Introductions

This new project has been incubating in the back of my mind for months now. As I have contemplated my impending retirement from university teaching to embark on homeschooling my son, my students have repeatedly recommended that I take up pod-casting so that they can keep up with what has ticked me off in society that week.

I'm not really sure that there is a need for this blog. Anything I can do, Joanna Brooks has done better. And yet, there is a virtue to just being a voice in the choir, in adding a strength of numbers approach to calls for increased justice, mercy and love in our interactions.

Like Joanna, I am Mormon, but increasingly I find myself tugging and pulling at that title like an ill-fitting skirt that's just an inch too short to meet the Honor Code regulations. I am self-conscious at being slightly different than everyone around me at church. Sometimes that difference is obvious, and I am sure that sometimes that difference is exaggerated by my own sensitivity that filters my perceptions and interpretations.

But I feel alone many a Sunday in a community of woman who are following God the best that they know how. I wonder sometimes why I am not happy or even, some days, at least satisfied with a cultural practice that seems to enrich so many others. Am I falling victim to special snowflake status? Is this a manifestation of pride. Probably. But not all.

Another tug at the title of Mormon is necessary politically. Mormon has become a political category - eliciting a view of the respondent as socially and economically conservative, white, middle-class, situated comfortably along the I-15 corridor with a persecution complex as rich as a plate of funeral potatoes. Some of those descriptives fit me better than others, and some not at all, and so I find myself self-identifying more as Christian than Mormon, even while recognizing how politically loaded that term is as well.

So this is going to be my space, to discuss issues that I feel deeply about, and to try and coordinate all the conflicting parts of my life in something resembling an internally coherent whole.