It’s Donna again, giving Chanson another well-deserved break from her weekly column. As always, I’m humbled but also very excited to be here, as I just learned that one of our own, the amazing writer, Johnny Townsend, has earned some high praise from Kirkus Book Reviews. His collection of short…
A Secular Mormon Christmas!
When I was in eighth grade, I wrote an essay for school about how much I love Christmas. I focused specifically on all of the fun projects I loved to do with my family — like making cookies and gingerbread houses and decorations and home-made advent calendars. I also used…
Christmas Eve Service
Some years ago, I attended a Christmas Eve service with my grandmother. She converted to Mormonism as an adult, and was raised in a more traditional/ritual religion (Ukrainian Orthodox). It’s a religion where they make a big deal out of Christmas Eve. She liked attending services of other churches on…
Rituals & Celebrations
I have a complicated relationship with holidays, one that predates my abandonment of religious belief. I have a hard time understanding rituals; I need to understand the logic underlying the holidays. The link between Christmas trees, gifts, and the birth of Jesus always seemed too tenuous for credibility. In graduate…
Anything but a Harry Potter Christmas!
A few nights ago, my husband and I were putting our children’s Christmas gifts into separate piles, trying to make sure each of them had the same number of items. When we’d finished dividing up the gifts, I looked at the three or four items each child had and declared…
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Pants on the Ground edition!
Chanson asked me to fill in siob this week. This week was going to be all about the pants, when a terrible tragedy happened Friday. I haven’t been watching or reading the news – my children are close to the ages of the children involved. It hits a little close…
Collecting nominations for X-Mormon of the Year 2012!!!
It’s that time of year again! Time to find which X-Mormon had the biggest impact in 2012! We have at least two really strong candidates this year: First off, Kyrsten Sinema, who was just elected to the United States House of Representatives. She is an ex-Mormon, and I think she…
LDS Knickers in Knots Over LDS Sisters in Pants
A Facebook group called All Enlisted (as in “we are all enlisted until the conflict is o’er”) states on its about page that It is intended to be a place of action where active LDS men and women can engage in acts of peaceful resistance to gender inequality in the…
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Kristmas Kremlinology Edition!
The big news this past week is the new LDS website Mormons and gays. From what I gather, the most amazing part is that in the official church stance they admitted that some people are gay or lesbian (they even made reference to reality on this!) whereas before this site,…
mormonsandgays.org — a Sign of Movement toward Dialogue?
The Church recently launched a site titled Love One Another: A Discussion on Same-Sex Attraction (at the URL: www.mormonsandgays.org). Here is a useful link that centralizes many responses to the new site. John Gustav-Wrathall writes at D&S that “Now is the Time” for dialogue, because this new site demonstrates that…