by NA
Because you were looking for something fun to do on a Friday afternoon.



|

by NA
An increasing portion of our traffic here at BCC has been via Google searches that include the term "rumspringa."  For example, a search for "rumspringa amish biography" shows BCC solidly in fifth place.  I would like to extend a special greeting to those seeking further knowledge of our Amish teenage friends, running free in their early adulthood.  This is doubtlessly the result of the upcoming UPN reality show, "Amish in the City."  Perhaps you have come seeking a tie to your own personal rumspringa days.  Perhaps you have come seeking photos of amish girls gone wild.  No matter: we welcome you!  Take this opportunity to learn more about liberal mormons while you're here, and ask all the questions you like.  Perhaps you'd be interested in reading the mormon equivalent of Amish in the City.

p.s. a special thanks to Aaron B. and to Jeremy for spearheading BCC's rumspringa-thon.  I promise this wasn't an intentional googlebombing attempt, unlike others I've seen.



|

by Grimshizzle
I read in the Rochester and Democrat and Chronicle this afternoon that prominent businessman and devout Mormon Kay Whitmore passed away last night after a struggle with leukemia. It's only by chance that I read it in the paper before I heard it over the phone; he happened to be a member of my ward.

I can't say I knew him very well. When we moved here he and his wife were serving in a singles ward in the next stake over, and they subsequently only attended our ward for a short time before they got restless and left on a mission (their second; previously they had overseen a mission in England) to southern California. They were simply too busy doing good things for me to run into him very often.

I did see him about a month ago, however, around the time of his diagnosis, and the circumstances of the meeting speak concisely to his character as citizen and saint: this former CEO of Kodak--the board of which, incidentally, forced him into retirement in 1993 because they wanted to trim more employees from the company than he was willing to fire--was sweeping up the gym floor after the boy scout pancake breakfast.

(Cross-posted at OT)



|

by NA
As you may know, I'm a lawyer, and draft contracts and other arrangements for a living.  Another way of looking at this is to say that I'm a bottom-feeder, and my job would not exist if people were honest with each other.  Either way, lawyers spin no cloth and till no fields.  My work, as with most modern office work, is heavily decontextualized, and I find myself far removed from any actual product or fruit of labor.  This didn't bother me very much -- when I was younger my office jobs and grunt-work were frequently detached from the real world.  This is a complaint of most modern office workers.  But lately, I've been working long hours, slaving over documents that few people will ever read, and otherwise questioning my chosen profession.  A part of this questioning has involved thoughts about being closer to people, working in a more hands-on way, and creating a more direct link between my efforts and an end product in the hands of the public.  This may not be possible for a lawyer, or for anyone else raised and trapped in an "Office Space" world.  I find myself wistfully thinking of becoming a tradesperson, such as a plumber or contractor, if only to witness the work of my own hands (this is, of course, total delusion -- I have no skills for working with my hands and my home improvements thus far have been met with limited success).

Is this a typically Mormon thought process, or an American one, for that matter?  I'm tempted to trace this kind of thinking back to puritan ethics and agrarian work culture, both of which are a part of LDS traditions.   Lesson manuals are filled with missives about "The Value of Work" and how noble it is to truly earn your money (pay close attention, investment bankers and arbitrageurs!).  These discussions seem inescapably tied to notions of a day's work for a day's pay and other concepts of work that somehow fall short of describing most modern professions.  As a result of this (perceived?) inadequacy I'd like to try and establish a framework for evaluating work in God's Plan to see if there are any rules or notions we can isolate as cultural relics, while identifying those divine gems that remain.  Not an easy task, but here are some initial thoughts:

• Work is meant to be difficult.  That is, we shouldn't get something from nothing.  The lot of the idler in scripture is fairly grim.

• We are meant to work in order to get by.  The concept of an idle aristocracy or of people taking jobs as a mere diversion is repugnant, as a violation of the principle that life is to be about survival and progression, not comfort and stagnancy.

• Our jobs really do matter.  I used to fall into the camp that asserts that within a certain range (i.e., legal) of activity, God doesn't care what we do to earn our money.  I now believe this to be false -- or rather that the boundary of the defined range isn't legality, but morality, as evaluated within the larger context of the purpose of work.  p.s. I should also point out, on a slightly unrelated matter,  that my wife Sumer thinks it's OK that Marriott hotels sell in-room pr0n and alcohol, and if she owned a convenience store would have no problem in selling such things herself.  I just wanted to get that out there.

I'm not sure where that leaves me, or what these ideas say about working in the modern world.  Even worse, these principles lead me to perform value judgments on professions in ways I'm not comfortable with (i.e., most modern office jobs are bad for us).  I also find myself unable to come to conclusions about the separation between workers and end-products (which seems to be the essence of work in modern society).  Is there something I'm missing here?  Let me know where I need to go from here, and I'll continue in future posts.

|

by Kaimi
is available here.  Not a bad tune, either.

|

by NA
As noted on the LDS.org site, Elder Maxwell passed away last night.  I will miss him, as one of the most thoughtful and well-spoken apostles in recent memory.  His thoughts on the meaning of discipleship, the hallmark of his tenure as apostle, were of personal importance to me and to many others.  Our thoughts are with wife and children.

|

by Dave
I stumbled across an interesting set of directives to Catholic voters entitled A Brief Catechism for Catholic Voters. It's written by a Catholic clergyman with a PhD and it's posted on a website that looks pretty darned Catholic, so I'll take it as a fair expression of conservative Catholic thinking on this tricky issue of church and state. Mormons, too, like to mix religion with their politics, but sometimes we see our own difficulties more clearly by viewing someone else's. So here are some highlights (quotes in italics, my comments afterwards) from the fourteen numbered paragraphs in the article.

3. If a political candidate supported abortion, or any other moral evil, such as assisted suicide and euthanasia, for that matter, it would not be morally permissible for you to vote for that person. This is because, in voting for such a person, you would become an accomplice in the moral evil at issue. No, voting for a pro-abortion candidate is not morally equivalent to choosing or assisting with an abortion. If it were, then so would a lot of things be too: fixing the car of a pro-abortion person, selling a house to a pro-abortion person, coaching their kids in Little League, even just saying "Good morning" as opposed to "One day you will burn in hell" or some similar benediction could be "assisting." Making abortion a controlling litmus test for voting debases voting and undermines the polity.

7. A candidate for office who says that he is personally opposed to abortion but actually votes in favor of it is either fooling himself or trying to fool you. . . . If you vote for such a candidate, you would be an accomplice in advancing the moral evil of abortion. Therefore, it is not morally permissible to vote for such a candidate for office. This attempts to deny Catholic politicians the possibility of separating their political sense of duty from their personal sense of religious obligation. Didn't Catholics figure this out with Kennedy in 1960? He said (in no uncertain terms) that as President he wouldn't take orders from the Vatican--would he have been elected if he had said the contrary? We expect politicians to represent all voters and act with an eye to the diverse views of their constituents and the public good, not simply enact their own personal moral agenda.

In paragraph 10, the author opines that if the choice is between two (or several) candidates who are all pro-abortion, one need not withhold one's vote, but should instead vote for the candidate who "would do the least moral harm." That seems like a better and more general principle to follow in every case: vote for the guy who will do the least (moral) harm. In paragraph 14, the author holds out that knowingly voting for a pro-abortion candidate is a mortal sin (in Catholic theology, a sin which kills the spiritual life of the soul and deprives a person of salvation, unless he repents). All this Catholic angst over voting is a reminder of how authoritarian and how thoroughly opposed to political liberalism was Catholicism in the 19th century. Echoes persist.

So are there any pitfalls here that LDS leaders and voters can avoid? I'll note that LDS leaders have consistently worked hard to avoid endorsing specific candidates or getting embroiled in political disputes. Yet, it feels like the Church is becoming more politicized recently. The times they are a-changing. What think ye?
|

by NA
You've probably read about this elsewhere, but the U.S. Air Force pilot who killed four and wounded at least eight Canadians in Afghanistan has been fined $5,672. This article provides a fairly good summary of the decision. Personally, I'm disgusted that criminal charges against him were dropped, and that all he gets is the 'maximum' administrative penalty of about a month's pay, along with a reprimand. The behavior of this pilot was outrageous, but even more troubling is the idea of a military institution capable of generating such self-justifying attitudes in the face of acts that are clearly wrong... One more reason I'm beginning to believe that all war is bad.

Ranting aside, this news has made me question LDS theories of atonement and "paying for our sins." We speak of restitution and atonement as though we have two separate processes working contemporaneously: you repent of your sins, and you also give back the apple you stole or fix the fence you drove through. This seems to me to be erroneous, at least if we're concerned exclusively with personal forgiveness. What payment would've been enough for this pilot? If we reject the notion of an eye for an eye, why do we require payment at all? Is the idea of payment generated out of the needs of the individual, or out of the demands of the community at large? For example, if God decides that an administrative reprimand is enough temporal suffering for this pilot to endure in order to be forgiven, does the community have any right to demand payment beyond that reprimand?

UPDATE: You can read the full text of the reprimand here.

UPDATE #2: ABC News has an older but still interesting article on how the U.S. military engages in relative soul valuation. You can view the article here.
|

by Kaimi
Don't worry, we won't tell your old AP what your reply was . . .


|

by NA
OK, let's settle this once and for all.


|