Contemplative Dexterity

I found Go Set a Watchman to be incredibly poignant, especially at this point in my life, having recently left my religion. While Watchman focuses primarily on the racial tensions of the 1950’s in the South, I felt that a lot of Scout’s thoughts and actions throughout the novel correspond to similar thoughts and actions that I’ve experienced throughout my life in regards to religion. Despite this being a new release, the most quoted line from the novel is as follows: “Every man’s island… every man’s watchman, is his conscience.” In the Bible, the term watchman is used to describe a ‘prophet’, or someone who is to become the moral compass of a home or town or civilization. The phrase, ‘Every man’s island’, or ‘no man is an island’, indicates that a person’s conscience is what influences their interactions with their surroundings and with others. When ‘every man’s island’ and ‘every man’s watchman’ come together, the quote is indicative of an individual’s conscience being what influ...

The LDS church recently published an article that addresses polygamy. You can read the article in its entirety here.  After reading the article at work, I decided that I needed to look for more information and went directly to mormonthink.com . I needed something that could explain the multiple facets involved in polygamy, something that would present evidence rather than try to cover it up or pass it off as just something that we can't fully understand right now, but will be revealed to us in the eternities. Polygamy has been one of those things about Mormonism that never sat right with me, but after asking why and receiving the answer "because God commanded it", I stopped pushing for a reason and tried to ignore it.   In a conversation with my boyfriend the other day, I was relating to him all of the information that I could remember from the portion of the polygamy section that I had read that day. Like myself, he had accepted polygamy as "one of those things...