The Gospel According to Jeffrey

It’s time for yet another installment of Responding to Facebook , the show where I share stuff that’s really just way too long for microblogging. For the last few months, the Bloggernacle has been rife with stories about the Ordain Women Movement , a group that seeks to have The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints change its longstanding policy of only ordaining men to specific offices in the Priesthood. While the reasons behind this are far too complex to be treated in this post, the point is that this group wants this change to occur, and has been attempting to effectuate this change through a variety of methods—not the least of which is showing up at the Priesthood Session of the Church’s Annual and Semiannual General Conferences and requesting admission to the men’s meeting. (As an aside, the men’s meeting is always preceded by a General Women’s Meeting, the preceding Saturday. Of course, all women are invited to attend this meeting, and men requesting admissio...

One of the most beautiful practices of The Church of Jesus Christ  is that of performing ordinances for the deceased, by proxy. Latter-day Saints believe that baptism is essential to salvation, and that other temple ordinances ( e.g. endowment , sealing , etc.) are essential to exaltation. We also believe that, since God is just, absolutely everyone will have the opportunity to accept those ordinances. A just God, for example, would not damn one of His beloved children just because that child was unlucky enough to be born in, say, eighth-century China, and go his entire life without even hearing the name of Jesus Christ. Because this practice is so beautiful to us, it confuses us to no end when people react so adversely to it. An extreme example of this occurred in the late 20th century, when a Holocaust-survivors group objected to somebody having submitted the names of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims for proxy baptism. The Church’s response was to issue an official...