Maintaining positive relationships through…being mistaken

This post is the fourth in my series on my adventures with the Mormon Stories conference in Houston this year. See the introductory post here, the first Maintaining Positive Relationships post here and the second Maintaining Positive Relationships post here.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when I went to the Mormon Stories Conference in Houston, I had a vague sentiment that most, if not all people there, would be those who had disaffected from the church. I was disabused of this notion when Lee Prince went up to speak and introduced by saying that he was a TBM, as it were. Nevertheless, he also disclaimed that his talk, named after the Oliver Cromwell quote: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken,” would be applicable for Mormons regardless of where they were on the belief spectrum.

Maintaining positive relationships through…wrestling

This post is the third in my series on my adventures with the Mormon Stories conference in Houston this year. See the introductory post here and the first Maintaining Positive Relationships post here.

While the first speaker at the Genuine Mormon Conversations conference was John Dehlin, the keynote speaker for the conference was Dan Wotherspoon. As with John’s talk, Dan’s talk wasn’t formally named in the program (and remind me to talk one day about those programs — it was amazing how much the programs invoked the Mormon church counterpart, what with conductors,  invocation and musical numbers listed…and at the same time, it played a twist on those same LDS counterparts…I don’t think you’ll soon see a woman conducting in an LDS sacrament meeting. And maybe as a nod to the confusion over whether women can give the opening prayers in sacrament meetings, the Mormon Stories Conference had that too. The similarities continued all the way down to the “Story Sharing Meeting,” where someone took the standard testimony format on its head and literally said, “I know the Mormon church is not true.”) However, in my notes, the central subject I found for his talk was Wrestling with God, the church, one’s family, and the battle itself.”

Dan framed this talk around a Sunstone article by Rick Jepson: Godwrestling: Physicality, Conflict, and Redemption in Mormon Doctrine (PDF alert!).

Maintaining Positive Relationships through…coming out

As I expressed my intentions to do so in my last post, Reconnecting with the Mormon community, I am taking the time to publish my notes and thoughts about the talks of many of the Houston Mormon Stories Conference speakers. I have decided to go the linkbaity/traffic-baity route and wrote a greater number of posts rather than fewer.

The first speaker I’ll address is John Dehlin, of course. I didn’t catch the title of his talk (and I’m sure that eventually, some kind of recording will go up on Mormon Stories so everyone will just be able to watch or listen to what was said), but I think it was something like Having the Difficult Conversations.

Before I go into the content of the talk itself, I’ll talk a bit about the name of this conference itself.

Reconnecting with the Mormon community

Today, I reconnected with the Mormon community.

No, I didn’t go to some official church function. No, I didn’t go back to church (especially since today is a Saturday). Instead, I went to something totally different: the Mormon Stories Conference on Maintaining Positive Relationships Through Empathy and Dialogue that was in Houston this weekend. (Unfortunately, since I was stuck in O’Hare airport trying to get home from training yesterday, I couldn’t make the Friday session where there was dinner and a live Mormon Stories interview, and because my next engagement wants me to work tomorrow, I won’t be able to attend tomorrow’s “late morning meetup.”)

It was a great experience. Definitely way better than if I had gone to some official church function or to sacrament meeting itself (not to knock sacrament, but this set a pretty high bar). I wrote plenty of notes for most of the speakers, so depending on how much of a shill I feel like, I will either make another summary post for the entire conference, or I’ll make several posts addressing each speaker individually to maximize page views. But today, I wanted to talk just about my overall impression with the event.

Tales from the Work Lulls: Standardized across the world

As I wrote in the first article of Tales from the work lulls, I am at Tax Entry training for my firm this week. In contrast to my previous week, filled with late working hours (and including a 12-hour workday on Saturday), everything this week counts as a “work lull.” But I guess that’s kinda the point, since we’re supposed to be meeting people in a collegial (and faux-collegiate) environment.

But, as you all may have been able to tell, since I’m an introvert post-Mormon who blogs on the interwebs about my old religion, I decided to play the game of, “Who’s a Mormon.”

Admittedly, this game really isn’t fun with accountants. When you hear, “From BYU,” the thinking’s done. (I am aware that non-Mormons attend BYU, but…)

But even more interesting is the idea of Mormon radar.

Educating People about the Gospel

John C had an interesting post over at By Common Consent a few days ago about the purposes of the Church Educational System (CES). It’s very popular to denounce Sunday School, seminary, and institute lessons as too boring or too shallow to prepare members for the complexities of The Full Story (TM), but John’s post attempted to defend the CES and question the biases of people who prefer a more inoculative style. As he writes:

…Some people would argue that we won’t lose that many people if we start teaching history using the Richard Bushman model (or some such). What they are actually saying is we won’t lose many of the right people if we change our teaching model. Remember, we have all heard stories of people losing the church when the priesthood ban ended (but that was okay, because they were racists) or when polygamy ended (but that was okay because they were polygamists). I’ve even heard stories of people leaving the church over misspellings or over the introduction of the three hour block (those silly, silly apostates). That people will leave the church over just about any reason is a truism; the question we should be asking ourselves is “what sort of people are we trying to retain?”

I ask because, for all that I dislike the Church Education System model of teaching, I understand its purpose and I think it is a noble purpose. It strives to provide an inoffensive, generally palatable spiritual product for the masses. We are actually interested in retaining everyone in the church, even the people who think that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy or that Jesus drank grape juice because the Word of Wisdom is eternal in scope. So thinking that improving the rigor of our historical narrative or our exegesis isn’t really about our struggle for truth; it’s about our desire to reshape the church in our own image (at least partly).

As could probably be expected, there was a lot of push-back in the comments.

Tales from the Work Lulls: Genealogy Sleuth

My second week of working full-time (and my first week of working on an engagement) is about to end (tomorrow, I have to fly to tax entry training, so it’s not even like I get any rest, whooo). While this week has certainly been busy (I just got home from my first 12 hour day…why did it have to be a Saturday?), there are some times in the day when there are lulls. Maybe the client hasn’t sent a file…maybe my supervisors just haven’t gotten my next assignment prepared. Whatever the case, I find ways to preoccupy myself.

At some point during the week, I noticed that another person on my team had the last name Monson. Being the dork that I am, I thought…hmm, what a coincidence.

I wonder if he’s Mormon?

At that point, I put on my hardboiled detective hat…It was time for some genealogy sleuthing.

All work and no blog probably deserves an explanation…

Since I’m a natural introvert, I didn’t really suspect that there was anything strange about my parents’ post-work lives when I was growing up. Other than going to aikido or  something related to church (for my dad), or doing some kind of errands (for my mom), my parents seemed not to do much outside of the house when they got back from work. So, I thought that’s how most people live.

In fact, I’m still somewhat convinced of the following idea: while kids and teenagers and college students “hang out” after getting done with whatever their assigned tasks area, the distinguishing hallmark of a Real Adult (TM) is that one stays home after getting home.

…I don’t think my parents are shut-ins…I just thought (read: think) that’s how adults conduct their business. And, from the stories I hear about their coworkers, I can’t really blame them for not wanting to hang out with them either. (And I mean, if the people you see most often are bad coworkers or people from your ward at church, then I guess…it’s best to stay home.) Yet, the reason I am writing this post with a strongly implied hedge to all of my statements here is because at some point, someone pointed out that many adults do similar things to what kids/teenagers/college students do: they hang out with friends after they get back from work. Ever since, I’ve doubted whether that was true or not.

So, are my parents shut-ins and homebodies? Are they just introverts like myself? Or is there something else to explain this?

Not even seeing eye to eye here, as usual

Over on Twitter, Joanna Brooks @askmormongirl asked:

if you had to convince a 23 year old that a religious / faith / spiritual life was worth the investment, what would you say?

I recently had my 22nd birthday, so given there aren’t too many life differences between a 22-year-old and a 23-year-old, I suppose that this question could be greatly relevant to my interests. And personally, I am very interested in reasons people might make to convince me that a religious/spiritual/faithful life is worth the investment, although even still, I don’t really know what these terms mean and people are pretty unclear about defining them in an accessible, consistent way. Ah, such is life.

Anyway, several people on twitter took a stab at Joanna’s question, and as usually happens with these kinds of questions,  I either wasn’t completely on board with the answer or had no freaking idea where the person was coming from.

Ah, such is life. Anyway, let’s dive in…

2011 in review

A few weeks back I (very lazily) posted some stats about Irresistible (Dis)Grace since its last birthday. Well…it turns ut that every new year, the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepare an annual report for wordpress blogs…and it’s quite a bit more detailed than what I had presented.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 39,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 14 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.