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October 14, 2010
T’other day: during a jaunt through a simmering intellectual salon called Facebook, I learned that by adding a flavored pudding mix to one’s banana-bread dough, why, the resultant increase in relative moisture renders the final product altogether de-light-ful. Here I too strive by way of personal anecdote and even cultural analysis to add something like… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
But this is the most significant shift which future “historians” fail to diagnose in her condition: the realm of the public, the imagined mass, of the visible and countable and comparable – these places are regarded, futurely, as the authentic temple of the Spirit. Individual spirits are rewritten as Mass Spirit, and the time-and-placelessness of… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
So, Will they be any more or less correlated than they are now? Without the social contribution of a classroom, digital Sunday Schools will become Twitterized: a time and a season to meet and embrace are supplanted by digital timelessness and the seasonless meets of constant, limited-character realtime instruction. Classroom feedback is limited to FAQs… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
Content: here is matter to Correlate. Long ago, perhaps, “content” was a category for texts which housed our sensibilities, hopes, histories, gods, and so on. No longer: “Content” is a category for what remains to be Correlated; every day, every media product, talk, webpage, curriculum text, and mission statement. How is Brother Content Correlated? Three… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
Priesthood Correlation merely names, in the future, the coordination of scheduling software and surveillance apps among agents of the Church who hold keys to its real and virtual properties (How long until “hearing confession” is a Facebook status for LDS bishops?). This streamlined referentiality trimmed some of the congregational fat from the present-day term Priesthood,… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
An administrative department eventually was formed in the 1970s, and the Correlation Department became the corridor through which every text, website, image, DVD, film, commercial – everything produced at Church headquarters – was made to run. Here volunteers would check for historical accuracy, whether the material met certain needs, and whether it espoused only true… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
What does Sister Cost hear in her journey? Slower conversion rates leads to decreased investments outside the U.S. Donations continue to fall. Chapels fall into disrepair. Temples suffer “dated” interiors. Political entities muscle the upper-middle class for more money to fund a global empire. Payment of “tithes” soon opposes payment of taxes. Church revenue steams… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
1847 Mormon pioneers flee the United States for Mexican Territory, and yet, only a year later, again find their flag of the Kingdom of Deseret planted somehow in the dirt of the U.S. Conflict follows for fifty years. 1947 Mormons from what one might now call the “Utah-branch” have rejected plural marriage (while others embraced… [Read more…]
August 9, 2010
Part Two: Economy of Words An obsession over ritual precision in sacred spaces like temples and chapels has long characterized Mormons. Yet in the early 1960s apostle Harold B. Lee, with the insights of other churchmen recently returned from educational service among Native Americans, converted the ritual concerns into administrative obsession. With large charts and… [Read more…]
July 1, 2011
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