Going live, virtually

The article Virtual Church During Global Pandemic went live earlier this week on Canadian News about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  Below is the link to that article

https://news-ca.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/virtual-church-during-global-pandemic

Catherine Jarvis is the one who pulled this article together. She says that in writing this article the most important thing she learned

was that our connections to God and to each other are only limited by our creativity. Although this pandemic has been challenging on many levels, during this time I have come to a deeper appreciation of the importance of God's love in my life and of how my connections to the larger community, including my Latter-day Saint congregation are essential. It is in those connections to others that love is experienced, given and received.

I love the nine pictures that accompany the article.  For a few years now, I have been wanting to think about my relationship to my church as horizontal rather than vertical.  That it to say, it has always seemed to me that the road ran from Alberta down to Utah when it comes to Mormonism.  I have been hoping that the road might run coast to coast, at least for a few trips.

In other words, I have been wanting conversation with other Canadian Mormons. mainly to develop a group conversation about the work our church might do in light of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commision.

I purchased the new book by the Pretes to accomplish this.  The book isn't that satisfying if read for that purpose, though I am loving it for other reasons.

Better for me, I love the photos that accompany Catherine's article.  This may be the first time in my life I have felt my Canadian religious identity. I studied the You Tube screen shot, hoping to recognize a name I knew.

I loved listening to the Canadian Mormon Virtual Choir singing "Love One Another" (there is a link to this in the text).  The 1 1/2 minutes it took to look at that link was not  time lost during my day.  I have been wanting to ask if an of my Albertan friends know any of the people singing.  I don't know any of them.

I know Cornetta, the woman with the family ages 17 to 4, for she was the first person to tend Catherine's kids for an extended period of time when they were about 1 1/2.  But I have only known her by name, so it was so good to see her face.  Catherine told me that on Christmas Day she can always count on getting a phone call from Cornetta -- something she can't count on from me or from the rest of her siblings.  We know we are family in other ways.  Cornetta and Catherine reaffirm their deep connection with a phone call on that holy day.  For some reason that makes Cornetta feel like family to me.

I love the paragraph about the woman who connects with the children in her Primary by email and other electronic platforms.  Just love it!

I think Natalie Berg's paragraph about Sunday in the Park is just a riot.  The picture could be repainted by Seurat, or could easily fade into a musical Sondheim style.

Well, that is the short way of saying what is in my heart the long way.

Arta

Eighty Memories for Eighty Years: #52 The beginnings of the Internet for me

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought,
Volume 25 Number 1, Spring 1992

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 
is an independent quarterly 
established to express Mormon culture 
and to examine the relevance of religion to ....

I learned to do word processing when I began to work at the library in 1989.

The internet was still in its infancy. I took a personal interest in discovering how this new medium was opening up the world. 

One day I saw a letter to the editor in a periodical called Dialogue that said an email list called Mormon-L was being set up by David Wright.

An open invitation to join the list was attached to the letter. Initially I was afraid to join, but my curiosity was greater than my fear.
 I spent the first three weeks on the list, listening in on what seemed like an enormous telephone party-line, but with text as the medium. People were asking questions of one another – speculating on historical and contemporary Mormon issues.

In the world before the internet, this kind of speculation was done at home, or maybe in a Sunday School class or an evening fireside.

There was a favourite saying in those day to those who asked questions: just put it on a shelf, since what you are asking is unanswerable.

Now there were answers everywhere. With the internet, there was an open 24-hour line: people were talking from one side of the U.S.A. to the other, sharing information about what was happening in their regions. When I first joined the list there was dialogue about caffeine that involve(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Six )d such pressing questions as “does a chocolate bar have as much caffeine as a cup of coffee?”, for example. That makes me laugh now. I was all amazed. Open discussion and no one closing it down, putting it on the shelf.

Probably a year later, six Mormons had been labeled as dissidents and were marked for excommunication. Agog. That was me, to be listening in and over-hearing this discussed from a distance. I was going to work an hour early so I could watch who would speak out or up: who was being called into the next disciplinary council.

As I look back now, thirty years later, time has run its course. Internet chatter seems like just the course of the day. Mormon bloggers write about a myriad of topics. Anytime I have a question about religion, a google search will pretty well give me an answer or maybe two or three answer to the same question.

I look back to those early days when the internet was in its infancy. I am glad that I was there to listen and learn.

Arta

Interactive link about Mormon Feminist Events

A friend sent me this note about an interactive link from Oxford University Press.

I thought others who read this blog might like to look at it.

http://blog.oup.com/2015/11/mormon-feminism-events-timeline/

Arta

Call for Papers by the American Academy of Religion

My friend, Ruth Bailey, writes to me that in her latest Mormon Historical Association newsletter, there was a call for papers that she thinks I might know more about than she. (me being Canadian, her begin American)

.

American Academy of Religion, Pacific Northwest Region

2014 AAR/SBL/ASOR Regional Meeting

University of Calgary, Alberta May 9-11, 2014

They want Mormon Studies.  When both of us attended the  Mormon Historical Association Conference that was held in Calgary, one of the speakers pointed out that Mormonism had been left out of Canadian history and shouldn't have been.  It looks like the American Academy of Religion want to include it.  They want the meeting to be multidisciplinary--history, culture, belief and practice, theology, scripture, politics.  They especially want papers that include impact of women and minorities; development of Mormon beliefs, etc.; interfaith traditions; politics, Mormon Studies within the academic study of religion; Mormonism within North American culture.

Proposals need to go though Oxford Abstracts.  For more details, see http://pnw-aarsbl.org.  Submit between October 15, 2013 and January 21, 2014.  Acceptance letters will be sent by February 1, 2014.

Looks like it is late now for submitting papers, but anyone with an interesting paper could still submit late. Conferences like these are always looking for good papers and are willing to squeeze them in somewhere.

There are probably lots of other papers out there that involve the Mormons, just waiting to be written ... or that have been written and are just waiting for a place to be read.  Just an idea.

And no, I am not going to write another paper with you, Rebecca.  I have ports to see, instead.

Arta