publishers Marketplace are both reporting that print book sales were down by about 9% in 2011, with the heaviest hits being in paperback fiction (-17.7%) and mass market paperbacks (23.4%). In almost every category, print sales were down in 2011 by about double the percentage they were down in 2010. Today’s Daily Lunch…

I have a confession to make: even though I knew I had to wake up at 4:30 this morning to catch a flight, I stayed up well into the night for the nail-biting final results of the Iowa caucuses. I wanted to see if Mitt would pull it off. “I don’t actually care about this,”…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners