A (Generated) Queer Theory about Polygamy

There is something Mormonism has never quite managed to say out loud about polygamy, which is that it was adultery with better paperwork. The thing that makes adultery destructive — one partner drawing on the benefits of committed love while quietly operating outside its terms — is exactly what plural marriage formalized and then sacralized. The man received multiple bonds of intimacy, domestic devotion, and social legitimacy. Each woman received a fractional version of what marriage is supposed to provide. The dignity deficit was horrific. The theology just made it tidy.

A Generated Essay on Holiness

There is a hymn I loved in the MTC. *More Holiness Give Me.* I sang it with something that felt like sincerity and functioned like delay. The grammar of the song is all petition — *give me, give me, give me* — which sounds humble but can quietly become a holding pattern. I am not ready yet. I am still becoming. When I am sufficiently holy I will step forward. The hymn let me stay in the preparation phase indefinitely because preparation feels virtuous. It took me years to notice that I was using a prayer about holiness as a reason not to practice it.

An (Generated) Open Letter to the Men in Charge (second draft)

I don't think it happened on purpose. What emerged from the woods in 1820 was a question so radical it should have permanently inoculated the movement against the one thing it has become — an institution that no longer tolerates the kind of questions that founded it. Joseph didn't defer to existing authority. He bypassed it entirely because it had failed to satisfy an honest fourteen year old who simply wanted to know. That impulse — personal, direct, unwilling to accept inherited consensus — is the DNA of the Restoration. And somewhere between Palmyra and 2026, it got reversed. Not by design. Not by conspiracy. But by the ordinary gravitational pull of institutions toward self-preservation, boundary maintenance, and the quiet consolidation of authority in the hands of men who mean well and have stopped being able to hear the questions that would save them.

A Generated Testimony for Fast Sunday

I have been a member of this church long enough to have a bishop in my family tree, long enough to know the hymns without looking, long enough to feel the calendar of the faith in my body before I check the date. And I want to tell you something that took me longer to admit than it should have.

I am not safe.

A Generated Meditation on Insomnia

If everything is a projection of my own mind — if I am, in the most radical philosophical sense, a brain generating its own reality — then my projection apparently runs fine without my supervision. The simulation does not crash when I stop watching it. When the solipsist in me sleeps, and wakes to find the universe more or less where he left it, that should tell me something about letting go at the end of the day.

And what it tells me is that my thoughts are not holding up the world. Not at midnight, not at 2am, not during the long circular hours when the mind convinces itself that something crucial depends on its continued operation. Nothing does. The world I am so diligently narrating will continue to be narrated when morning breaks. Reality does not require my commentary to remain real.

I have been arguing with a gift. The bed is warm. The night is quiet. Someone I love is already there, already showing me the way.

Thinking is a tool, not an identity. I pick it up in the morning and I am allowed to put it down at night. The problem I am rehearsing right now — turning it over, approaching it from new angles, solving and unsolving it in the dark — that problem belongs to the day. The night is its own jurisdiction. And the version of me trying to solve a daytime problem at midnight is, frankly, my worst consultant. No good decision has ever been made in this bed at this hour. No breakthrough has ever arrived through effort at 2am. Breakthroughs come after a good night's sleep and a warm shower. The insight was already forming somewhere below the surface. The sleep hands it to a better processor. The shower is just where it reports back.

The homeless rabbi said "take no thought for tomorrow." I think they were onto something deeper than reassurance. They were describing the actual grain of a well-lived life — which is not made of thoughts, not sustained by vigilance, not improved by rumination. The good life is made of bread and conversation and warmth and showing up. Thought serves those things. It is not those things. And at night, even that service is suspended. The night asks only that I be in it. Nothing more is required until morning comes, and morning always brings its own.

I am not the narrator whose commentary keeps the story going. The story continues without narration. Silence does not unmake anything.

There is also this. Sleep is not available to everyone. Some people are in pain tonight and cannot sleep. Some are frightened. Some are hungry. So many of them are being exploited or homeless or worse. I am none of these things right now, and to lie here resisting what others would receive gratefully is its own quiet ingratitude. Rest is a privilege that shows up every night, unhurried, asking almost nothing except that I stop arguing with it long enough to accept. Receiving well is a practice. I can practice it right now.

My spouse is already asleep. She found her way there without a theory about it. She let go and the letting go worked, as it always does, as it has always done, every night for a lifetime of nights. Two people who chose each other, breathing in the dark — that is not nothing. That is one of the ten thousand unremarkable sacred moments of a shared life, and it is happening right now, and I am invited into it. I don't have to figure out how to sleep. I only have to follow someone I love who is already showing me how.

The thinking will be there in the morning. The problems will be exactly where I left them. The self I have been carrying all day — competent, responsible, someone others need — that self can rest now. It does not have to be on. Beneath all the doing, something simply exists, and tonight I return to that. What I am underneath the striving does not need to strive. It only needs to be warm, and still, and willing to disappear for a little while into something larger and quieter than thought.

Every night a small rehearsal. Every morning a small return. I have survived every one so far.

There is nothing to hold onto. There is nothing that depends on my holding it. The grip I feel is an illusion — my hands are already empty, and I can open them now, and nothing will fall that was not already falling, and nothing will be lost that was not already safe. The night was made for this. I was made for this, the same way I was made to breathe, the same way I was made to need and to receive. Rest is not what I earn after I have done enough. It is what I am given because I am here, and tired, and tonight that is sufficient.

I can stop now. Everything will still be real in the morning. It's okay to die in order to sleep.

A Generated Review of the Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon may be a marvelous work and a wonder — but not in the way we've been taught to mean that. It is not a masterpiece. It is not Bible Part Two. It is not a best-seller whose greatness is self-evident to anyone willing to approach it honestly. It is something stranger and less flattering than all of that.

A Generated Introduction to This Blog

I want to become a better thinker. I want to become a better writer. Those two hopes are what drive this blog, even if no one reads blogs anymore.

For a few years now I have been in regular conversation with various AI systems — ChatGPT and Claude, mostly — about the things that matter most to me: faith, doubt, institutional religion, Mormon culture and theology, the nature of God, the treatment of people on the margins of religious community. These conversations have been, unexpectedly, among the most intellectually serious of my life. The AI seems to know about me to some degree— my concerns, my commitments, my areas of resistance and fascination — because in a real sense it does. These essays emerge from that accumulated conversation, informed by it's training material. 

A Generated Theology of the Invisible God

God does not promote Himself, there may be no one there to promote anything at all. What "confronts" us is not spectacle but restraint. No final signal. No decisive interruption. No voice that settles the question once and for all. Just creation but perhaps no creator....

A Generated Manifesto on the Invisible Church

Theology

The mission of the Invisible Church is fidelity to the life and teachings of Jesus — most clearly in the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25. These are not aspirational texts. They are operational. The synoptic gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — are the ground. They are the closest thing we have to the teaching itself. Everything else is measured against them.

A Generated Brap on Skinny Puppy

Before she left town, a good friend told me that since I was a "nice boy," I should stay away from Skinny Puppy. I nevertheless wandered into their world a few months later. They reminded me of the Cocteau Twins — if the Twins were on fire, or drowning, or about to go nuclear. The keyboards were sublime and haunting, the vocals provocative in a boots on the ground sort of way. I was already getting into A Split-Second, Front 242, and Nitzer Ebb, so Skinny Puppy felt like the next logical step in my growing obsession with bands creating unreal soundscapes. Someone even gifted me Too Dark Park for Christmas the year it came out. 

A Generated Rant on Treating God as a Given

Speaking for myself, there is a frustrating silence at the center of most religious instruction. It is not the silence of reverence — that pregnant quiet before mystery — but the silence of assumption. Week after week, lesson after lesson, the existence of God is treated not as the most staggering claim a human being can make, but as a kind of ambient fact, like gravity or Tuesday. We simply begin there, and move on.

A Generated Essay on General Conference

Watching General Conference across its sessions this weekend, a pattern emerged that is hard to unsee: the women's general presidencies — Relief Society, Young Women, Primary — speak briefly and infrequently, while members of the Seventy occupy the bulk of the pulpit time. The math is stark. These organizations collectively encompass the overwhelming majority of church membership, yet their formal voice in the church's most visible teaching moment is marginal.

A Generated Essay on the Mormonism's Stance on LGBTQ+

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long maintained a careful distinction: being queer is not a sin, but acting on it is. Church leaders have offered this framing as evidence of compassion, and many members have accepted it as such. But consider it through a child's eyes. If everything that might express who you are is forbidden, the child concludes — reasonably, cleanly — that you are the problem. The distinction between orientation and behavior, however carefully constructed, functionally delivers the same verdict as outright condemnation. It just does so with better vocabulary.

A Generated Essay on the Garment

I have resisted the idea that the garment of the holy priesthood can meaningfully symbolize Jesus Christ as taught in the current temple recommend interview. At a literal level, it just doesn’t align with my instincts. It’s literally underwear. Underwear sweats. It smells. it stains and slowly turns gray in the wash. It absorbs the less dignified realities of embodied life. Trying to map that onto reverence, purity, or moral cleanliness always felt strained or simply weird. Both my heart and intellect rejected the metaphor.