The LDS Church should...

[_bcspace]

... start acting more like a religion, less like a corporation.

The words of someone who's never attended an LDS Church.

[_Tobin]

... start acting more like a religion, less like a corporation.

The words of someone who's never attended an LDS Church.

Spoken by someone who's never toured the Church HQ.

[_Dr. Shades]

What, exactly, would that "needed benefit" be?

Never mind. It wouldn't provide any benefit.

Indeed.

[_bcspace]

Spoken by someone who's never toured the Church HQ.

I've actually done a little work there and had some Church business there from time to time. I'd say for sure you've never been there.

[_Drifting]

in my opinion - There is only one "should" that I think would be important to the church, that would be hugely beneficial to itself and to the world.

I think that the church should scrap its proselytizing missions completely and convert wholly over to service missions.

This ^ is what Christ would do, were He really in charge...

[_sock puppet]

... start acting more like a religion, less like a corporation.

The words of someone who's never attended an LDS Church.

Don't I wish that they were, and I had never.

[_Tobin]

Spoken by someone who's never toured the Church HQ.

I've actually done a little work there and had some Church business there from time to time. I'd say for sure you've never been there.

Actually, you'd be wrong as usual. I've seen the great beast and been inside a few times. I didn't care for the cafeteria food served there.

[_Morley]

What, exactly, would that "needed benefit" be?

Never mind. It wouldn't provide any benefit.

Indeed.

You're suggesting that there's no benefit to art. Or at the least, that there'd be no benefit to 'art missions.' Am I correct?

Are you serious, Shades?

[_Ceeboo]

Don't back down from the first philistine comment, zeezrom. Of course it would provide a much needed benefit and that is why the Mormon church originally sponsored art missions.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7053 ... tml?pg=all

https://www.LDS.org/ensign/1988/10/harv ... n?lang=eng

Unfortunately, the program did not expand upon it's foundations and produce a Mormon culture in which literature, music and the visual arts attained the status of need, as man does not live by bread alone. Had the contemporary church retained even a smidgen of investment in the aesthetic, I might have held out longer than I did. My initial impressions of "church" was of something completely devoid of style and design. One could not read in contemporary LDS chapel architecture any sign of human creativity, or choice and judgement. Seemingly made by a factory, they looked like a factories and they functioned as ones: turning out endless church meetings each virtually indistinguishable from the other.

Of course, I was also aware that there existed older chapels and church buildings of fascinating structure and history. But as I was growing up I saw that being destroyed rather than preserved: the destruction of the Coalville Tabernacle serves as a reminder of that will to cultural uniformity.

I think there is currently some recognition of the desirability of preservation and yet the gutting Salt Lake's downtown and replacement by a garish mall is disheartening. As too, is the continued facile designs of current temples (oh Cardston Temple, are you destined to always be an architectural anomaly?).

Well, it's an interesting topic, zeezrom and needs much more exploration than I can give it in a single post. I've been thinking about it a lot recently as I've been immersing myself in what for lack of a better term I guess I call "religiously inflected" fiction. At the moment, Flannery O'Connor, Denis Johnson and Marilynne Robinson. Comparing these writers with Mormon-identified novelists is still quite a painful lesson. Well, again, I don't have the time and space to get very far into this here, but I'm hoping to take this up in an extended piece of writing once I get my head above water this semester and catch up with other obligations.

(of course there are other elements at play that transcend traditional Mormon aesthetic parochialism: American education has pretty much abandoned an art education in the public schools. Many Americans, students and adults, unlike their counterparts worldwide, have little comprehension of "art" in its broadest sense. Visual arts, film, and literature are probably not only non-existent pleasures for broad swaths of the population, but entirely incomprehensible to them as well.)

A Blixa contribution is like a Denzel Washington film..............................They are both usually awesome and they are both very often worthy of a second viewing!

Peace,
Ceeboo

[_zeezrom]

Thank you, Blixa. There is still so much about church history I'm ignorant of. I'm usually amazed at the damage inflicted by Correlation. What a beast that was! A firey serpent, indeed.

I'll check those links out...


The reason I brought this up is because I feel like the church is playing tug-o-war. On one side, you have the giant gorilla (investment properties) and the other is a thin, little raccoon (the church's assistance to the poor). But religion needs to be more than just that. It needs to be a whole world. Isn't that what it hopes to be when Christ comes? We are not machines.