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Flunking Sainthood

A couple of days ago I blogged about the LDS Church encouraging Mormons to phase out the terms “inactive” and “less active” from their vocabulary. This is a story I had reposted from Wheat & Tares, which had a first-person account of a meeting in the UK where such language was allegedly discouraged for the…

Thoughts on four Mormon items in the news this week: 1) When was the last time you heard the terms “inactive Mormon” or “less active Mormon”? Over at Wheat and Tares, there’s an interesting post about a change brewing in the Church’s PR: these terms are apparently being phased out. I was surprised, and heartened,…

This afternoon I dug into my computer files and found this old sermon that I gave on September 16, 2001, the Sunday after the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. It was surreal to read it again a decade later. Some elements of that week I had forgotten entirely–I had no memory of the…

Here’s a guest blog post from activist Palmer Chinchen, author of the new book God Can’t Sleep. Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about it: GOD CAN’T SLEEP: Waiting for Daylight on Life’s Dark Nights Palmer Chinchen. David C. Cook, $14.99 trade paper (240p) A former missionary kid in Liberia and now pastor in…

Here’s a 12-minute talk I gave last month about the Twible project, with some of my favorite tweets from the Old Testament. Hope you enjoy it.

My daughter is not a pink-princess kind of girl, but we’ve had enough glimpses of fairy wings and pixie dust to make me interested in reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein’s incisive and funny exploration of the “new girlie-girl culture” she sees being marketed to girls at ever-younger ages. If you have a young…

“Hi, my name is Brad Carmack, calling on behalf of Protect Marriage Maine.  Will you vote to maintain the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman?” This was my phone pitch in October of 2009.  Calling from Provo, Utah, I volunteered in the effort to persuade voters in Maine to oppose…

“I had no idea how cynical the Book of Ecclesiastes could be,” I told my writing group a couple of weeks ago. “It also contradicts itself over and over again: Life sucks, and then it’s beautiful. There’s no reward in heaven, but God cares about us. Rich people can’t be trusted, yet they are chosen…

Today’s “Talk of the Nation” broadcast will be devoted to Mormonism: what it is, what it’s not, and why so many non-Mormons are afraid of it. I don’t know who all the guests are, but I’m thrilled that one of them will be Joanna Brooks of Religion Dispatches. I find her writing to be both…

Tomorrow, I am burying my father’s ashes in a little cemetery in southern Illinois, where he can be laid to rest near his parents. It’s an odd kind of closure. Some of you know that my father crashed back into my life rather suddenly last October after a 26-year radio silence. He had abandoned our…
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