News for Mormons

From The Associated Press:

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Last fall, the head of the Mormon church’s Relief Society delivered a treatise on motherhood that equated nurturing with keeping a tidy house. Women in poor countries who dress their daughters in clean, ironed dresses, the speaker said, honor a sacred covenant.

Julie B. Beck’s exhortation at the church’s General Conference that Mormon women strive to be “the best homemakers in the world” did not go unanswered. More than 250 women signed an online rebuttal.

The exchange illustrates that while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is years removed from open hostilities over feminism, passions still run high over the role of women in a patriarchal church.

No one can profess to know how women’s issues will be handled by the successor to church president Gordon B. Hinckley, who died Sunday at 97.

But few expect major changes along the lines of opening the Mormon priesthood — an office granted only to Mormon men — to women.

But women could still emerge as stronger voices of the church.

“My feeling is that things are not going to change much, that the church is going to keep its very conservative positions on women’s roles,” said Margaret Toscano, a self-described feminist activist who was excommunicated in 2000 and teaches language and literature at the University of Utah.

Although the church did not reveal why Toscano was excommunicated, she argued a historical precedence for women in the priesthood. She also promoted the concept of a “Mother God,” a deity who was described in an early Mormon poem as a consort to God in heaven.

Today, Mormon feminism thrives in a different form. A blog called Feminist Mormon Housewives, for instance, calls itself as “a safe place to be feminist and faithful” and offers the protection of anonymity.

Toscano said Beck’s 1950s vision of motherhood astonished many Mormon women who believed the church, while not encouraging career women, had at least acknowledged women could work and still be good mothers.

Entire article here

From Cville (VA):

When this new chapel is completed in November, the area’s Mormon nexus will switch to Charlottesville.

“Outside, if you look at the LDS church, it looks pretty wacky,” says Bryan Kasik, sitting in Java Java on the Downtown Mall. “This farm boy from New York has a vision of golden plates and then he writes this entire book.” A Mormon, Kasik is talking about the founder of his church, Joseph Smith, who went before Almighty God in prayer one night in 1823.

“While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor,” Smith wrote afterwards. It was an angel with the name of Moroni who four years later directed him to a hill in upstate New York, where Smith received a buried ancient text that resulted in the Book of Mormon.

One hundred eighty years later, Smith’s belief system has beget the 12-million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and potentially the next president of the United States of America). More than 82,000 are in Virginia alone with a segment of those residing in our region. “There’s been some great growth in the last 20-some years,” Victor Morris says. In November of this year, a new church building off Airport Road will be completed and once the chapel is finished, it will shift the area’s Mormon nexus, or “stake,” to Charlottesville from Waynesboro, where it currently sits.  “I’ve seen the changes a little bit more dramatically,” says Morris, who is now the bishop of the local church’s First Ward. (A ward is the LDS’ term for a congregation of 500-600 members or less and each ward has a bishop. In Charlottesville, there are four that are all at capacity.) “We were just barely coming up on a ward when I left.”

In 1987, Morris, a then-teenage Latter-day Saint, left to attend Brigham Young University and eventually ended up on the West Coast, where he continued full-time in the church, teaching seminary to high school and college students.

A year and a half ago, Morris returned here to coordinate a similar effort in an area that includes not only Charlottesville, but Harrisonburg, Lexington and Lynchburg as well. “The Old Testament is what we’re working through now,” he says.

Six months after returning, Morris was also tapped to serve as First Ward bishop. “It came really as a surprise,” he says. As a new arrival, many in the church were still foreign to him. “It’s been a learning curve to get to know them to where I feel like I can serve them well in this capacity.”

Per Smith, Mormons believe that each and every one receives divine revelation, but a bishop has authority over an entire ward. “That’s a lot to live up to, spiritually and even physically,” Morris admits.

Some of a bishop’s duties might include serving the temporal needs of those in the ward. “It’s very rewarding because you get to see what I feel is a very powerful manifestation of the true love of Christ,” he says. “You’re put in that capacity, and it’s been quite a blessing, but it’s intimidating to me. These are real people with real needs and those real needs come at times that are not always so coordinately planned.”

Four years ago, Gretchen Patterson woke up to find her husband still sitting in his den chair, dead from an apparent heart attack. “He was gone and I knew it,” she says. After calling the rescue squad, Patterson notified members of the church who rushed over. One of those was the Relief Society’s Compassionate Service Leader, a role Tanya Skeen filled for a number of years, one she describes as “compassionate service in different aspects.”

“They still take care of me,” says Patterson of her church ward, a smattering who are represented here. These Latter-day Saints are spread throughout the community in various vocations and lifestyles. Some of them even like Metallica—early Metallica that is.

Entire article here