... start acting more like a religion, less like a corporation.
The words of someone who's never attended an LDS Church.
... start acting more like a religion, less like a corporation.
bcspace wrote:... start acting more like a religion, less like a corporation.
The words of someone who's never attended an LDS Church.
zeezrom wrote:Dr. Shades wrote:What, exactly, would that "needed benefit" be?
Never mind. It wouldn't provide any benefit.
Spoken by someone who's never toured the Church HQ.
Tchild wrote: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.
bcspace wrote:... start acting more like a religion, less like a corporation.
The words of someone who's never attended an LDS Church.
bcspace wrote: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.
Dr. Shades wrote:What, exactly, would that "needed benefit" be?zeezrom wrote:Never mind. It wouldn't provide any benefit.
Indeed.
Blixa wrote:
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.)