The Gospel According to Jeffrey

If you missed my last post, check it out . Otherwise, here’s Part II. :-) I’m now going to conclude my thoughts by pointing out something I’ve spoken of, many times before: the issue of how men are treated in the Church. I don’t claim to know how things were done in the 1980s or the 1880s or whatever other era, but I can certainly say that in the almost 20 years I’ve been a member of the Church, men have been treated like crap. This past Sunday would be a perfect example. Last Sunday, Anna and I attended the  Auburn Hills Ward  in the Wichita, Kansas Stake. Following the youth speaker, the second speaker was a single mother in her mid-30s, whose topic was womanhood. The crux of her talk—which point she kept revisiting—was, “I don’t claim to know what’s it’s like to be a man, but being a woman is really hard.” The implication, of course, was that women’s roles are so difficult to balance that merely filling them at all is enough to warrant praise. Following her rema...

Warning: this is a long post, and it actually kind of devolves into a rant, for a while. If you’re a first-time reader, don’t worry; I’m usually not this bad. ;-) So I saw an interesting post, this morning, on a Latter-day Saint blog called  Times and Seasons . The post, entitled Women and Meetings , cited a recent professional conference the author attended, in which speaker  Dr. Bruce D. Perry  stated that “The IQ of group decision-making goes up in direct proportion to the number of women participating in the group.” The blogger’s question, therefore, was what the reader thinks of this claim, and specifically its implications for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Recent changes making the Ward Council (with three women) rather than the PEC (with zero women) the primary group decision-making body at the LDS congregational level improves the quality of decisions made at the local level. The absence of women in the senior councils of the LDS Church at ...

This past Sunday was my first time attending an entire elders quorum meeting in weeks. Between taking photos for the upcoming issue of the Elders Journal , helping a friend in the Family History Center ® , subbing in Primary and Nursery, and our annual stake Priesthood meeting (which requires each ward in our building to have only Sacrament Meeting), it had been seven weeks since I last attended an entire meeting with my quorum. What’s most amazing is how much I missed it, and how little I realized how much I missed it. My hearing isn’t the best, so I always sit in the front row to keep the gym’s (sorry, Cultural Hall’s) less-than-ideal acoustics from drowning out the instructor. The front row was unusually full, this week, and it was great to be back where I belong, in the company of my brethren. Furthermore, we’ve been blessed with a really great quorum—unlike most wards and quorums, I can’t think of a single person that can regularly be counted on, to bring up some ridiculous pet ...