A little more than five years ago, I got an e-mail from Ryan Bell and Adam Greenwood asking me to join an as-yet-named new blog. Ryan and Davis Bell, Adam, Matt Evans and a few others were the original ring-leaders. I agreed to the summons.
We were pondering what to name this new blog, and I suggested “Laban’s Neck.” It goes without saying that the history of Millennial Star would have been very different had it been named Laban’s Neck.
by Bruce Nielson
Andrew Ainsworth was recently nominated for a Niblet award for his excellent post which posed the question “Do we let the Church get in the way of the Gospel?”
The analogy is that of an orange:
Any church is like an orange: it has sweet, juicy, nourishing fruit (i.e., truths that help people live better lives); and it has a tough, bitter peel that protects the fruit and holds it together (i.e. an organizational structure, prescribed forms of worship, and claims to divine authority). Were it not for its protective institutional peel, a church’s nourishing spiritual teachings would become damaged and lost; were it not for its fruitful truths, a church’s institutional peel would be hollow and purposeless. Continue reading
The car technician called to tell me an “act of God” had been visited upon my vehicle. Apparently the “wrath of the Almighty” would not be covered by warranty. He inquired as to whether I had homeowners insurance? I sank against the wall with the phone frozen to my ear.
“What?” I squeaked at the technician.
“Ma’am, you got squirrels in your engine.”
“Pardon?”
“Ma’am. It’s the biggest darn squirrel’s nest the boys and I have ever seen. Buckets of acorns too. The company don’t cover squirrels Ma’am. Anything a squirrel does is an act of God.”
My wife has had some great entrepeneurial ideas for new products based on her experiences in child-rearing. Here are a few:
1)Sound-proof glass between the children’s area and the front seats in a minivan.
I mean, wearing missionary outfits to a basketball game and then chanting “you’re still Mormon!” at the BYU fans. Really, really funny. Those guys definitely should be in the Conan/Leno sweepstakes.
But on a less sarcastic note, it is worth noting that my alma mater Stanford was forced to apologize when our “marching” band made fun of Notre Dame in ways that had anti-Catholic overtones. Err, make that forced to apologize more than once. In 1991, the band had a drum major dressed up like a nun, which enraged Catholics. And then of course in 2004, the band linked Mormons with polygamy when Stanford played BYU.
Anyway, I think we should agree that making fun of somebody’s religion should be off-limits. This doesn’t just apply to Mormons but to Catholic, Baptists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.