Chile Journal #3: Serendipity and Second Chances
Twenty-six years ago, I was a student in a study abroad program in West Berlin. This was in the spring and summer of 1988, one year before the Berlin Wall came down. Before I left, I had told one of my...
View ArticleChile Journal #4: What Courage Looks Like
“Why were they imprisoned, your parents?” I asked my new friend, Tito, who was introduced to me through a mutual friend, someone in fact who had baptized him into the LDS church some twenty-five years...
View ArticleChile Journal #5: The Hope of Nature
Pablo Neruda once said that if you didn’t know southern Chile and the Chilean forest, you didn’t know this planet. He wasn’t the first great poet to be guilty of bioregional chauvinism, of that kind of...
View ArticleMormons and Public Transportation
Recently an article in the Salt Lake Tribune raised the timely question, Is air pollution a moral issue? In it faith leaders from a variety of communities in Utah answered the question from their...
View ArticleAgreeing to Disagree: Political Differences in a Community of Faith
Can people of faith be one even or especially if we aren’t in agreement on politics? In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul exhorts us to be worthy of our vocation as Christians. We do this, he says, by...
View ArticleAnger, Forgiveness, and Community
I have been blogging here for two years, and throughout this time, I have been chiefly interested in the quest for community. I understand community to be something that is achieved when we find...
View ArticleThe Blessings of Service: Lessons from Guatemala
Service opens the world to us. That, anyway, is what I have experienced in Guatemala where for the past 17 years I have joined a team of eye surgeons about every other year to work in a remote hospital...
View ArticleWaiting on the Lord
The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. Lamentations 3:25 For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am in, therewith to be content. I know how to be...
View ArticleNearing Fifty
I guess it must be the approaching milestone of turning fifty, but I am in a meditative mood these days about life. Well, the truth is, I think I have always been a meditative type. I used to write bad...
View ArticleOn Reading and Language (or, notes on what I have learned from literary theory)
There are at least two very important things that I learned from literary theory, especially the sometimes infamous deconstructionist variety. The first is the value of very close readings. There is...
View ArticleLove of Reading
Consider this title in both of its syntactical meanings. What does it mean to love to read? What does it mean to read with love? I don’t want to sound like I am on an anti-technology soapbox, but I am...
View ArticleOn Marriage
Twenty-five years ago yesterday, I married my wife, Amy. When we were dating, we did a lot of envisioning. The feeling of romance is very much a feeling, among other things, for the future. We could...
View ArticleThe Trail of Memory
37 years ago I spent one month at the Bennion Boys Ranch in Victor, Idaho. It was the first of a total of four summers I would spend there, two as a camper and two as a counselor in my late teens. My...
View ArticleSeeing Through A Glass Darkly
I have learned by happy and sometimes sad experience that the mind is a changeable thing and not always the most reliable filter by which to perceive reality. I recognize, of course, that this is...
View ArticleThe Spiritual Value of Reading Secular Literature
I recently gave a presentation at Education Week at BYU on this topic. I offer here a brief summary of my lecture. It builds on a theme of a number of my previous posts about reading. It is a fair...
View ArticleThe Theology of Climate Change Denial
Let me say outright that I am not interested in this post in trying to prove climate change to anyone. I frankly find such debates exhausting. If you want to know what I think of climate change, you...
View ArticleReligion, Conservation, and Community
I have had a rare and unusual opportunity this week to spend a few days with leaders from The Nature Conservancy and from environmentally active religious communities representing many different faith...
View ArticleWhy I Am a Mormon, Part I
This is an attempt (in four installments) to explain a few things about what might be called my spiritual autobiography. I have felt compelled to write something like this for some time, but I haven’t...
View ArticleWhy I Am A Mormon, Part II (Revelation)
To continue from my previous post, I want to focus on three areas of my belief that are central to why I am a Mormon. I want to clarify again that I am not interested in making arguments against other...
View ArticleWhy I Am a Mormon, Part III (Missionary Work)
It is fair to ask why a religious conviction needs to be expressed and shared publicly. Why can’t it simply be a private and personal matter? Given the world’s long history of religious intolerance and...
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