My latest essay for Religion Dispatches is now online, titled "Evangelicals, Halloween, and the Macabre." It can be read here.
I co-authored an essay with Charles Randall Paul of the Foundation for Interreligious Diplomacy titled "I Believe You're Wrong: The Trouble with Tolerance" with the tagline "A personal recipe for peaceful co-resistence with religious rivals." The essay appears in Religion Dispatches, and it represents a unique effort by a Protestant and Mormon scholar coming together to address religious disputation in the public square with the New York City Muslim community center and mosque controversy as the application.
Religion Dispatches includes two stories related to Mormonism that caught my attention, both dealing with the narrative aspect of the faith, and in this case its connection to the weblogging.
The first story is titled "Birth of the Bloggernacle," which talks about the large numbers of Mormon bloggers, many with a significant reading audience (would that my blogs had as many readers!), who share their life stories, and their faith, through the web. As the byline for the story describes,
"Mormons are natural storytellers, they say, and commanded by the church to research family history and take an account of their lives. LDS and the internet: a match made in heaven."
The second article moves from a general consideration of the popularity of blogging in Mormonism to a specific example of this in a Mormon mom's blog. This article is titled "'Not a Fan of the Undergarments': A Mormon Mother Blogs." The byline for this article is more provocative than the one referenced above:
"A Mormon mommy blogger ponders spiritual laziness, gay marriage (fine with her), projectile vomiting, the evils of daylight savings time, and the relationship between Mormon-mom perfection and antidepressants."
Religion Dispatches can be found here.
