Just this week, my friend Jana Riess wrote an article regarding an attack made on Elder Oaks because of his statements on same-sex marriage.  Jana notes that many liberals were disappointed in his strong stance against it in General Conference, but that the vicious letter from a returned missionary was not called for.  Elder Oaks response was also published, wherein he asks the man to see his local leader for guidance on repenting (ostensibly for his belligerence towards an apostle).

Wading through the hundreds of comments, I noted that many defended this angry man, expecting Elder Oaks to apologize, “turn the other cheek”, etc. 

Lost in the shouting there is one key concept taught by Jesus.  Continue reading →

I might as well add my voice to the chorus of self-congratulatory and/or other-condemning posts out there on the topic (I won’t link to them, though.  Well, I’ll link to this one, which is the only good one I’ve seen so far).

Orson Scott Card in his wonderful “Saintspeak” (which predates snarker sites by decades, and did it better than any of them – if any of them are still active) pretty much already came up with the definitive definitions: Continue reading →

This is a guest post by Michael Towns, long-time commenter and friend of M*.

I was recently struck when I read a blog post by the versatile Rod Dreher. For those who don’t know Mr. Dreher, he is an American author and columnist. He was a longtime Catholic who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in the wake of the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal. I have found his blog posts and musings to be trenchant, important, and often amusing. He covers a lot of cultural ground, delving into politics occasionally but usually hewing to topics of societal issues and influences.

The recent posting was entitled “Can There Be Jews Without The Jewish God?” It was a response to Jonathan Tobin’s analysis of a Pew survey of American Jews. It deals with Jewish assimilation in secular society and the resultant loss of distinctive Jewish identity.

Essentially, “irreligion” has taken center stage in American Jewish life. As Dreher summarizes:

The main lessons, it seems to me, are as follows:
1. Without belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and in the absence of anti-Semitism, there’s no binding reason to be Jewish.
2. Unless the Jewish community is willing to police its boundaries, to draw sharp lines between who is and who isn’t in the tribe, it will dissipate.

He goes on to note:

Fifty years ago, there was a lot more cultural pressure to affiliate with a church. You felt that you should, that it was the right thing to do. That’s long gone. In a free society in which there is no serious penalty, social or otherwise, for not being Christian, you have to give people a reason to want to be a Christian. As we’ve observed in this space, no church has found the solution to waning Christianity (see Pew’s study on the “Rise Of The Nones”), though the Jewish experience seems to confirm the idea that a religion that does not offer something meaningfully distinctive from the mainstream will not endure. If you fling open the windows of the Church to the world as it is today, you run the real risk of the winds blowing your house down.

Continue reading →

This is a guest post by Huston, who is a high school and college English teacher, a convert, and the father of six.

Five years ago, my wife’s grandfather had a major stroke. A physically active man throughout his adulthood, he saw most of his strength evaporate overnight. In the immediate aftermath of the stroke, he needed constant care. Was his life ruined?

Not at all. He and his wife had had eight children. Each of those eight had had several children. By the time of his stroke, most of the grandchildren themselves were adults who were starting families. Between the descendants and their spouses, there was an army of dozens who were ready and able to serve.

The grandchildren utilized social media and coordinated around-the-clock care for him for weeks. Then we helped move him and his wife out of the home they could no longer care for themselves in. Today, they live with a son and daughter-in-law who are themselves empty nesters with decades of independence ahead of them.

Financial burden to society: zero.
Continue reading →