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On Faith and Choice
Faith doesn’t come naturally to me. It never has, and I suspect it never will.[fn1] And still I go, every week, and teach and learn and take part in ordinances and community and church culture and all...
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On Oxfam and Your Taxes
As Ronan mentioned a couple weeks ago, in 2015, BCC is going to encourage our readers to donate to Oxfam America to aid in its efforts to relieve poverty. Lest our altruism be imperfect, though, I...
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Religious Freedom in Houston
In today’s news conference, Elder Oaks continued his outspoken advocacy of religious liberty, a right that he has passionately defended in the past. He provided three recent examples that, he...
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Role Models
In my mission farewell talk,[fn1] I spent a little time talking about one of my teenage heroes. Charlie “Bird” Parker was an alto saxophone player who revolutionized jazz. With Dizzy Gillespie, he...
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#todayatchurch
Scene: Primary singing time. Song: “A Child’s Prayer.” Boy to my right: beatboxing softly. Conclusion: “A Child’s Prayer” is definitely better with a beatbox accompaniment. N.b.: YMMV, depending on...
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Does Open Stories Foundation Qualify As Tax-Exempt?
Last week, Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote an article about John Delhin’s finances. A couple things leaped out at me, particularly salient, perhaps, because of research I’ve been doing recently, and because...
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The Most Controversial Bloggernacle Post in the 6,000-Year History of the...
Historicity.Filed under: Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation
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(Mis)reading Scripture
A seemingly evergreen issue in the bloggernacle: what do we do about prooftexting? On the one hand, it allows us to apply scripture to ourselves. On the other, it suggests that scripture, as written,...
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20 Years of Statistical Reports, Visualized #ldsconf
Did you know that, as of December 31, 2014, the church had 3,114 stakes with 29,621 wards and branches? Of course you do: every April during Conference, somebody reads the church’s annual Statistical...
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Elder Holland, Free Soloing, and the Fall #ldsconf
My childhood memories of General Conference are replete with stories about farming; my memory may exaggerate, but in it, virtually every talk derived its moral lesson from some combination of scripture...
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Review: Volume 23 of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies
There’s a huge, but underexplored, problem with the Book of Mormon: it don’t get no respect. Richard Bushman bemoans the fact that the Book of Mormon can’t get a toehold in cultural history classes or...
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Mormonism in the Internal Revenue Code
Whenever possible on April 15, I like to put together a quick post about some Mormon-related trivia from the tax world. This year’s edition: church financial disclosure. In brief: tax-exempt...
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The Spiritual Mission of the University
Two weeks ago, graduating BYU students and their families listened to a commencement address delivered by Professor Robert George of Princeton. The Jesuit motto: For the greater glory of God. In his...
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The Church and the Wall Street Rule
Even though the federal income tax is my main professional interest, I don’t teach exclusively tax classes; every year, I also teach a Business Organizations class.[fn1] In many business entities...
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Obergefell and BYU’s Tax Exemption
On April 28, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, which challenged both the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage and of states’ nonrecognition of same-sex...
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Vestigial Polygamy
The church officially—and in fact—ended its experiment with polygamy more than a century ago. Yet polygamy and its effects remain with us today. And no, I’m not talking about D&C 132; we’ve...
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Coleman, Cafeterias, and Choirs
Ornette Coleman died today. I don’t have any idea how resonant his death is in American culture. I don’t know what pictures the words “Ornette Coleman” conjures up in your mind, if any. But I hope to...
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Trek, Mobs, and Spiritual Escalation
The version of this post I originally drafted in my head was going to be easy: I’d describe a trek activity (mob attack—more on that in a minute) that, in spite of its being clearly inappropriate,...
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Tax Exemption, Post-Obergefell
… will look a lot like tax exemption, pre-Obergefell. There’s been a lot of Sturm und Drang recently over what will happen to the tax exemptions of churches and religiously-affiliated schools that...
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Intertemporal Mormonism
J. Wellington Wimpy understood the time value of money The last couple days, I’ve been thinking about intertemporality in the church. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how we see the value of...
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