A Call For Kindness

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by Pete Codella (bio)

Sometimes it’s difficult to remain optimistic. I had already planned to write about the teenage boys who bullied Karen Klein, the bus monitor in Greece, New York, and then the Aurora, Colorado shootings occurred — two national stories in the past month with pretty negative underpinnings.

Can you imagine taking your young child or teenager to a movie and experiencing what those people in Colorado experienced?

How would you feel if your twelve year-old son spoke to a grandma the way those boys in New York did? Or what if that had happened to your grandmother?

I’m concerned that in our reality TV culture, where rude, immature and sometimes vindictive behavior is consumed as entertainment, and with Hollywood movies glamorizing violence, we’re sending too many conflicting messages, particularly to our youth.

Even for adults, can you imagine how confusing it would be to be in a movie theater with people dressed as various Batman characters, with movies playing in other theaters on the other side of the wall where you can hear gun scenes playing out, to have someone in a bullet-proof vest and gas mask show up in front of your theater, throw a gas canister then begin shooting people?

I’m not suggesting I have an answer. Do we put juveniles in prison? Do we outlaw private citizen gun ownership? Do we secure and install metal detectors in every public space?

I recently visited The Foundation for a Better Life, where I enjoyed going through their outdoor billboard designs intended to remind people of great values exemplified by extraordinary people, and even remind ordinary people of the greatness within.

MMM Style: Red Wing Boots

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by Clark (bio)

Before: Don't know if you know this, but if you take your Red Wing boots into their store, they'll give you new shoe laces and oil the leather for free. Not a bad deal yeah? I got these 1975-era Irish Setter Red Wing Boots the other day and took them in for their latest refurbishing. I decided to get them re-soled as well. Shoes or clothing don't really get me going, but I must say I'm pretty pumped to get these back in a week.

After: I got my boots back. I'm quite happy with them. They now have new soles, a new layer of polish, and some crisp clean laces. I'm gonna have these things for the rest of my life, no doubt about it.

MMM Quotes 10: How Love Rewires the Brain

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

photo via flickr (marie-II) 

"In a relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors [coteries of ingrained information patterns] activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love." - A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini and Lannon

Read more about A General Theory of Love, as well as four other books that tackle the psychology of love, at Brain Pickings.

Guest Post: Getting a Little Passionate This Morning With the Comment Section

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Have something to say? Anyone can submit a guest post to Modern Mormon Men. Send us an email with your post, a post title and a paragraph of introduction (on yourself).

Lauren Johnson received her degree in journalism from the University of Utah and served a Mormon mission in Cleveland, Ohio. A laid-off television reporter, she currently resides in Salt Lake City. Lauren is an avid blogger - you can find her at laurenruthie.blogspot.com. She’s also a tweeter @laurenruthie. Read her first MMM guest post here.

Each morning, it's the same. I wake up, roll over, drink my cup of water sitting on my bedside table placed there the night before, and then grab my phone and read the news. Deseret News, Salt Lake Tribune, Google News, and CNN are my basic morning go-to's.

Before I go further, last night was a more difficult night. I laid in bed and worried about my future. Uncertainty weighed on me. I think I can say I was genuinely frightened. Fear is a very real feeling--one to be dealt with--but, I believe, unnecessary in achieving anything that one wants in life. Fear is the opposite of faith. That sums it up. And although I understand this, sometimes fear creeps up on me and I have to face it. I don't try to run away from my fear, because it will always catch me. Instead, I embrace it. I hold it close, as if it were a child with nowhere to go, and I try to understand and listen to what it has to say. I repeat back to my fear what it tells me, to make sure I understand. I have a conversation with my fear. Yesterday, I felt the fear of giving up what I thought was my dream career in reporting. I felt the fear of not having a job I loved, and not making enough money to support myself or those I love. And then I felt the fear and "what ifs" of marriage and love. What if I never got married? What if I didn't become a mother? There were a few tears, but after talking it out I felt a bit better--safer--and I fell asleep.

Back to this morning: I woke up. I drank my water. I grabbed my phone and started reading. The first headline that caught my eye was from Deseret News: Number of Older Women Having Babies Continues to Grow.

I read the article with happiness. I could tell my fear had snuck off while I slept. It seemed I had given my fear enough comfort and enough listening and love, that he was good to skip off and do his own thing for a while, rather than keep tormenting me.

The article definitely described the negatives of later motherhood. Things fear and I have talked about before--energy and health, fertility, generational gaps. But it also talked about the benefits that made me so happy--that children with older parents have higher IQ's, better vocabularies, better opportunities and security, and that parents of older children often live longer. The thing that made me the most happy was realizing that it was NORMAL. I knew this. Of course I knew this! Gosh, I only know thousands of ladies and gentlemen just like me in the Salt Lake Valley alone. Older parenting is the new NORMAL. I am not alone.

Then I went to the comment section.

The Teachings of Jesus Christ: An Interview with Mark Anthony Barrionuevo

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

In this post I interview Mark Anthony Barrionuevo, author of the recently published two-volume anthology of Christ's teachings titled The Teachings of Jesus Christ.

What is The Teachings of Jesus Christ?

I think of it as Mormon Doctrine meets Jesus for Dummies. I’m not trying to be irreverent but I believe the alphabetical and doctrinal order of Bruce R. McConkie’s seminal take on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ beliefs, as well as the simplified format and user-friendly presentation of the [Blank] for Dummies series, is an appropriate synopsis of The Teachings of Jesus Christ.

In a nutshell, The Teachings of Jesus Christ considers every single doctrine, principle, truth, verity, idea, topic, etc. that Jesus Christ spoke while in the flesh among the children of men or taught through His actions. For me, these are encompassed in the Gospels in the New Testament of The Holy Bible—Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke, and Saint John—and in 3 Nephi of The Book of Mormon.

Why did you write The Teachings of Jesus Christ?

This project began because of an experience attending church. I brought my biological father to worship services with me one Sunday and after the meetings were done I asked him what he thought. His answer surprised me. My father said that the church we had just attended claims to be the Church of Jesus Christ but that he did not hear any of the teachers and preachers speak about Christ.

My visceral thought was that he was wrong. Hadn't he listened to the sermons? Hadn’t he paid attention to the topics of the talks? And then I thought again. The topics of temple work, God’s plan for His children, and priesthood authority were all discussed that Sunday and to me each subject is inextricably centered on Jesus Christ: temple work is performed in the House of the Lord Jesus Christ and is possible because of His infinite and eternal sacrifice; God’s plan of salvation is possible because Jesus Christ performed the atonement; and priesthood authority is the authority for man to act in God’s name on the earth, which is the same authority that Christ possesses and acted under while he performed His labors among men. But, to my father who did not have a background in the LDS-perspective on these spiritual matters, Christ, or at least the explicit name of "Jesus Christ," was absent.

So, in answer to your question, I wrote The Teachings of Jesus Christ so that any preacher or speaker who speaks about Christian or spiritual matters can begin with the source and branch off from Him. In that way, our implicit reverence and reliance on Jesus Christ will be explicit and "His light may shine."

How did you start this project?

So, as this conversation and experience with my biological father percolated in my mind, one day while I was observing students do their classwork for a few hours (yawn) I decided to be productive. How could I be productive? Starting with St. Matthew Chapter 1, verse 1 of The Holy Bible and moving methodically from there, I wrote down what topics each verse spoken by Christ or about Christ's actions contained. Some days I was able to complete a block of verses. Some days I would spend an entire hour on one verse, notating and analyzing the multitude of significance and meaning in the words of the Savior.

I have to add that it was a very daunting and extremely humbling, but extremely invigorating, task to analyze the numerous layers of meaning located in one sentence of the Redeemer’s teachings. As the greatest teacher who ever lived, even as the Word in flesh, you can't imagine the complexity and perfection infused in one seemingly passing comment to a lawyer or to an adulteress. Yet no sentence is a throw away; no word is wasted. There's meaningful yet underlying context. There's eternal significance. There's temporal solace. There's piercing condemnation. There's unadulterated love in every syllable. Maybe that is one reason Jesus Christ is called the Master: He is the Master of language and of teaching the eternal verities of God.

How long did it take you to complete it?

I started in March 1997 and it was finally published in February 2012. The process wasn't continuous. I had lots of false starts and switchbacks.

Guest Post: Discussing Race With An Investigator

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Have something to say? Anyone can submit a guest post to Modern Mormon Men. Just send us an email with your post, a post title and a paragraph of introduction (on yourself).

Ryan Gotchy Mullen always uses three names in print, but only one aloud. He is a husband, father of three, engineering grad student and avid reader of the Book of Mormon. His hair has been both black and white in the past, but is now rapidly turning gray.

Race is always a tricky subject for me when talking about the Church. How can I simultaneously explain that my church had erroneous views and prejudiced racial policies while affirming the Church's divine origin? As a modern Mormon man I am comfortable with this dichotomy, but I'm not great at explaining it. However, a friend of mine is taking the discussions and in reading the Book of Mormon, he stumbled upon the Lamanite cursing. In his own words:

I wanted to be honest in that I had a hard time reading 2 Nephi 5. It started with the chapter description. Then again in v. 21, where it seems to claim when the Lamanites were "white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome," but then because of their unbelief, God marked them and "cause[ed] a skin of blackness to come upon them." I read this as saying something about both black and white skin. The way it praises white skin is bizarre, and blackness is seen as some kind of punishment. As I read this, I read that the Nephites continued to have white "delightsome" skin and that the Lamanites where marked---by God---with black skin. So, good guys are white; bad guys are black.

He goes on to stress that he has never witnessed racism from modern Mormons, however he's aware of Mormons' rocky racial history and sees in this passage strong evidence for the idea that Joseph Smith was influenced by his culture in writing the Book of Mormon. Here's my response:

Happy Little Clouds

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by Scott Heffernan (bio)

PBS Digital Studios has just released their second video from their remixed icons series. You probably saw the first video, Mister Rogers: Garden of Your Mind (shown after the jump). To create these wonderful videos, PBS teamed up with Symphony of Science musician John D. Boswell. This newest one features Bob Ross, creator and host of The Joy of Painting. Watch and enjoy.