A great friend and I were discussing “Big Tent” Mormonism over the weekend and it was a great conversation. Alas the school year has begun and he’s a teacher. So I am hoping we can continue the conversation here. Let me restate some of the discussion, and also carry it forward a bit. (more…)

In this post I would like to briefly outline 5 reasons for why we should believe our authorized priesthood leaders over our own reasoning.  The purpose of this post, in contrast to many of my prior posts, is not to convince the reader that they ought to so prioritize the church leaders’ beliefs over their own.  Rather, it is more to provide a taxonomy of sorts for such reasons, if only for the purpose of clarification.  Commenters are encouraged to specify which reasons they do and do not endorse as well as provide and categorize any reasons that I might have missed. (more…)

What are the elements within our Faith’s conception of the atonement which are unique to it? Here I will attempt to name a few. (more…)

How many of us have had repeated bloggernacle interactions with some person that felt a little too much like this:

While I think we can all easily identify with and understand Phil’s perspective and his reaction to Ned, it probably takes a little more mental effort for any of us to identify with Ned.  This partially has to do with the fact that Groundhog Day is told from Phil’s perspective, but I think it also has to do with the fact that Ned is just plain annoying.  It is for similar reasons, I suggest, that we so easily see ourselves being trolled by others in the bloggernacle but rarely if ever see ourselves as doing the trolling.  We each see bloggernacle interactions from our own perspective and, not without reason, see their one-note repetitions as annoying.  Indeed, not unlike Phil’s second encounter with Ned, we tend to assume that in such interactions we are the victims of a shell-game or some other misdirective scheme on the other’s part.  Like Phil, we have a difficult time believing that Ned is truly being sincere in his on-note repetitions. (more…)

Alright, the title is partially tongue in cheek since the method I describe below has more than a few caveats to it.

Ziff over at Zelophehad’s Daughters put up a post shows the distribution of Facebook likes which readers of each blog in the bloggernacle have for each member of the 15 apostles.  Keep in mind that by “reader of a blog” I mean a person who has liked that blog on Facebook.  Thus, Ziff’s data compares this distribution against the distribution which exists for the total FB likes to Q15 members.  I find this comparison interesting, but incomplete.  (Newcoolthang does not have a Facebook page, but this is not the incompleteness to which I am referring.)

Luckily, Ziff was nice enough to also publish his raw data in the post, thereby allowing me to analyze the data along different lines.  Whereas Ziff was concerned about the distribution of likes among Q15 members for each blogs readership, I want to analyze how much support there is for each Q15 member within each blogs readership.  By “support” I mean this: out of all the people that “like” a particular blog, how many of those people also like each Q15 member?  Here are the result of my analysis: (more…)