I'm Back

Well its certainly been a while since I posted here, and I’ve missed covering a fair bit of Mormon news, such as new Apostle Neil L. Anderson (another middle-aged white American with a business degree, sorry having a hard time getting excited). Anyway I though I’d inaugurate my return with some links to articles I’ve found in recent months that I thought were interesting:

• Here is an interesting perspective on an LDS Sacrement service from the UK Guardian. Check out Shariatmadari’s take on why the Mormons get no respect.
• Kind of along the same lines we have New Cool Thang on Challenges to the Acceptability of Mormonism.
• The ongoing brew-ha-ha over Big Love’s airing of a depiction of the LDS Endowment ceremony probably warrants its own post by me in the future. Here are some good points on the way the ceremony seems poorly (even misleadingly) worked into the story, usually the show’s writers are pretty spot on in their presentation of Mormonism, but here they kind of strained credulity to show us the Endowment ( a move no doubt taken at lest in part to generate controversy and hopefully viewers for the show). I’ve not seen the actuall depiction on film yet (its blocked on YouTube, and season 3 is not yet out on DVD ), but you can see this interesting (and I fear disturbingly accurate) scene of Barbs Church court.
• Barack Obama’s Mormon Ancestry
• Not an article, but an interesting period video on largely Mormon Utah in the 1940’s.
• The puzzling Mormon gender gap, I’ve seen this first hand. One notable example from my experience was a little branch I served in Kentucky, it had maybe 6 active males, plus the missionaries and two score or so women who attended regularly. In a system where men are required to do most of the church administrative and ritual work, that’s a difficult load to carry.
• A comparative analysis of LDS Missions as an effective religious retention and commitment deepening ritual.

Hopefully more posts to come soon.