According this US News and World Report article, one of the biggest finds from the new American Religious Identification Survey is rise of the “nones” and the bleeding of traditional institutions’ membership. More people are choosing to call themselves non-denominational, spiritual, or not religious at all. In terms of percentage of population, the biggest gains [...]

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Who has more power to change the system in which they’re embedded–women in Mormonism, or female porn actors?

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Apparently some aspect of the LDS temple ceremony will be portrayed on HBO’s Big Love (tonight?). Here’s a picture that was forwarded to me, apparently from TV Guide: Mormons are decrying this as sacrilegious and disrespectful, of course, but as one of thousands who was hoodwinked into going through the ceremony and socially coerced into [...]

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This is another lecture that was put on at my school, this time by the ACLU, in response to Prop 8. The California Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments about the Constitutionality of Prop 8 a week from tomorrow. In preparation for that, the local ACLU chapter invited to gay people who grew up in [...]

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I think I’m finally to the point where I’m ready to turn my membership card in the Mormon Church in. Unfortunately, I can’t redeem it for a decade and a half of tithing. I held onto it for this long because, quite frankly, I felt like I could be a more effective critic of the [...]

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My first bout of graduate school was at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (the U!).  We quickly realized that our little family wouldn’t make the rent on my stipend, so like many job-free Mormons without marketable skills, I  went down to the local Church welfare office and found me a job.  A [...]

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Obama’s first YouTube-Side Chat. I’d love to get the audio in podcast, since I have more time to listen than to watch. I’m so glad that he’s doing this (I’ve been saying for some time that the Fireside Chats need to be brought back, to increase trust and transparency; in this case, also to increase [...]

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This time, Dean Starr introduced Monte Stewart, of the Marriage Law Foundation (or MLF). I bet I can guess which way this one will go. There were questions but no rebuttal. It was sponsored by the J. Reuben Clark Society, who described its mission as exploring how religious belief influences practice of the law. Proposition [...]

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These are my remarks from the Sunstone 2008 panel #331,  “Raise up a child in the way she should go…and which way is that?”  Several of you have asked Jana and I about how we’ve approached the spiritual aspects of raising our two precocious children, and two years spent outside the church have given us [...]

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Yesterday, the LDS Church issued a lengthy press release clarifying its positions on marriage and its motivation for vigorously supporting Prop 8.  I’m going to try to dissect this later.  (via Kaimi of BCC) John Dehlin of Mormon Stories has a new project called Understanding LDS Homosexuality, in which he uses “personal stories and video [...]

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