New Year's Resolutions

As a celebration of our 100th post, the Expert Textperts decided that this year we are setting our resolutions here, where we may or may not actually stand accountable for them. January 1st is upon us, so we also decided it would be best to share our resolutions with anyone desperately looking for resolution ideas.

Brooke and Casey's joint resolutions:

• Eat more awesome foods (maybe try Schwarma?).
• Watch more movies (our Oscar prep this year has been dismal).
• We should probably do better at FHE too.
• Maintain our frankly laudable date-night record.
• Finally, finally finish reading Sarah Vowel's Unfamiliar Fishes together (it's our designated "road trip" book, only we keep forgetting to bring and/or read it when we road trip, meaning our progress has been painfully slow).

An Expert Texperts Christmas

For those of us coming from a mainstream western Christian tradition, today is Christmas Eve. I've been wanting to do a Christmas post for a while now, but I couldn't settle on a single idea, so instead I'm going to offer a fruitcake-like amalgamation of all the ideas spinning in my mind.

• The best Christmas album of all time is by John Denver and the Muppets, and I defy you to say otherwise.
• "Last Christmas (I Gave You My Heart)" is not a Christmas song. Sure, it uses the word "Christmas" and allude to giving gifts, but there's a difference between setting and content. However, with lyrics so asinine and otherwise completely forgettable, I can't blame it for clinging to the one thing that keeps it on the radio.
• That being said, if a film is set in Christmas--even if it only begins or ends during the Christmas season--it is a Christmas movie.
• (From observing the in-laws): Just because your wife put Die Hard on the pile of Christmas DVDs does not necessarily mean she actually considers it a Christmas movie, much less that she's willing to watch it on Christmas eve.
• "Jingle Bell Rock" has, sadly, not lived up to it's name in recent years. Or...decades.
• Christmas lights, when properly applied, can be very classy looking. Christmas lights, when improperly applied, can have all the class of a Potterville strip club.
• Watch small children sing Christmas carols. Deliver cookies to your neighbors. Visit someone you haven't seen in months (or years). These are just a few of the many alternatives to talking about politics at the dinner table.

Well, time to get back to the relatives. Merry Christmas!

Tooting the Horn

So if memory serves I might have already posted a version of my review of the film 17 Miracles . . . But whether I did or didn't, that one doesn't matter anymore. Now I have been published officially in BYU Studies. I am actually quite glad that I can fill out a citation on my CV (academic resume), that can look something like this.

Davis, Allan. "17 Miracles (film review)." BYU Studies 54, no. 4 (2012), 185-89.

So yes, I am tooting my own horn. This is my way of celebrating after finishing a week in which I wrote 70 pages of my own work while also grading 50 finals and 50 projects in the midst of holiday/end of the year parties. It was eventful, but I'm exhausted. If you would like to read my published review of the film 17 Miracles, click here. It should take you to the PDF of the document. If that link doesn't work, try this one and download the free PDF when you get there. Again, huzzah, and happy holidays.

The Conflict of the Century of the Week

Anybody who follows the Mormon blogging world or just Mormon internet culture has probably seen a great disturbance of late, one of near-cataclysmic proportions. I confess, my views on the topic are good deal more in-depth than I care to get into, and I would never pretend that all the participants are somehow equally at fault or that there aren't real issues at stake. There are good, bad, and worse guys (and, obviously, girls) here. Regular readers (shut up, we have a few) can probably guess where I stand, but others have said about all there is to say at this point. Still, it's just crazy to me that on post after post and on various Facebook threads I'm seeing so much of this:

...over this:

Love One Another

This is happening.

Today the LDS Church rolled out a brand new website: mormonsandgays.org. Let me tell you why this is awesome. Firstly, the very first thing you see at the top of the page (under the logo) is: Love One Another. This is the only context in which this and many other topics should be discussed.

I've been pushing for a little while now (much more online than in "real life," and for that I am sorry) that the basic idea here is love. The conversation doesn't need to be about whether you leave a family member behind, or whether they leave you behind. The question for Christians should be: Do I, like Christ told me to, love this person? There are several videos on the Mormons and Gays website, one of which is called Greg. He said, "homosexuality, that may be such a huge part of how we perceive that person, in reality is just a minor part... I had better not allow a little piece of what they are to become an alienation factor."

The Mormon Newsroom article about the launch of the website quotes Elder Cook, who said,"Let us be at the forefront in terms of expressing love, compassion and outreach."

Scott Pilgrim for social justice!

In the end, that's all we need to do. Disregard the political, as several groups have done, and remember that we're here to emulate Christ. We need to reach out and love everyone, not only the LGBTQ community, but everyone. Love the people you hated in high school. Love your siblings that you can't seem to agree with. Love your families, friends, extended families, strangers. We could all take a lesson from the Amish people who forgave and loved the family who needed the most help.

To anyone who thinks this is a negative thing or a push to get tithes from LGBT, I say, I'm sorry you feel that way. The support community is buzzing with excitement, and I'm feeling it too.

That's all.

The 4 Most (Least) Likely Candidates for Secretary of State

With Secretary Hilary Clinton stepping down as Secretary of State in January, the Obama administration is looking at possible replacements. I understand this process can be difficult, so, I am going to help them out. I ask nothing in return except for a brief mention in a newsroom speech and a personal fleet of Predator drones.

Candidate #1: Enraged Elderly Conservative Internet Comment Writer

"What do you think, Mabel?"
"It needs more expletives, Gerald."

Pros: If we're going to heal this nation, we need our officials to begin reaching across the aisle. What better way to do that than to reach waaaaay across the aisle? I can almost see the state department press releases now: "On behaalf of "president" Barrack HUSSEIN Obummer..."

Cons: I'm almost certain there's some prophecy in the Revelation of St. John about this exact situation.

On Facial Hair, or Shaving Ordinances

(Disclaimer: I started writing this post before I saw BCC's similarish post, so please don't get after me for intellectual infringement or anything. kthanx)

Well, it's that time of year when some guys grow out mustaches to raise money for testicular cancer (Movember), some guys finally get that rugged mountain man look they've been going for (Novembeard), and some just realize that they can skip shaving for the month in order to devote more time to studies, Netflix, etc. (No Shave November/Noshember).

As I pondered the power of November on shaving, I was thinking how great it is that any and all church leaders as well as male students here on the BYU-Idaho campus are so clean shaven. After all, a clean shave is the height of professionalism.

Right, Don?

Oh wait, what I meant to say was that a clean shave was the height of professionalism in the 1960s. Looking over the commonly shown pictures of all the LDS Presidents of the Church, you can see that David O. McKay was the first after seven presidents in a row to ditch facial hair. He became president in 1951 and held the office until his death in 1970. His change was perhaps the catalyst for the beardless LDS congregations so prevalent today.

Election Reactions Explained by GIFs

Well it's over, and by now everybody's had time to digest the election results. Liberals are satisfied but not overly confident following a narrow but solid electoral victory. Conservatives are calmly and stoically assessing how to best put forth their ideas as a loyal opposition party...haha, just kidding, everybody's losing their minds on the cusp of four more years under a centrist Democrat /Muslim communist radical president (depending on your perspective). Mine is not to judge whether the more jubilant or apocalyptic election reactions are correct; instead, I seek to describe what I've seen in the most informative and succinct manor I know: animated GIFs. So here it is, my list of of the whos and hows of the 2012 election! For best results, give it a minute to load before scrolling further.

My reaction

Welfare and Charity, God and Government

I want to respond to line of argument I've read many times, most recently here (note: the author was good enough to comment below), about the relationship between charity and welfare, and how that ties in with the role of religion in government. Many conservatives and libertarians oppose government run welfare programs on the grounds that they force individuals to engage in "charitable" giving against their will, thus undermining the entire purpose of charity. The implication is often that supporters of government "charity" do so in lieu of their own actions, forcing a counterfeit charity on the unwilling and congratulating themselves for it. Not only does this undermine agency, the argument goes, it's downright hypocritical!

That type of argument, while cogent, misunderstands the purpose of social welfare as I see it, and also relies on potentially troublesome assumptions about the roles of God and government--assumptions that liberals are often guilty of making as well. I take seriously the injunction to "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's," which I take to mean that earthly affairs of government are separate from the affairs of God. The conflict arises from confusing or mixing the two.

Sometimes the conflict is awesome.

In Fairness: A Post About Obama

In reviewing my additions to this blog, I've realized that, where politics are concerned, I've had a habit of magnifying the faults of conservative issues while largely defending (or, at times, ignoring) those of liberal issues.  I think this has been a result of my own shifting political allegiances; as I've grown more distant from the far-right rhetoric I enjoyed as a teenager, I've taken more issue with it, and as I've developed tentative liberal beliefs I've tried to bolster them.  This is entirely self-serving and biased, of course, but I don't think I've ever been too reserved about that.

In particular, I've been quite kind to the Obama administration.  While I took great pains in pointing out what I didn't like about each of the candidates in the Republican primaries, I gave President Obama a relative tongue-bathing in our recent political roundtable.

Pictured: Journalism