You’re familiar with surveillance states. We all live in one, to one degree or another. COVID and mass working from home also brought attention to surveillance corporations, which sometimes track their employees’ every keystroke to be sure they aren’t having unauthorized fun when they should be appropriately suffering for their paychecks. (Speaking of which, I … Read More ..read more

In her book, You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, the linguist Deborah Tannen points out a common issue in mother/daughter dialogue that becomes more prominent as the daughters age to adulthood: Mothers raise topics of conversation in order to maintain connection with their daughters, but daughters interpret them as trying to maintain … Read More ..read more

The Church announced yesterday that BYU will be adding a medical school. I have some suggestions for what it could be named and different medical areas it could emphasize. Please feel free to add yours in the comments. The Neil L. Andersen OB/GYN Training and Fertility Research Institute (and Medical School) The John Taylor Center … Read More ..read more

I recently read Benjamin E. Park’s new history of the Church (in the US mostly), American Zion. It was such a great read! Of course as a Mormon who’s attended church for decades and has even read a little academic Mormon history, I was familiar with a lot of the events in broad strokes, but Ben (I’m acquainted with him, so I’m going to call him that) brought in all kinds of interesting context and information about periods of time especially where my knowledge was really thin. And I was also especially interested to read how he thought about events in the last couple of decades, when I’ve been ..read more

I recently read Stephen C. Taysom’s biography of Joseph F. Smith, Like a Fiery Meteor. I’m acquainted with the author, so I’m going to refer to him as Steve, because it would sound strange to my ear to call him Taysom. Also, I’m going to follow his convention of referring to Joseph F. Smith as JFS. I appreciate that Steve takes his readers seriously enough to occasionally introduce a theoretical framework for understanding an event in JFS’s life. For example, when talking about the Mormon diaspora that followed the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum, he first briefly discusses diasporas in general a ..read more

Photo by Michael Hart on Unsplash I checked a sample of a few dozen temples in the US yesterday and found that all (with one exception) were open, even though it was Juneteenth. The one exception, Provo City Center, has been closed all month, presumably for deep cleaning. By contrast, every US temple I checked is set to be closed on July 4th. I posted about this on Facebook, and some of my friends made some interesting points: Church employees have a holiday on Juneteenth. (It appears, for example, on the list of closed days for the Church History Library.) BYU also observes Juneteenth as a h ..read more

We here at ZD are excited to bring you this exclusive leak, directly from the highest levels of the Church Administration Building, of a possible response by the Church to opposition by local residents to the proposed height of the steeple for the McKinney, Texas Temple ..read more

I really enjoyed Patrick Kearon’s talk this last General Conference. His message was well summarized by his title: “God’s Intent Is to Bring You Home.” He told the story of a policeman he once watched from a hotel window whose job for the day was to turn people away from a closed street. Elder Kearon said that the policeman looked like he was very much enjoying turning people away: “he seemed to develop a spring in his step, as if he might start doing a little jig, as each car approached the barrier.” He contrasted this policeman with God, who he said is eager to bring us home. I thought this ..read more

Back in 2020, I wrote a post where I looked at the large number of temples President Nelson was announcing, in contrast with the slow pace at which their construction was taking place. Of course since then, the pace of announcements has only increased. In that post, I mentioned that he had announced 24 across the previous year and a half. Now, he announced 35 new temples in each of the past two years, and slowed only a bit to 15 in Conference a few weeks ago. In this post, I’m going to update the analyses I did for the 2020 post, as well as adding a couple of new ones. Nearly all my data is ju ..read more

Best hymn: “Oh, What Songs of the Heart,” Saturday evening. It gets bonus points for mention of Heavenly Parents, but I really liked it musically too. Worst hymn:  “Lord, I Would Follow Thee,” Sunday morning. This was just very bland. Fastest hymn: “The Lord Is My Light,” Saturday evening. Slowest hymn: “Did You Think to Pray?” Saturday morning. Best and worst choir: I really liked the Utah Valley Institute choir that sang Saturday evening. I was much less a fan of the BYU-I choir that sang Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t a knock on their singing; I just felt like the arrangements they sang ..read more