DiaBLOGue

This week a controversial article on “How Mormons Make Money” broke at Businessweek. Two Mormon media voices provided measured responses, spotlighting the tension between Mormon scriptural injunctions and Mormon business practices, but showcasing important subtler nuances.
First Joanna Brooks explains “Another lost opportunity was Winter’s failure to pursue with any insight or curiosity the question of what motivates Mormon enterprise…The faith has a 170-year-long history of seeking economic self-sufficiency, motivated at first by Mormons’ desire for autonomy from a hostile mainstream and by necessity engendered by their western isolation. Today, that drive is motivated…by the need to create an endowment capable of sustaining the global physical infrastructure of Mormonism (temples, churches, universities) even as the bulk of the Church’s population shifts to the global south and tithing revenues flatline or even drop.”

Editor Kristine Haglund joins fellow panelists Jordan Kimball and Katie Davis Henderson in a new Mormon Matters podcast on “Growing Up Mormon–and Fearless.” They discuss how their intellectual and spiritual minds were groomed while growing up in faithful homes where questions were encouraged and discussed. Haglund explains how this helps her now with her own children: “I like the idea of letting my kids ask their own questions, that’s definitely the way it went in my family. It wasn’t that my father was assigning us questions to think about or asking us the hard questions…it happened more organically. It was more about our questions than his. So I try to do that with my own family, I try not to force my own questions on them…I mostly try to model fearlessness to them. They know that I ask questions and that things aren’t scary, even the hard things.”

A section from the epic theological poem “My Turn on Earth” featured at By Common Consent and “found” by guest editor Steven Peck:
(The Spell)
Knot it.
Bind it.
Fasten it with glue.
Hold it.
Twist it.
Into a matter stew.
Shrink it.
Crush it.
Until it’s just a tittle.
Pack it.
Stack it.
Until it cannot wiggle.
Until . . . ?
Until Bang!
Until KaBoom!
Expanding space
Extending time
And then there was light.

Mormon scholars representing a myriad of subjects congregate at the new blog Peculiar People, with consistently impressive results. Recent offerings include Dialogue contributor Taylor Petrey asking “Is Mormonism Ridiculous?” Ryan Tobler follows up with a similarly provocative question of “Is Mormonism ‘Bad Religion?‘” Mormon food historian Kate Holbrook gives us a peek at “My Emergency Shelf.” And right in time for Memorial Day comes David Howlett’s look at “A Mormon Massacre Site and Places within a Space.” And keep scrolling through the archives for other fascinating posts as well as bookmark the site for future fascinating explorations in Mormon studies.