I was what you would call “musically sheltered” as a young child. My parents really weren’t huge music fans but they had their favorites. For instance, my dad loved Anne Murray and my mom was an Elvis fan, but we didn’t hear very much of his music because my dad thought Elvis was an idiot. They both loved the Carpenters and John Denver. When my dad was feeling really crazy we listened to groups like the Oakridge Boys. (more…)

Julie put up an interesting post over at T&S asking “Are Women More Spiritual Than Men?” This question has come up at several Mormon blogs recently and it has become pretty clear to me that before we can answer it we need to define the word “spiritual”. So what does spiritual mean to you? (more…)

There was a recent Sunstone Symposium session on how well Mormonism is represented by the Bloggernacle. I was brainstorming for empirical ways to test this.

Mainstream Mormonism is purportedly 88% Republican.
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Ok, I can tell that fans are itching to make their predictions about the upcoming season — they started putting them up prematurely in the 2007 Season Preview thread. So here is the place to make your predictions for the upcoming football season. Here are mine:

Sat, Sep 1 Arizona ……………………W — 16-9
Sat, Sep 8 at UCLA …………………..L — 17-24
Sat, Sep 15 at Tulsa …………………W — 31-10
Sat, Sep 22 Air Force ……………….W — 35-17
Sat, Sep 29 at New Mexico ……….W — 24-14
Sat, Oct 13 at UNLV …………………..W — 45-13
Sat, Oct 20 Eastern Washington W — 52-10
Sat, Oct 27 at San Diego State…. W — 38-17
Sat, Nov 3 Colorado State …………W — 27-24
Thu, Nov 8 TCU ……………………………L — 35-31
Sat, Nov 17 at Wyoming …………… W — 34-21
Sat, Nov 24 Utah………………………. W — 35-28

So there you have it. I’m going with 10-2 in the regular season. I figure 10-2 will likely at least tie BYU for 1st the conference and send them to another bowl game which I predict they will win to go 11-2 overall on the year just like last year. I optimistically predicted a 9-3 regular season in 2006 and the Cougs outdid me. I hope they do it again this year.

What are your predictions?

In 2005 and 2006 I covered BYU football over at Bloggernacle Times. But since that blog is now defunct, the Thang is launching a new sports category so I can keep my sports blogging hobby going.

2006 Season Recap

BYU started the 2006 season with high hopes but lost two of their first three games in heartbreaking fashion. (They lost at Arizona on a last second field goal and a Boston College in double overtime.) The Cougs then went on to rattle off 10 straight wins including beating top 20 TCU in Texas and crushing the Oregon Ducks in the Las Vegas Bowl. This Spring graduated senior quarterback John Beck was taken early in the second round of the NFL draft by the Dolphins and looks to be the QB of the future in Miami. Several other graduated Cougs are vying for permanent spots on other NFL teams now too.

2007 Outlook (more…)

The point of this post is not to give opportunity to arguing whether evolution or no death before the fall (NDBF)is correct. It is not to look at whether S. McMurrin and H. Eyring Sr. or J. Fielding Smith and B. Packer more accurately state the official position of the Church. If you have perspectives along those lines, table them, because those sorts of comments will be deleted here, even if you do have a fancy ™ on the end of your name.

The attempt here is to take the two positions, or for the sake of this post, assume BOTH are true. Then we can look at possible ways that both can work together.
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I am always hearing this idea that the Word of Wisdom is important because our physical appetites will go with us to the spirit world, but we won’t be able to satisfy them since we are absent our physical bodies. This is offered as a reason we should not develop addictions to tobacco and recreational drugs. Apparently the spirit world will double as a giant rehab center with lots of people quitting cold-turkey. (more…)

Most of us Mormons believe God reads our minds. I pray to God in my thoughts regularly in the belief that God hears and understands my thoughts as clearly as I hear and understand them. Now how God could read the minds of billions of humans all at once is a mystery but since this is God we are talking about such mysteries are par for the course.

The other thing that Mormonism teaches is that God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Ghost are “one God”. This is generally believed to mean that the members of the Godhead have completely unified purposes and enjoy what is sometimes called an “indwelling unity”. One would assume that indwelling unity among the members of the Godhead means they read one another’s minds just like we generally assume they read all of our minds.
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I set my tray on the table with a clatter and flop back in the chair. I let my 200 pound backpack slide to the floor and my shoulders sing in relief. It had been an exhausting day. Every day is exhausting when you are a college freshman living in the dorms and your only form of transportation is your feet. (more…)

Mondo Cool, or Walt Cowart, is my Father in Law. He is a great man, with a great lineage. Anyway, I asked him, on a whim, if he had a post he’d like to put forth. He did.

My father is an old man. I do not say that disrespectfully, but matter-of-factly. He recently retired after 50+ years of practicing medicine. Truly, he is a unique example of service to his fellow beings. He converted to the Church over 40 years ago and has also been an exemplar of service to God. He was a child of the Depression; an onlooker of WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam; and a concerned observer of the societal change of most of the past eight decades. Genetics, however, has been his toughest challenge. His health has been mainly determined by a predisposition towards hypercholesterolemia which has affected his heart, and now his brain. The father I have known as a Lion of the Lord is now, because of health conditions, feeble – physically, mentally, and emotionally.

This, of course, is hard on me. And, it has intensified my thoughts about the purpose of aging. I, after all, am not getting any younger. I think we all wish we, and our loved ones, could be vibrant until the very end of our mortal probations, much like Pres. Faust. But for many, that is not the option.

What are your thoughts on the lessons to be learned by these final years? We all have challenges throughout our lives, but what, in particular, is the “purpose” of old age; or, what does old age teach us that the rest of life does not? Is it just part of the package or does it have special significance in our earthly sojourn? How does this phase of life, in particular, relate to our salvation? How should we prepare to care for our elder families and church members? What are the things we are doing to prepare ourselves for the “twilight years?”

I recently asked Nitsav at FPR about the correlation between Gen 3:16 and Gen 3:7. This is my own answer to the question. (more…)