This Christmas season, we bring the yearly reminder to make mankind your business. "A Christmas Carol" is a long beloved story that describes the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge from a misanthropic, greedy, old miser to a deeply caring and altruistic person. Perhaps most importantly, the text is a meditation on poverty and how those in positions of power create and justify their power by using poverty as a tool for exploitation. Scrooge's past, present, and future not only plug at Scrooge's heartstrings due to nostalgia but they also show Scrooge how his actions directly impact those in need, particularly Tiny Tim.

Take some time this Christmas season to not only give us a listen but to read the text for yourself and become transformed as Scrooge was. In today's world, it is needed, lest our future become a bleak and desolate hellscape no longer fit for life.

Happy Halloween!

A riddle for you: what do you get when you cross Charles Fort with Henry David Thoreau? You get Danny B. Stewart, folklorist extrordinaire!

Danny Stewart is an on-the-ground folklorist who has collected hundreds of original stories in the greater Utah area. These stories consist of encounters with the fantastic, the impossible, the ghoulish, the loving, the benign, and the banal. They range from angry flying monkeys bouncing from tree to tree at elementary schools, headless children that haunt the Provo Tabernacle (now known as the Provo City Center Temple) and downtown Provo, gnomes and faeries that roam Lions Park in Provo, UT, ghosts that haunt basements in bars, and many different ventures into what Danny calls the Provo Vortex on Grandview Hill.

Danny’s ultimate charge is to challenge closely held assumptions of both academics and lay people. Reality is far stranger than we tend to think, but that strangeness need not be thought of as entirely evil and needing to be avoided. Indeed, life is far richer than the stale and paranoid realities we tend to create for ourselves, and we have people like Danny to thank for bringing that richness to our attention.

For more information on Danny and his ghost tours, check out his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/provoutahghosttour

Check out this interview Danny did in Canada earlier thisyear: https://open.spotify.com/episode/01XH4hqCO4aKIJ7bPAgvA4?si=s1gJHghgTQm3gGE5nPJhOA

Special thanks to Emily Van Dyke for her photo graphic design.

On this week’s episode of Horsin’ Around we are pleased to have one of our dear classmates at CGU, Shiloh Logan, join us. Our conversation revolves around the intricacies of the Mormon “Liberty Community,” groups of Latter-day Saints that are informally organized around Ezra Taft Benson’s “Proper Role of Government” and the writings of W. Cleon Skousen. We further explore the ways that Satan lurks in the background of these ideologies, as well as Shiloh’s own professional, philosophical, and spiritual journey with the Liberty Community and Latter-day Saint conservatism more broadly. It truly is a Religious Studies romp as we delve into the ways that we “scripturalize” certain impulses in our political worlds by incorporating cosmic narratives that orient these political orientations, framing them as governed by God, Satan, and/or their emissaries. These narratives and their significance are then constantly renegotiated and incorporated when new events and people become introduced into the political world.

We also briefly touch on what was then breaking news (we recorded this conversation last Fall) about Operation Underground Railroad’s founder Tim Ballard getting into hot water both legally and with the institutional Mormon church and the early shockwaves that were beginning to go through Mormondom. In light of this last topic, we may have to bring Shiloh back to speak more about more recent developments in that infinitely fascinating interaction between an influential layperson and the upper echelons of Mormon leadership.