Contemplative Dexterity

Recently I’ve noticed a few of my friends posting links to articles written by Matt Walsh with their own comments applauding what he has to say. Quite a few of them have gone so far as to say that he is able to write exactly what they think but are unable to put into words themselves. Naturally, I’m curious about the ideas that my friends are supporting, so I’ve taken to reading these articles whenever they appear. Before I delve into any critiquing, however, I just want to say that Matt Walsh is a glorified hipster writer that the Blaze is using to draw millenials into the Christian Right’s grasp. While I have no doubt that he is an intelligent individual, his writing is patronizing to the extreme. He rarely considers what the flip side of his argument may be, and when he does, he either highlights the fanatical views of a minority of liberals or just completely misses the point of the argument of what the majority tends to believe. This has been consistent with each article I’ve ...

Our Civic was stolen from our driveway over the weekend. Riley* was completely enthralled with the police man that came to file the report. Both boys kept saying the police man will bring the car back. As we knelt down to say prayers, I told Riley we can ask Heavenly Father to help us find the car. His response… “He can’t help us Mom!! Heavenly Father isn’t a police man!” A wonderful lesson on prayer and God’s love followed, but with confusion about why Heavenly Father wasn’t coming to our house like the police man did :D haha love our conversations with Riley. *name has been changed I came across this post a few days ago from a friend on Facebook. I thought it was interesting that her 4 year old son, despite Sunbeam lessons endorsing the power of god, accused god of being unable to help them find something material. It’s a logical conclusion. God is not a policeman. That’s why his name is “God” and not “Officer God”. It’s depressing to think though that my friend and her ...

Sometimes I reflect on my life and wonder what it would have been like had my family never moved to Utah when I was 11 years old. For 9 glorious years I lived in northern California in a once small town that was in the beginning stages of evolving into a large city. While my family was, and still is LDS, my closest friends at the time were not LDS. Most of them weren’t even overtly religious. During the time in which I still considered myself to be LDS, I often wondered if I had remained in California, would I, through the influence of these non-Mormon friends, “succumbed” to the evils of the world when I was a teenager? Through contact on Facebook, I viewed pictures of my friends holding beers, displaying new tattoos or piercings, and I knew, without being told, that most of them were experienced in the world of sex by the time they graduated. A part of me longed to have had those same experiences, but the side of me that was still heavily influenced by Mormon dogma, tried to convi...