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A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.

Main Street Plaza

A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.

Author: chanson

C. L. Hanson is the friendly Swiss-French-American ExMormon atheist mom living in Switzerland! Follow me on mastadon at @chanson@social.linux.pizza or see "letters from a broad" for further adventures!!

Merry Christmas!!

chanson, December 24, 2013

Folks, I am really sorry to have missed doing SiOB the other day — especially considering that it was going to be the gay polygamy issue!!! From the minute I finished work on Friday evening, I had a million things to do to get ready for Christmas! So, even though…

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Sunday in Outer Blogness: Who’s driving this train? edition!

chanson, December 15, 2013

True to his name, Profet anticipated this weeks hot topic in his piece highlighted last week!! In a nutshell: The CoJCoL-dS posted an article about race on its official website, and everybody is super-happy to learn that racist doctrines (like curses or restrictions based on skin color) aren’t LDS doctrines…

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Sunday in Outer Blogness: Family Christmas Survival Edition!

chanson, December 8, 2013

Those Christmas family gatherings can bring priceless joy, but can sometimes also involve treading in dangerous waters. Some have boundary problems deciding what to say (for example the first comment here is fascinating, but perhaps wouldn’t be helpful in some family Christmas Eves…), and some have still-open wounds. And even…

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Unweaving the tangled web: Michael Oborn’s “The Complete Mystery of Matthew Alcott”

chanson, December 7, 2013

Do you ever wonder what’s in the secret vaults of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Have you ever imagined what you’d do if you had access? Matthew Alcott was a humble archivist working for the church when some previously undisclosed documents caught his eye, including Joseph Smith’s…

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Sunday in Outer Blogness: Happy Thanksgivukkah Edition!

chanson, December 1, 2013

In a surprise move, the first day of Hanukkah fell on Thanksgiving this year! The Highchair Travelers provided some ideas on how to celebrate Hanukkah — and don’t forget to read the Hannukah story from the Bible! I assume you already all know how to celebrate Thanksgiving: You think about…

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Sunday in Outer Blogness: Doctrinal Jello Edition!

chanson, November 24, 2013

I learned an interesting thing this past week in the comments of Reddit: Apparently the General Authorities of the CoJCoL-dS are discouraged from keeping journals. Why? Well maybe this tale of one of Joseph Smith’s revelations getting edited before canonization may shed some light on it. In other news of…

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My Favorite Rules!

chanson, November 21, 2013

Ever since Donna Banta posted this old LDS Living article to facebook a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about all the rules that define the LDS lifestyle, and how they change. Specifically, the article is about how Mormon families should forbid their kids from sleeping over at friends’ houses….

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Sunday in Outer Blogness: Mixed-messages edition!

chanson, November 17, 2013

What happens when you devote your life to following authority — and then that authority announces that your hard-lined authoritarian approach isn’t the right way to go? This is the sound of brains exploding. Of course only the Catholics have this problem — the CoJCoL-dS has found a clever way…

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Sunday in Outer Blogness: More Equal Edition!

chanson, November 10, 2013

Now that Mormon presidential aspirations are a distant memory, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has rediscovered the fun of anti-gay-marriage political activism — this time in one of their old haunts: Hawaii! (see this timeline.) In other unsurprising news, criticism of their lame arguments is persecution —…

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Sunday in Outer Blogness: Judging each other edition!!

chanson, November 3, 2013

This week hosted two big kerfluffles! First there was Joni Hilton’s piece in Meridian Magazine on “Liberal Mormons”! It was so offensive that Meridian Magazine actually took it down, but John Dehlin came to the rescue and posed a cached version so that you, too, can personally experience the outrage,…

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Latest Comments:

  1. Donavan on Mormon Stories and John Dehlin’s Mystery CycleDecember 27, 2025

    COJCOLDS is tribalism, no different, no better than MAGA, built on repeating lies and aligning the worst aspects of human…

  2. Holly on Feeling Spiritually Defrauded By Spiritual Fraudsters (Unrighteous Dominion)December 27, 2025

    Hi Chanson-- You write, "A lot of ExMos like JD like to downplay stories like mine because seem to corroborate…

  3. chanson on Feeling Spiritually Defrauded By Spiritual Fraudsters (Unrighteous Dominion)December 27, 2025

    The positive things I got out of being raised Mormon are very similar to the items the both of you…

  4. Holly on Feeling Spiritually Defrauded By Spiritual Fraudsters (Unrighteous Dominion)December 26, 2025

    Hi Andrew-- You write, "the LDS church, precisely because it emphasizes so much about lay leadership, about member involvement, magnifying…

  5. Andrew S. on Feeling Spiritually Defrauded By Spiritual Fraudsters (Unrighteous Dominion)December 26, 2025

    Every time I think about the things I learned from the church that I still find value in outside the…

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