Author Archives: guest
The Women Shall Be Last
I’m happy to say that I live in an enlightened ward. Though some wards are stuck with bishoprics who misunderstand something and thus only let men say the opening prayer, my ward happily asks women, men, and teenagers of either sex to give the opening prayer. And closing prayer.
I was uncertain about speaking order, though. It seemed women always spoke first, and men always spoke last.
The “Stage” Mormon
G.K. Chesterton’s excellent Father Brown series is a collection of short stories that are superficially mystery tales, but often contain fairly deep social and religious commentary. For example, I think one of the early Father Brown tales – “The Invisible Man” – is one of the most profound short stories in English literature.
In the tale “The Vampire of the Village” the mystery hinges on the demeanor of a priest, and while I won’t give away the ending, I am going to quote from Father Brown’s explanation of how he realized the truth behind a murder:
Peanuts and the connection to Mormons…
[No. I am not claiming Charlie Brown is LDS or something silly like that (though I always wondered about that Linus kid…..)]
Charles Schulz was the genius who created Peanuts. One of his daughters joined the church and served a mission in England. Did you know that? I have for awhile, and didn’t think much of it beyond “hmm, that’s interesting.”
However –
I was reading reviews of the recent Schulz biography, when I stumbled across a blog post at Cartoon Brew. The ensuing discussion has Schulz’s children and other friends chiming in about the inaccuracies in the book. However, I found myself absolutely moved by his daughter’s description of her relationship to her dad and his reaction to her becoming Mormon:
Check it out here, and then return and report (or comment, anyway).
[You can read the whole amazing discussion if you’re a Peanuts fan, but I figured this one comment would appeal to Mormons of all types, even ones without any particular affection for the classic comic strip].
Big, Fun, Scary Adventures
In July, 1999, twenty-one relatively young people with nothing better to do decided to try writing novels in a month. Six of them actually did it. Eight years later, in November, 2006, nearly 13,000 crossed that same finish line (almost 80,000 gave it a shot.) Last year (2006) the participants logged a total of over 982,000,000 words — the expectation is that we’ll break 1,000,000,000 this year. I’ll be contributing my 50,000 this year, as I did in 2004, 2005, and 2006. (Promo: You can do it too!)