With all due respect to others who tried their hands at Conference blogging, I think that the best commentary award goes to a string of posts over at Dave’s Mormon Inquiry Blog (See posts here, here, and here).
Here are some samples of his comments:
- President Monson’s self-deprecating stories about his experience playing basketball struck a pleasant note. I don’t normally resonate with the storytellers, but this time I appreciated the humility and confidence of a man who could tell a story of his athletic shortcomings to a crowd of 10,000 guys.
There was some interesting critical commentary, such as:
- I’m sorry, I do not worship the God of Earthquakes. That kind of stuff played well for illiterate peasants of the ancient world, but not for modern Christians. I think Elijah kind of made that point 2500 years ago: God is not in the storm but in the still small voice.
As well as some funny vignettes of conference watching:
- Dennis E. Simmons gave the “But If Not” talk. By halfway through it I had the kids chiming in with the punch line, “but if not . . .” And what a voice! This guy should be on television (well, I guess he was). This one’s a keeper.
All in all, not a bad showcase of what the Bloggernacle (or as Dave — in what I think is a hopeless attempt to recycle an already used phrase — calls “Mo-blogging”) can be.
Yes, it was very nice, but did he top 117 comments, the majority by a single person? I think not.
Dave is of course famous for being the most articulate and thoughtful person in the bloggernacle. I’ll take his conference report as better newsmaking than the Deseret News’ schlock, any day.
Dave’s extended quotation from Bro. Hafen is very relevant to Kristine’s post on the Bearing of Complicated and Complicating Testimony, http://timesandseasons.org/archives/000636.html.
Schlock, Steve? Really.
No it isn’t, Adam. I think I was pretty clear that I wasn’t interested in blowing cold air on hothouse flowers for the sake of watching them wilt, only in showing/telling/teaching about why we should care about the delights of the mind.
Adam, it may be too bad you didn’t say, “Schlock, Steve? Really?” because then I would cut and paste some of the horrors of poor writing that emerge from their news coverage. DN is a mediocre paper, worse so when they cover Church-related events. The Church News, for example, is a wonderful example of a great idea turned horribly, horribly wrong, IMHO.
You may think that the use of “schlock” is a bit harsh. Fair enough — to each his own. But it is the epitome of schlock as far as I’m concerned: “Something, such as merchandise or literature, that is inferior or shoddy.”
Now of course you may be thinking: “Mr. Pot seems to be calling the kettle black.” Guilty as charged. But I’m not exactly trying to put out a for-profit, serious journalistic endeavor, either.
All of this is a longwinded way of saying: quit fishing for apologies, Adam! Never!!
Ah, Kristine HH, you have misunderstood me. I did not mean to say, ‘Here is a quote which puts paid to all those silly debunkers.’ I meant to say something like, ‘here is a quote that addresses some of the same themes as have been raised in Kristine’s post.’
Note, however, that I did misunderstand you. I thought you were saying something like, ‘Granted that we don’t want to blow cold-air on hothouse flowers solely to wilt them [well put, that], why not do it from time to time to toughen them? As we have discovered, an occasional intellectual challenge to certainty can be an occasion for growth.’ It was to that proposition that I responded. Now I see that you’re talking about sharing the joys of the intellect with people. I see that as a different proposition. Answer: I don’t know. Maybe one can start with the sorts of oddities and curiousities that interest anyone, or when one has a chance, recount an entire intellectual odyssey, so the interlocutor gets the emotional flavor of the experience, so the Spirit can convey what’s in your heart to yours. But not everyone has the temperament, and our culture and society do little to draw it out. The going might be a little slow. You’ve probably encountered the same thing with music; some people just don’t get it, and how to help them?
I may be a little pessimistic because I’ve seen the same problem from another angle. I know people who enjoy philosophy very much. I know people who enjoy modern (non-representational) art very much. Enough of them do that I realize something is there. But I can’t see it. People try to explain it to me, or I read simple accounts, and it all washes over me. It’s even a little eery, as I realize I’m up against something alien. What to do? Shrug and hope for a better day.
For the record, I do worship the God of Earthquakes.
Adam – I was wondering about that.
Actually – since God is suppossedly God over everything, why isn’t he the God of Earthquakes?
Yeah – Elijah said God wasn’t in the Earthquake, but there were plenty of other times in the scriptures he was.
I guess I don’t see what he meant by that comment.
Personally, I think Kim Siever’s token Conference post was the best. It seems to be the most critical and it seems to have received the most backlash. Well, relatively speaking.
:-)
Kim, I agree. Your post on Daylight Savings Time really made my blood boil. How could they endorse a practice that screws up the life rhythms of 300 million people twice a year? There’s a principle to be learned here: Don’t mess with Times and Seasons!
Thanks for the kind comments, Nate and company. You guys push a lot of traffic.