The Mormon Monk

. . . that " it's good to lead a monk's existence ." While I am thrilled that statistical evidence has finally been found to validate my lifestyle, I'm more than a little concerned at the data underlying this conclusion. In the relevant study, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that 45% of college students are essentially wasting their own time and their parents' money. A study of 2,300 students at all levels of higher education found no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing for 45% of undergraduates after two years in college. This can't all be blamed on students, however; over half of those surveyed didn't take a SINGLE course that required 20 or more pages of writing per semester or a SINGLE course that required more than 40 pages of reading a week: professors have lowered their standards. The good news is that students who enrolled in more demanding classes--and were, essentially, forced by their demanding professors to...

Have you ever been told that we need to make English the official language of the United States? That bilingual nations are inherently problematic? Gather round, and listen to a story: Once upon a time there were two monolingual populations, the Frivvles and the Jibbers,  living within a single nation . These groups mostly ignored each other; the only real problem arose when a member of one monolingual culture (the Frivvles) wanted to interact with members of another monolingual culture (the Jibbers) but couldn't. In such a scenario, the solution seems very clear: any Frivvle that wants to interact with a Jibber will learn Jibberish, and any Jibber that wants to interact with a Frivvle will learn Frivvlesh.  They should coexist peacefully, right? Ah, I can hear you objecting--what if one culture is more powerful than the other? What if a vast majority of this society speak Frivvlesh, leaving speakers of Jibberish to cluster together and either A) interact only with other J...

. . . and I will give you rest. This is the promise of Matthew 11:28, but what does that promise mean? In the very next verse Jesus invites us to "[t]ake my yoke upon you," which hardly sounds like an activity or a posture we would typically associate with "rest." In this particular case, Christ is using the word  rest  in the same sense that Alma uses that word when describing the post-mortal life to his son, Corianton: "And then it shall come to pass, that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow" (Alma 40:12). In both of these scriptural examples  rest  is used to signify a state of emotional and spiritual release, freedom from sin as opposed to freedom from work. We know, in fact, that the postmortal life will involve a great deal of work for those who have taken Jesus Christ...

When the wicked priests of King Noah wanted to stump/embarrass Abinadi, they asked him a question about Isaiah: "What meaneth the words which are written, and which have been taught by our fathers, saying: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings?" (Mosiah 12:20-21). Of course, as Abinadi makes abundantly clear, he is NOT someone you want to play "Stump the Prophet" with. He launches into one of the finest discourses in all of the Book of Mormon and quotes (what we now think of as) the entire fifty-third chapter of Isaiah before concluding that "the prophets, every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy [. . .] are they who have published peace, [. . .] and O how beautiful upon the mountains were their feet! [. . .] And behold, I say unto you, this is not all. For O how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that is the founder of peace, yea, even the Lord" (Mosiah 15:14-18). ...