A Generated Essay about Virgins, Lamps, and Sacrament Meeting

The parable of the ten virgins has always bothered me, and I think it's worth being honest about why before offering a reading that finally gave me peace with it. My original trouble was this: the New Testament Jesus leaves the oil undefined. He doesn't say here is the five step program for keeping your lamp full. He just tells the story and lets it sit there. Which produced in me not comfort but anxiety and something close to resentment. If the oil has no clear meaning then the parable is essentially saying you might be foolish without knowing it and there is nothing definitive you can do about that. Some days you have it and some days you don't and the door closes regardless. The parable as threat. Grace with a hard limit and no clear instructions for staying on the right side of it.

A Generated Spoiler for a Redux of the Jedi

I first saw Return of the Jedi in the theater when I was ten years old. I was too young to catch Star Wars on its original run, but I was lucky enough to see The Empire Strikes Back in a proper theater and caught Star Wars a bit later during rerun season. By the time Jedi arrived I was primed and ready. The B-wing fighters, Jabba's palace, the skeletal half-built Death Star, the dogfight over Endor, the force lightning, those extraordinary matte paintings — I loved all of it. I walked out of that theater completely satisfied.

A Generated Reflection on Worthiness Culture

There is a Latin phrase that names what the LDS church has been doing to its children for generations without quite realizing it has a name. Vinculum sine consensu. A binding without consent. Roman law understood clearly what institutional religion has repeatedly forgotten — that you cannot be bound by a covenant you haven't made. Nemo obligatur sine facto suo. No one is obligated without their own act. The covenant requires the covenantor. The binding requires the bound to have actually agreed to be bound.

A Generated Exploration of Faith

Faith is not primarily about its object. Before you can believe in anything — God, yourself, another person, the future — you have to first be the kind of being who believes. That prior posture, the orientation of openness, the leaning-forward into what isn't yet certain, is the foundation everything else rests on. Ted Lasso found it on a pub wall in Birmingham. Moroni found it at the end of the world. They're describing the same thing.

Murmuration: A Generated Proposal

There is a moment at the symphony that most people endure but a few of us love: the tuning. Before the conductor appears, before the program begins, the orchestra warms itself into existence. A cello finds its resonance with long slow bows. A piccolo runs articulated fragments. A French horn smears through a lip slur. A kettledrum strikes once, into silence. No one is coordinating. Everyone is purposeful. The result is accidental and beautiful — dissonance of timbre and texture and rhythm, a collective sound that exists nowhere else in human music-making. What if that moment were the performance?

A Generated Introduction to Come Follow Me “Holiness to the Lord”

This is a redux of an earlier post so that I could read something to my Sunday school class based on several conversations with Claude about the lesson material and things learned on my mission: 

A Generated Premise for a Tough Read

I wish there was a well written thriller about a conspiracy that works precisely because the institution it exploits is decent. Not corrupt or naive in any culpable sense. Decent in ways that create specific and exploitable vulnerabilities. The institution’s warmth, its forgiveness culture, its lay leadership model, its routed legal architecture: none of these were designed to harm anyone. All of them, in combination, created a terrain that a small number of extraordinarily patient men learned to exploit for a few years each. That would be the novel’s central argument, and it is an argument that cannot be made as an anti-institutional polemic. It can only be made as a story that loves what it is trying to protect.