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.

After Christian and Brandon descended into unmitigated madness after their first two dates, their spouses looked over at them and said "Hey guys, pass some of that good stuff over!"

We now venture east from Greece to the roots of the Himalayas to show that philosophy is not just a thing for Westerners and especially that Buddhism is not merely a "religion." Indeed, "Buddhism" itself is not a thing until European imperial forces travel east and categorize the myriad ways of the Dharma as such. This makes understanding the Buddha, his teachings, and how they spread across the Asian and, reportedly, African and European continents a rather sticky endeavor.

After this necessary preface, we cover the life of Siddartha Gautama, a prince in the Indian peninsula around 600 BCE, who left palace life and eventually became the Buddha, the enlightened one. The Dhammapada is a collection of reported teachings of the Buddha, or, in other words, constitute his various upaya, or skillful means, to aid humanity in becoming liberated from the cycle of rebirth and dissolve back into the cosmic void. We also cover the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, or the Eight-Pointed Wheel of the Dharma.

Buddhism in its entirety is far too vast and deep to cover in one episode. Consider this a basic crash course to whet your palate to want to seek out more on your own.

For those who would like to learn more about European imperialism and how it created almost everything we know about "the Orient," Buddhism, and religion more broadly, we recommend the following texts:

"The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism" by Tomoko Masuzawa

"Orientalism" by Edward Said (we will likely cover this in a much later episode)

Here is the Big Joel video that we mention in the episode: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=big+joel+ben+shapiro

In this episode of Latter-day Saint Thinkers, we cover one of Christian’s favorite figures in Mormon thought: the inimitable Eugene “Gene” England. From his early years growing up in Downey, Idaho to his retirement from BYU, England lived his life in an organically liberal Mormon way. “Liberal” with a little “l” being the key, here. Gene fiercely believed in and was willing to accept opinions that were different than his own and lived his life devoted to the ways that Mormonism provided folks the tools to drink deeply from all sources of information in a way that enriched and strengthened faith. To this end, as a graduate student at Stanford, he founded Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, which sought to bring diverse voices into dialogue with one another in the hopes of creating a robust conversation about Mormonism for both intellectuals and lay people alike. However, England found himself ensconced in the bourgeoning culture war that had been brewing between Mormon intellectuals and the institutional Church for some time. At BYU he found himself labeled as both too liberal and not liberal enough. All while he simultaneously received apostolic beatdowns for progressive theological views on God and writing a biography of Brigham Young. In short, Gene found himself at a crossroads in the history of Mormon thought. He was born too late to be among the “golden years” of Mormon thought and theology in the early 1900s but born too soon to be among scholars of Mormonism that apply a critical lens to their faith and still be accepted that we see nowadays. We owe much of our intellectual freedom to Gene, and we are all the better for it.

Christian cries in the episode too, so that means it must be a good one!

Here are links to the resources we drew from to create this episode:

Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism by Terryl Givens:

https://www.amazon.com/Stretching-Heavens-Eugene-England-Mormonism/dp/146966433X

Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal (Introductions to Mormon Thought) by Kathleen Haglund:

https://www.amazon.com/Eugene-England-Kristine-L-Haglund/dp/0252043936

The Eugene England Foundation:

https://www.eugeneengland.org/