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32 Min Read The Marshall Star for December 20, 2023 Crew-6 Connects with Marshall Team Members During Visit By Celine Smith One week after the 25th anniversary of the International Space Station, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 visited the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center to share their experience during Expedition 69. The event was held Dec. 14 in Building 4316. Expedition 69 began March 2 with Crew-6 flying on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. While aboard the space station, the crew studied the behavior of flames in microgravity, grew cardiac tissue using 3-D culturing, and researched the impact of weightlessness on astronauts’ health. Expedition 69 Crew-6 astronauts smile and hold a banner for a photo with team members from the Human Exploration Development & Operations Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. From left, the astronauts are Sultan Alneyadi, Steven Bowen, Warren “Woody” Hoburg, and Frank Rubio. NASA/Charles Beason NASA astronauts Frank Rubio (flight engineer), Stephen Bowen (flight engineer), Warren “Woody” Hoburg (flight engineer), and UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi (flight engineer) answered questions from Marshall team members after viewing a short film summarizing the research done on Expedition 69. Acting Center Director Joseph Pelfrey welcomed Marshall team members, thanking them and Crew-6 for all the effort that goes into making a mission successful. “As we wrap up 2023, I just want to say how proud I am of our team and all the accomplishments that you have helped us achieve this year,” Pelfrey said. “Crew-6 is going to talk about their amazing experience. Marshall is a part of that experience and mission with the work we do here between Payload Operations, the Environmental Control and Life Support System and payload facilities and our Commercial Crew Program support. This is a great time to hear from our guests and celebrate our successes together.” During the Q&A portion of the event, the audience learned about the strides in research being made on the station. Hoburg discussed the growing of human tissue while on the expedition. “One day Sultan worked on heart muscle cells up there and we actually got to see the cells beating under the microscope,” Hoburg said. “We’re doing work in Low Earth orbit to help people back on Earth with potential heart disease. We also did work with the BioFabrication facility where we 3D-printed biological material. We printed the first-ever section of human meniscus.” The microgravity environment of the station provides crew members with the ability to do more intricate work that cannot be done as well on Earth, Hoburg explained. Expedition 69 is particularly important because it marks the longest time an American astronaut has been in space. The end of the mission concluded Rubio’s 371-day stay in space, which began with Expedition 68. “I was excited to implement lessons learned right away,” Rubio said. “With your first mission, you’re learning. You typically don’t get to implement your better self until years later. I got that opportunity much sooner.” From left, Alneyadi, Hoburg, Bowen, and Rubio answer questions during the Marshall team member Q&A portion of their visit. NASA/Charles Beason Rubio also used his experience to detail the effects of prolonged time in space on the body. “You miss microgravity, in the sense that it’s a lot of fun to just fly around,” he said. “It takes 72 hours to 5 days to fully acclimate to microgravity. After two weeks, you’re completely used to it. When you come back to Earth, there’s a lot of aches and pains because the reality is offloading everything off your joints, especially your spine, feels good – specifically for those who are older. Like, for me, it feels like I’ve run a 5k every time I get up because my feet did nothing for a year, but your body does readjust.” Expedition 69 also marks the first time a UAE astronaut has been to the station. Alneyadi spoke about his unique experience when asked about his participation in a culturally based event. “I was presenting to the whole region, speaking Arabic, discussing the International Space Station, and showcasing the importance of its science,” Alneyadi said. “It was very impactful, and I felt honored to be a part of it as well. I see the impact on the students. They ask a lot of questions and have a lot of excitement.” The event concluded with the opportunity for attendees to get their picture taken with the Crew-6 astronauts. “People are the same everywhere, that’s the basics of humanity,” Bowen said when asked what’s the most exciting thing he’s learned from the international aspect of his work. From our perspective, we can’t see borders — it’s one Earth. At the very intimate singular level, people are people. We’re people, and we’re absolutely capable of doing amazing things.” Learn more about Crew-6. Smith, a Media Fusion employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top Take 5 with Jason Adam By Wayne Smith For Jason Adam, joining NASA wasn’t a career choice. It was a calling. “A calling to push the boundaries of human knowledge, to turn the dreams of a starry-eyed child gazing up at the sky into a reality, and to be a part of humanity’s greatest adventure – the exploration of the universe,” said Adam, who is the manager for the CFM (Cryogenic Fluid Management) Portfolio Project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Jason Adam, manager for the CFM Portfolio Project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, holds a full-size resin model of a Thermodynamic Vent System Injector while standing in front of an Exploration Systems Test Facility within the CFM Laboratory in Building 4205.NASA/Danielle Burleson The project develops key CFM technologies used to acquire, transfer, and store cryogenic fluids in orbit. The project is within STMD (Space Technology Mission Directorate) and develops crucial technologies for STMD and other mission directorates. Adam’s role extends across 12 states and six NASA centers, managing significant contracts and a multitude of complex activities nationwide. Growing up in North Dakota, Adam said he always was captivated by the mysteries of the universe as he studied the night sky. “(I was fascinated) by the endless expanse above, with its twinkling stars and wandering planets, and boundless possibilities,” he said. “This childhood wonder laid the foundation for my journey to NASA. It was here that my dream to explore the cosmos took flight.” Working with projects like CFM enables Adam to live his dream, and he hopes to inspire others as well toward NASA’s mission of exploring the universe for the benefit of all. “Remember your journey at NASA is not just about personal achievements, but also about contributing to the greater goal of exploring and understanding our universe,” he said. “Embrace this opportunity with enthusiasm and a commitment to excellence.” Question: What excites you most about the future of human space exploration and your team’s role it? Adam: Cryogenic fluid management is a critical and exciting area of technology, particularly in relation to the exploration of Mars for several reasons. One of the primary uses of cryogenic fluids in space exploration is as rocket fuel, specifically liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. These cryogenically stored fuels are highly efficient but must be kept at extremely low temperatures. Effective cryogenic fluid management is crucial for months or years-long missions to Mars, as it ensures that the spacecraft has enough fuel for the journey there, operations on the Martian surface, and the return trip. Mars missions are looking into using ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) to generate fuel from Martian resources. For example, water ice from Mars can be processed into liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Managing these cryogenic fluids effectively is essential for this process to be viable, enabling longer and more sustainable missions. Cryogenic fluid management is not only a cornerstone to enable Mars exploration but also a catalyst for broader innovations in space travel and various terrestrial applications. Question: What has been the proudest moment of your career and why? Adam: There have been many proud moments in my 20-plus years at Marshall that originated at Stennis Space Center. Some of those moments include helping the shuttle return to safe flight through testing SSMEs (space shuttle main engines) at Stennis, to flying the Mighty Eagle Lander with a small team in the Marshall West Test Area, to now having the privilege of leading the CFM project with a group of spectacular individuals. In each case, I have been proudest when the team was accountable, authentic, passionate, inclusive, and highly competent. Those are the teams I cherish most and the type of environment I try to create as a leader. Question: Who or what drives/motivates you? Adam: Working at Marshall, my motivation is deeply rooted in the pioneering spirit of technological innovation and the quest for knowledge beyond Earth. Marshall, known for its groundbreaking work in developing systems that push the boundaries of space technology, serves as a constant source of inspiration for me. My drive is fueled by a profound passion for space exploration. The idea of contributing to missions that reach into the unknown, that test the limits of human ingenuity and reveal the mysteries of the cosmos, is what gets me up in the morning. I’m driven by the knowledge that the systems and technologies you’re helping to develop at Marshall will one day make space more accessible and safer for astronauts. This drive isn’t just about the technology itself, it’s about what that technology represents – the human desire to explore, to learn, and to constantly push forward. My motivation comes from wanting to contribute in a meaningful way to this grand endeavor. Each day at Marshall offers a new opportunity to be a part of something larger than yourself – to contribute to a legacy of exploration that benefits not just the present generation but also the future ones. In my role, I’m not just a witness to history in the making; I’m an active participant in shaping it. Question: What advice do you have for employees early in their NASA career or those in new leadership roles? Adam: First, follow your passion. Begin by immersing yourself in a field that truly fascinates you. NASA’s diverse missions span from the depths of the oceans to the far reaches of space, so align your work with what genuinely excites you. This passion will be your driving force and will keep you motivated through challenges. Second, build a strong foundation. Whether your focus is technical, scientific, or administrative, strive to develop a robust base of knowledge and skills. Seek opportunities to learn from different projects and teams. This diverse experience will be invaluable as you progress in your career, providing a well-rounded perspective and a toolkit of solutions. Third, nurture your team. As you advance into leadership roles, remember that your success is intricately linked to the well-being and performance of your team. Invest in understanding their strengths, aspirations, and challenges. Encourage an environment where everyone feels valued and motivated. Strive to create an environment where employees can bring their full self to work. Question: What do you enjoy doing with your time while away from work? Adam: Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my family. My wife and I have three children and two dogs. We like to spend time outdoors and enjoy camping around the region in our camper on some weekends. My wife and I also like to watch our alma mater, North Dakota State University, play football. Smith, a Media Fusion employee and the Marshall Star editor, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top Pamela Bourque Named Chief Counsel at Marshall Pamela Bourque has been named as chief counsel at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. She has served as the center’s acting chief counsel since May, leading Marshall’s Office of the General Counsel team and overseeing the legal practice areas of procurement and contract law, partnerships and agreements, personnel law, ethics, fiscal law, employment law, intellectual property, and litigation. Marshall’s chief counsel is responsible for coordinating a full range of legal operations affecting the center and its organizations. The chief counsel also serves as a senior member of the NASA Office of the General Counsel’s enterprise leadership team. Pamela Bourque, chief counsel at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA From 2022 to April 2023, Bourque was Marshall’s deputy chief counsel, assisting the chief counsel with managing the legal operations of the center. She also supported the NASA legal enterprise on various senior teams, including the Legal Leadership Board, the Ethics Best Practices Working Group, the Deputy Counsel Forum, and participated as a mentor in NASA’s attorney mentoring program. From 2005 to 2022, Bourque was the center’s assistant chief counsel for general law and litigation. She was the functional lead for litigation matters and provided Marshall management with legal advice and representation in the areas of personnel law, federal ethics standards, agreements, and other matters. Under her leadership, Marshall’s Ethics Program was recognized by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics with an Ethics Program Award. From 1993 to 2005, Bourque was an attorney-adviser at Marshall. She has previously served as president of the North Alabama Chapter of the FBA (Federal Bar Association), as well as the chair of FBA’s Labor Law Symposium for multiple years. Bourque has been recognized with numerous NASA awards during her career, including the NASA Office of the General Counsel’s Meritorious Service Award, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, the NASA Silver Achievement Medal, the NASA Space Flight Awareness Launch Honoree Award, the NASA Space Flight Awareness Silver Snoopy Award, the Marshall Engineering Directorate’s Service to Engineering Award, and other performance, on-the-spot, and peer awards. She has been profiled in Women at NASA. A native of Broussard, Louisiana, Bourque is a graduate of the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command’s Leadership Investment for Tomorrow (LIFT-II) Program, the Simmons Executive Leadership for Women/NASA Fellowship at Simmons College, the Department of Defense Mediator Certification Program, and she is currently enrolled in the Leadership of Greater Huntsville’s Connect Emerging Leaders Program. Bourque earned a Juris Doctor degree from Tulane University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she was a senior fellow. She received her honors baccalaureate degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She lives in Madison with her husband, Max Patin. They have two children. › Back to Top Thomas Percy Named Systems Engineering and Integration Manager for Human Landing System Program Thomas Percy has been named as the SE&I (Systems Engineering and Integration) manager for the HLS (Human Landing System) Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The SE&I office oversees the development and verification of requirements, cross-discipline insight into commercial lander providers, and cross-program integration. The HLS SE&I team is also responsible for integration with the Moon to Mars Program in the areas of mission development, general analyses, and requirements management. Thomas Percy, Systems Engineering and Integration manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA/Danielle Burleson Since 2021, Percy has been the deputy SE&I manager for HLS. From 2020 to 2021, he was the integrated performance lead for HLS, managing the team within SE&I responsible for trajectory analysis, environments, performance assessment, mission development, and metric tracking. From 2016 to 2020, Percy was a space systems analyst prior to his role as chief architect of the Advanced Concepts Office at Marshall, where he supported the formulation of the HLS Program as well as transportation architecture studies for human Mars missions and the development of various robotic spacecraft concepts. Prior to joining NASA in 2016, Percy spent 13 years working in private industry at SAIC as a section manager and support contractor to Marshall and Johnson Space Center. He also was a part-time instructor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville off and on from 2006-2021. His honors include a NASA Group Achievement Award: Human Landing System Source Evaluation Panel; NASA Exceptional Service medal; NASA Silver Achievement Medal Group: Human Landing System Source Evaluation Panel; and a NASA Group Achievement Award: Mars Basis of Comparison Reference Team. A native of Easton, Massachusetts, Percy received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, a master’s in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and a doctorate in aerospace systems engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He and his wife, Erin, live in Madison. They have three children. › Back to Top Mission Success is in Our Hands: Chelsi Cassilly Mission Success is in Our Hands is a safety initiative collaboration between NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Jacobs. As part of the initiative, eight Marshall team members are featured in new testimonial banners placed around the center. This is the second in a Marshall Star series profiling team members featured in the testimonial banners. Chelsi Cassilly is a planetary protection microbiologist working for Jacobs at Marshall, where she’s been for almost three years. A native of Tennessee, she previously worked at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, as a postdoctoral fellow prior to joining Jacobs. She’s a graduate of Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology, and of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned a doctoral degree in microbiology. Chelsi Cassilly is a planetary protection microbiologist working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA/Charles Beason “It’s an honor and privilege to work for Jacobs and NASA,” Cassilly said. “I look forward to work every single day and consider myself exceptionally blessed with this opportunity I’ve been afforded.” Question: What are some of your key responsibilities? Cassilly: I support many different projects at Marshall. Primarily I help projects implement planetary protection. This includes the Mars Ascent Vehicle, which is part of the Mars Sample Retrieval Lander; a mission concept for a Europa Lander; and the lunar Human Landing System. I also manage the Planetary Protection Lab at Marshall, which is a fully functional biosafety level 2 lab. Funded by multiple sources, including NASA ROSES (Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science), Marshall Cooperative Agreement Notices, Marshall Technical Excellence funding, and Jacobs Innovation Grants, I have both completed and continue to support multiple smaller experiments to determine microbial abundance within materials as well as sterilization methods. Question: How does your work support the safety and success of NASA and Marshall missions? Cassilly: NASA missions must meet the requirements laid out by headquarters. One subset of requirements on some missions is planetary protection, that is, preventing forward and backward microbial contamination. Marshall is involved with several missions where there are planetary protection requirements to meet. I help the center interpret and implement techniques to meet the requirements. I am currently the only point of contact for this discipline at Marshall, so I take seriously the responsibility of helping engineers understand unfamiliar terminology while also ensuring we are compliant with requirements, therefore helping achieve the goals of our missions. Question: What does the Mission Success is in Our Hands initiative mean to you? Cassilly: It means that success is personal. It means every single one of us can contribute in large ways to mission success simply by being ethical and maintaining our integrity as workers and as individuals. Question: How can we work together better to achieve mission success? Cassilly: We can support one another by encouraging safety, ethics, a culture of learning, ownership, and integrity within our teams. We can foster an environment where ownership is lauded and correction is not seen as negative, but rather as learning opportunities and areas of improvement. Benchmarking such progress of both individuals and teams, using mistakes and problems to propel us forward, will serve to strengthen teams, develop a sense of pride in our collective mission, and provide clear trajectory for our long-term efforts and goals. › Back to Top I am Artemis: Bruce Askins Growing up, Bruce Askins was passionate about space and oceanography. His desire to explore other worlds always made him want to be an astronaut. Though he did not become an astronaut, Askins has built a 42-year career at NASA, and, as the infrastructure management lead for NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) Program at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Askins is an integral part for the next generation of explorers. Askins and his team are the gatekeepers and protectors of data and responsible for both cyber- security and physical security for the SLS Program. Under Askins’ leadership, his team ensures all data is stored properly, that information about the rocket shared outside NASA is done with proper data markings, and access is given to those that need it. Bruce Askins is the infrastructure management lead for NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) Program at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center.NASA/Sam Lott Askins wasn’t always familiar with the world of infrastructure and cyber security. As a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Askins began his career as part of NASA’s internship program. He considered himself imaginative, or “creatively driven,” which is why Askins originally pursued a career at NASA. “I always loved the design aspect of my early position in special test equipment,” Askins says. “Back then I drew everything by hand with a pencil before eventually transitioning to computers.” His creativity and interest in underwater worlds, along with his scuba diver certification, led him to have a hand in designing early test elements for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. At the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, a former underwater training facility at Marshall, Askins interacted with a crew of astronauts supporting Hubble and designed the flight simulation hardware used for crew training on the Canadarm2 robotic arm that is still a part of the International Space Station today. Askins has been a part of the NASA family for almost half a century and is thrilled to be a part of the next era of space exploration to the Moon under Artemis. “To explore is one of the greatest things that we can all do, and with the Artemis Generation the sky’s the limit,” Askins said. SLS is part of NASA’s backbone for deep space exploration, along with the Orion spacecraft, advanced spacesuits and rovers, the Gateway in orbit around the Moon, and commercial human landing systems. SLS is the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts, and supplies to the Moon in a single launch. › Back to Top NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video from Deep Space via Laser NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video on Dec. 11 from a record-setting 19 million miles away (or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance). The milestone is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space – enabling future human missions beyond Earth orbit. “This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions.” Members of the DSOC (Deep Space Optical Communications) team react to the first high-definition streaming video to be sent via laser from deep space Dec. 11 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Sent by the DSOC transceiver aboard the Psyche spacecraft nearly 19 million miles from Earth, the video features a cat named Taters.NASA/JPL-Caltech The demo transmitted the 15-second test video via a cutting-edge instrument called a flight laser transceiver. The video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 Mbps (megabits per second). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent “live” to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time. Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, a NASA technology demonstration riding aboard the Psyche space craft, is using advanced laser communication technology to transmit large amounts of data back to earth. DSOC is the latest in a series of optical communication demonstrations funded by the agency’s TDM (Technology Demonstration Missions) program office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “We just demonstrated a highly advanced data transmission capability that will play an instrumental role in NASA’s boldest missions to deep space, and it shows that DSOC is functioning successfully in a relevant environment,” said Tawnya Laughinghouse, manager of the TDM program office at Marshall. “Streaming an ultra-high definition video from millions of miles away in deep space is no small feat.” The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA’s Psyche mission Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet’s greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars. “One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.” Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. This 15-second clip shows the first ultra-high-definition video sent via laser from deep space, featuring a cat named Taters chasing a laser with test graphics overlayed. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) “Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL’s DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology – everyone loves Taters.” There’s also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online. This latest milestone comes after “first light” was achieved on Nov. 14. Since then, the system has demonstrated faster data downlink speeds and increased pointing accuracy during its weekly checkouts. On the night of Dec. 4, the project demonstrated downlink bit rates of 62.5 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 267 Mbps, which is comparable to broadband internet download speeds. The team was able to download a total of 1.3 terabits of data during that time. As a comparison, NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus downlinked 1.2 terabits during its entire mission from 1990 to 1994. “When we achieved first light, we were excited, but also cautious. This is a new technology, and we are experimenting with how it works,” said Ken Andrews, project flight operations lead at JPL. “But now, with the help of our Psyche colleagues, we are getting used to working with the system and can lock onto the spacecraft and ground terminals for longer than we could previously. We are learning something new during each checkout.” The Deep Space Optical Communications demonstration is the latest in a series of optical communication demonstrations funded by the TDM program under NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and supported by NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program within the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. JPL is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Psyche is the 14th mission selected as part of NASA’s Discovery Program under the Science Mission Directorate, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center, managed the launch service. Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, provided the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis. › Back to Top NASA Geologist Paves Way for Building on the Moon By Jessica Barnett For many at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, a love – be it for space, science, or something else – drew them to the career they’re in today. For geologist Jennifer Edmunson, there were multiple reasons. Her love for geology dates back to her childhood in Arizona, playing in the mud, fascinated by the green river rocks she would find and how they fit together. As she grew older, her love for astronomy led her to study the regolith and geology of the Moon and Mars in graduate school. Jennifer Edmunson, geologist and MMPACT project manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.NASA That, in turn, led her to Marshall for her post-doctorate, where she studied how shock processes from meteorite impacts potentially affect scientists’ work to determine the age of rocks using different radioisotope systems. On her first day, she needed help from the center’s IT department, which is how she met Joel Miller, the man she now calls her husband. “I met him on April Fools’ Day, and he asked me out on Friday the 13th,” Edmunson recalled. “I knew I needed to get a stable job, so I got a job as the junior geologist on the simulant team here at Marshall. That was back in 2009.” Fourteen years later, they still work at Marshall. He’s now the center’s acting spectrum manager, and she manages the MMPACT (Moon-to-Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technology) project. Through MMPACT, Marshall is working with commercial partners and academia to develop and test robotic technology that will one day use lunar soil and 3-D printing technology to build structures on the Moon. “It’s phenomenal to see the development of the different materials we’ve been working on,” Edmunson said. “We started with this whole array of materials, and now we’re like, ‘OK, what’s the best one for our proof of concept?’” NASA aims for a proof-of-concept mission to validate the technology and capability by the end of this decade. This mission would involve traveling to the Moon to create a representative element of a landing pad. MMPACT aims to build lunar infrastructure using the materials readily available on the Moon. This process, known as in-situ resource utilization, allows NASA engineers to use lunar regolith, fine-grained silicate minerals thought to be available in a layer between 10 to 70 feet deep on the lunar surface, to build different structures and infrastructure elements. Marshall geologist and MMPACT project manager Jennifer Edmunson, fourth from right, joined several other scientists for a trip to Stillwater, Montana, earlier this year. Stillwater is known to have rocks like those found on the Moon.NASA However, regolith can’t be used like cement here on Earth, as it wouldn’t solidify in the low-pressure environment. So, Edmunson and her team are now looking at microwaves and laser technology to heat the regolith to create solid building materials. After successfully building a full-scale landing pad on the Moon, MMPACT will likely focus on a vertical structure, like a garage, habitat, or safe haven for astronauts. “The possibilities are endless,” she said. “There is so much potential for using different materials for different applications. There’s just a wealth of opportunity for anyone who wants to play in the field, really.” Edmunson hopes to get more lunar regolith first, as NASA is still working with samples from the Apollo missions and simulants based on those samples. She’s also looking forward to Artemis bringing back samples from different parts of the lunar surface because it will provide her team with a wider pool of regolith samples to analyze. “We want to learn more about different locations on the Moon,” she said. “We have to understand the differences and how that might affect our processes.” Knowing this will make it easier not just to build landing pads and habitats but to build roadways and the start of a lunar economy, Edmunson said. Some minerals are rare on Earth but abundant on the Moon. To study how those minerals could be used for building, scientists rely on simulants, like the synthetic anorthite pictured here.NASA “I want there to be sufficient structures there to make things safe for crew, so if we want to build a hotel on the Moon, we could,” she said. “We could have tourists going there, mining districts pulling rare Earth elements from the Moon. We could do that and get a lot of resources that way. I want science to progress, things like building a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon. I want more information on more of the different sites around the Moon, so we can get a be`tter understanding of how the Moon formed and the history of the Moon. We’ve only scratched the surface there.” There are parts of the Moon that can only be explored in detail by visiting in person, Edmunson explained, and she’s excited to be working at Marshall as that exploration is made possible. “It’s awesome to be part of this. Honestly, it’s the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” she said. “I was born in ’77, so I missed the Apollo lunar landings. I would love to see humans on the Moon in my lifetime, and on Mars would just be amazing.” Her advice is simple to anyone considering a career like hers: Just go for it. “A lot of it comes down to passion and tenacity,” she said. “If you really love what you do and you get to do it every day, you find more enjoyment in your career. I feel like I’m making a difference, and with surface construction at such an infant kind of stage right now, I feel like it’s a contribution that will last for a very long time.” Barnett, a Media Fusion employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top Sprightly Stars Illuminate ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’ A new image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights. NGC 2264 is, in fact, a cluster of young stars – with ages between about one and five million years old – in our Milky Way about 2,500 light-years away from Earth. The stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and larger than the Sun, ranging from some with less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing about seven solar masses. This new image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights.X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: T.A. Rector (NRAO/AUI/NSF and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA) and B.A. Wolpa (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA); Infrared: NASA/NSF/IPAC/CalTech/Univ. of Massachusetts; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & J.Major This new composite image enhances the resemblance to a Christmas tree through choices of color and rotation. The blue and white lights (which blink in the animated version of this image) are young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Optical data from the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak shows gas in the nebula in green, corresponding to the “pine needles” of the tree, and infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars in white. This image has been rotated clockwise by about 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upward, so that it appears like the top of the tree is toward the top of the image. Young stars, like those in NGC 2264, are volatile and undergo strong flares in X-rays and other types of variations seen in different types of light. The coordinated, blinking variations shown in this animation, however, are artificial, to emphasize the locations of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree. In reality, the variations of the stars are not synchronized. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video This composite image shows the Christmas Tree Cluster. The blue and white lights (which blink in the animated version of this image) are young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Optical data from the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak shows gas in the nebula in green, corresponding to the “pine needles” of the tree, and infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars in white. This image has been rotated clockwise by about 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upward, so that it appears like the top of the tree is toward the top of the image. The variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes. Some of these are related to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares like those undergone by the Sun – but much more powerful – and hot spots and dark regions on the surfaces of the stars that go in and out of view as the stars rotate. There can also be changes in the thickness of gas obscuring the stars, and changes in the amount of material still falling onto the stars from disks of surrounding gas. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts. › Back to Top NASA’s 3D-printed Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine Test a Success NASA has achieved a new benchmark in developing an innovative propulsion system called the Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE). Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center successfully tested a novel, 3D-printed RDRE for 251 seconds (or longer than four minutes), producing more than 5,800 pounds of thrust. That kind of sustained burn emulates typical requirements for a lander touchdown or a deep-space burn that could set a spacecraft on course from the Moon to Mars, said Marshall combustion devices engineer Thomas Teasley, who leads the RDRE test effort at the center. Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center conduct a successful, 251-second hot fire test of a full-scale Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine combustor in fall 2023, achieving more than 5,800 pounds of thrust.NASA RDRE’s first hot fire test was performed at Marshall in the summer of 2022 in partnership with In Space LLC and Purdue University, both of Lafayette, Indiana. That test produced more than 4,000 pounds of thrust for nearly a minute. The primary goal of the latest test, Teasley noted, is to better understand how to scale the combustor to different thrust classes, supporting engine systems of all types and maximizing the variety of missions it could serve, from landers to upper stage engines to supersonic retropropulsion, a deceleration technique that could land larger payloads – or even humans – on the surface of Mars. Test stand video captured at Marshall shows ignition of a full-scale Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine combustor, which was fired for a record 251 seconds and achieved more than 5,800 pounds of thrust. (NASA) “The RDRE enables a huge leap in design efficiency,” he said. “It demonstrates we are closer to making lightweight propulsion systems that will allow us to send more mass and payload further into deep space, a critical component to NASA’s Moon to Mars vision.” Engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Venus Aerospace of Houston, Texas, are working with Marshall to identify how to scale the technology for higher performance. RDRE is managed and funded by the Game Changing Development Program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. › Back to Top

#space #astronomy #news #science

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73ironath · 2 years ago

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THE PLAN OF OUR FATHER FOR US I am confident that many of us have made plans ahead of our future and family to be stage by stage and the activities therein until we arrive. Such stage to stage our FATHER has done too. And His plan stages are: 1. Premortal 2. Mortal 3. Postmortal In the premortal, we were taught lessons. D&C 138:56. These lessons are productive life-spiritual skills, which is highest of all. Other talents and gift we also developed and it was the spiritual talents that made them to be effective. NOW, in the plans we have, is there room to develop, improve our spiritual gifts for ourselves, come children and our friends committed to us? If not, then our plans do not have base to kick off. Everything were created spiritually before it became natural. Moses 3:5 In His plans, some of us will have infirmities that we may experience his handiwork. John 9:1-4; some marry early/late; some give birth early/late. Luke 1; some lose their infants and at any age. On the case of infants, Joseph Smith said: "I have meditated upon the subject, and asked the question, why it is that infants, innocent children, are taken away from us, especially those that seem to be the most intelligent and interesting. The strongest reasons that present themselves to my mind are these: This world is a very wicked world; and it … grows more wicked and corrupt. … The Lord takes many away, even in infancy, that they may escape the envy of man, and the sorrows and evils of this present world; they were too pure, too lovely, to live on earth; therefore, if rightly considered, instead of mourning we have reason to rejoice as they are delivered from evil, and we shall soon have them again. …" Teachings of Joseph Smith chapter 14. While there, we agreed to the trials when we come to earth as the Lord said: "we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them" Abraham 3:25 With the acceptance of Christ and his ordinances; repentance, effect and application of his atonement and enduring to the end, our postmortal to be with the FATHER is assured. These knowledge will quench our much complaint in life. https://www.instagram.com/p/CpkV2P0Ay6e/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“Girls’ schools promoted an intense female peer culture which contrasted with the disciplines of moralistic home environments. Evidence from the accounts of girls attending the myriad female seminaries and girls’ boarding schools throughout the Northeast suggests that their academic programs were relatively gentle, and that their peer culture was powerful and often fun. Despite the best efforts of outnumbered teachers, relations with friends tended to overshadow lessons learned. Overwhelmingly when girls wrote home to their parents, they described the girls they had met, and the antics they had shared; in diaries they noted the romantic intimacies they had formed, with academic work generating only occasional mention.

Girls’ peer life at school was high-spirited, collective, and ritualized all at once. Teachers themselves often participated. At Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1860, teachers organized a costume party, suggested characters for everyone, and helped sew costumes—perhaps in part a sewing lesson. (For Lily Dana, suggestions included an elf, Mischief, or a witch.) At a Prospect Hill School party in 1882, townspeople came, the girls wore flowers and white dresses, and Margaret Tileston reported that she had done the quadrille with Miss Clarke and the gallop with Miss Tuxbury—concluding that she had had ‘‘a very nice time.’’

Girls remembering their days at convent schools report similar good times. Julia Sloane Spalding recalled elegiacally her years at Nazareth Academy, a school run by the Sisters of Charity in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1850s. ‘‘The sisters allowed us to romp and play, dance and sing as we pleased and our stage performances were amusing, if they had no greater merit. Musical soirees, concerts, serenades and minstrelsy kept our spirits attuned to gladness. Varied by picnics, lawn parties, hayrides, phantom parties, nutting parties in summer and candy pullings and fancy balls with Nazareth’s colored band to fiddle.’’

Exclaimed Spalding, ‘‘O what fun!’’ in fond reflection on the good times among the sisters who served ‘‘good substantial sandwiches, cakes and fruit’’ from ‘‘great big baskets.’’ She concluded, ‘‘and so, the spice of life conduced to our health and happiness.’’ Mary Anne Murphy arrived at Nazareth Academy with her sister in 1859 during a quadrille, the slave musicians calling out the figures. She and her sister stood in ‘‘wonderment that such fun was tolerated in a convent.’’ Whatever the nostalgia of middle age, certainly these reflections suggest that elite Catholic and Protestant girls’ academies left some of their richest memories in collective fun.

If teachers sponsored some activities, they implicitly sanctioned many more. Wilfrida Hogan attended the Sisters of St. Joseph convent school in St. Paul in the 1870s and remembers fondly her class, which was known for its lively irreverence: ‘‘Each girl seemed to view the other as to who could play the biggest pranks, or have the most fun.’’

Ellen Emerson overflowed with delight in a letter to her mother (significantly, not her father) while at Miss Sedgwick’s School in Lenox, Massachusetts: ‘‘Every night we do things which it seems to me I can never remember without laughing if I should live to be a hundred. The most absurd concerts, ludicrous charades, peculiar battles etc. etc. Then the wildest frolics, the loudest shrieks, the most boisterous rolling and tumbling that eye ever saw, ear ever heard or heart ever imagined. I consider myself greatly privileged that every night I can see and join such delightful romps.’’

When teachers were around, the pranks were more likely to occur upstairs in student bedrooms. Lily Dana and friends joined together to victimize two other girls by putting crumbs in their bed, and cutting off candle wicks. Another evening Dana noted that she ‘‘Had some fun throwing pillows and nightgowns,’’ and though Miss Porter caught her, it did not seem to dampen much her spirits. Teachers at girls’ schools were occasion- ally disciplinarians, clearly.

One teacher told Lily Dana that ‘‘she supposed my mother let me do everything,’’ and the sisters at St. Mary’s Academy in South Bend, Indiana, turned the piano to the wall in order to keep girls from waltzing with each other. Yet students often emerged victorious; at St. Mary’s they played combs for dance music instead. (One participant reported that ‘‘the Sisters had to give up, for they knew not what to do.’’) The ideology of nurture combined with the shared exuberance of age mates overpowered much teacherly remonstrance.

It is sometimes hard to read such tales of schoolgirl exuberance without wondering whether the inmates had taken over the asylum, however, so a corrective is in order. One such account which requires a second look is the spirited account of Agnes Repplier, In Our Convent Days (1906), about her time in the late 1860s at a Pennsylvania school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Repplier writes of the pranks and passions of her band of seven partners in crime, in an ebulliant account designed to appeal to a readership newly attracted to childhood naughtiness in revolt against Victorian propriety. It is clear in retrospect, though, that she must have concealed or minimized an- other side to her experiences. For the denouement of her story is her expulsion and removal from a school she adored.

Peer cultures could also be cruel and hurtful beyond the control of evangelical teachers, as the practices of hazing in British public schools testify. Some of the most painful memories of inclusion and exclusion in girls’ schools centered around that most primal of media, the sharing of food. Food boxes, customarily sent from home, were the occasion for impromptu parties, a demonstration of wealth and taste, or an opportunity to play favorites.

The elation which greeted such arrivals might well prove a commentary on the regular fare at boarding schools, which sometimes undoubtedly was very poor. (The advice giver Mary Virginia Terhune’s critique of girls’ boarding schools included the accusation that they fed their students from a ‘‘common vat’’ which supplied breakfast, dinner, and supper all together, a practice partially confirmed by one account of eating the same stew at least twice a day at an Ursuline academy in San Antonio in the 1890s.)

At any rate, the arrival of food from home occasioned select gatherings and provided opportunities for discrimination among friends. When one friend’s mother brought good things to eat, Josie Tilton noted that ‘‘we’’ had a feast tonight, explaining for the future who she would always mean when she said ‘‘we’’—‘‘Lizzie, Emma, May and I’’— the groupness secured by inclusion in this select group of diners.

Lily Dana suspected a friend of being miserly and so snuck into her room to inspect. ‘‘There was a box which had been filled with cake, part of a pie and several other things filling her trunk nearly half full. . . . If I had a box sent to me I think I should give my friend more than ‘five or six cookies.’’’ If girls could feel short-changed by each other, relations with parents could also strain over the sending of food boxes, which represented extremely conspicuous con- sumption for girls attempting to ‘‘belong.’’

In an unusually direct letter home in the 1840s, Maria Nellis passed on to her parents her unmediated hurt and sense of disadvantage in the competition for food—and the status that came with it. Elizabeth got her box yesterday and was favoured with six times more things than I was. Her box was so large and heavy the master found it his match to carry it upstairs. She has 4 kinds of cake, nuts, apples, candy, clothing and every thing else, but after all, Dear Poppy, I am not jealous. . . . When you sent that box you did not send half what I asked. I was very disappointed. You said it would be eatables, but it wasn’t. You sent only a few apples, one cake and some clothes. Why didn’t you send me some nuts? I haven’t had a nut yet this winter, and indeed I expected nuts above all things. E. Fox had a box worth speaking of. Now that shows that you don’t care enough for me to even send me a few nuts.

Intermittently, Nellis regained control, but her grievance was palpable. Finally at the end, she acknowledged to her parents that she might be hurting their feelings, reassured them that she loved them all with ‘‘a deep and fervent love,’’ and promised better behavior in the future. Clearly at stake for her was both status in the school world and a primitive sense of deprivation in her own family.

As the correspondence suggests, the emotional atmosphere in girls’ boarding schools was not only intense but more expressive and enacted than that within moralistic, Victorian households. Within private, female, boarding academies, duty-bound Victorian daughters learned languages of sentiment, desire, and emotional excess censored from other parts of their lives. The elaborate conventions accompanying the expression and affirmation of affection among boarding-school girls, sometimes involving teachers as well, was indeed a separate ‘‘female world of love and ritual,’’ as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg affirmed in a classic article about nineteenth-century women’s culture.

In recent years, Smith-Rosenberg’s ‘‘Female World of Love and Ritual’’ has been attacked for its overgeneralizing characterization of an exclusively female emotional sphere in the nineteenth century, but her strongest evidence confirms the significance, the power, and the longevity of girls’ boarding school friendships, which were enacted through elaborate rituals in a range of schools.

The rituals of boarding school life centered around the making and breaking of special friendships, known variously as ‘‘affinities,’’ ‘‘specials,’’ or ‘‘darlings’’ and increasingly as either ‘‘smashes’’ or ‘‘crushes.’’ One way of expressing interest was to ‘‘filipine’’ with someone, to leave her a surprise gift outside her door. (When Lily Dana was caught, she needed to give her gift, a large apple, outright.) Such relationships played out in diaries, letters, and the poetry of autograph books. Girls expected to pair up for many school activities and entertained a variety of ‘‘dates’’ with different girls for walking, going to church, and sleeping.

Sally Dana wrote home to her mother explaining that she was following her father’s advice not to form special friendships too soon, and so had ‘‘slept in eight different beds.’’ During these private moments, girls would share secrets about their own likes and dislikes, each other, their teachers, families, and their school lives. The intricacy of such social calendars opened ample opportunities for misunderstanding and frayed feelings.

These peer relationships characterized elite female seminaries in the North- east, but they also appeared in a range of schools, including the African American Scotia Seminary, founded by the American Missionary Association in Concord, North Carolina, following the Civil War. Scotia had northern roots, which may have influenced its student culture. Glenda Gilmore tells us it was modeled on Mount Holyoke, and was ‘‘calculated to give students the knowledge, social consciousness, and sensibilities of New England ladies, with a strong dose of Boston egalitarianism sprinkled in.’’

Roberta Fitzgerald went to Scotia in the early twentieth century and kept a composition book, likely in 1902, which was filled with the talismans of schoolgirl crushes. A note inside addressed to ‘‘Dear Roberta’’ asked, ‘‘Will you please exchang rings with me today and you may ware mine again,’’ and Roberta herself wrote a sad poem to a friend ‘‘Lu’’ who had thrown her over.

And so you see as I am deemed

Most silently to wait

I cannot but be womanlike

And meekly await my fate.

Ah! sweet it is to love a girl

But truly oh! how bitter

To love a girl with all your heart

And then to hear ‘‘Cant get her.’’

And Lulu dear as I must here

Relinquish with a moan

May your joys be as deep as the ocean

And your sorrow as light as its foam.

On the back of the notebook, which also contained class assignments, was a confidence exchanged with a seatmate. ‘‘I was teasing Bess Hoover about you and she told me she loved you dearly.’’

For those much in demand, this charged atmosphere of flirtation and intimacy in the North and South represented an exhilarating round of fun and sport. For those less secure, diaries and letters presented an obvious outlet for the anguish of the neglected. Agnes Hamilton, a member of a Fort Wayne clan which sent several daughters to boarding school on their way to prominent careers in progressive America, experienced some of both. Sometimes she basked in the glow of family reputation; often she worried over her own inability to keep up with her illustrious cousins. Her unusually detailed accounts document an entire school culture rather than just an individual emotional life.

Hamilton’s first impressions of school social life at Miss Porter’s School were favorable, but even these revealed insecurities to come. In an entry from November 1886, when she was seventeen, Hamilton noted that ‘‘Farmington is just as perfect as they all said it would be, the girls, Miss Porter, and all.’’ Her reservation had to do with her own imperfections: ‘‘But I don’t think I am the right sort of a Farmington girl.’’ Even so, Agnes was in demand, describing a flurry of close attentions from numerous girls. A week later, in her cousin’s absence, she received displaced attentions:

Yesterday Mannie was very nice to me. I suppose she thinks I am lonely without Alice. We walked past the fill around by the river to the graveyard. Then she came in and we talked for an hour. All evening we were together. This afternoon we walked together too for Tuesday is her day with Alice. We went down to the green house where Mannie gave me some lovely roses. I would give anything to know what she thinks of me. . . . Will I ever be able to talk and be jolly as other girls? Some girls are frightfully stupid and yet they can make themselves somewhat agreeable. I have struck up a sudden friendship with Lena Farnam. We were together Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday I asked her to be my church girl in Alice’s place.

Agnes was still in a position to be picky, noting one drawback: Lena ‘‘seems very nice indeed but I wish she were not only fifteen.’’ Lena was far from the only prospect. Agnes noted another new friend: ‘‘I have seen a great deal lately of Edith Trowbridge too. When she overcomes her shyness she will be exceedingly nice.’’ Not surprisingly, with all the intensity of the socializing, Agnes mentioned with no comment that only three out of thirteen in the class were prepared for their lessons that Tuesday. In those early weeks, Agnes Hamilton’s enthusiasm for this exciting life of emotional intrigue was palpable. The next week (she seems to have written on Tuesdays), Agnes announced to her diary ‘‘the jolliest crush in school’’ involving one of her very own intimates of the week before.

‘‘I walked with Edith Trowbridge this afternoon, on purpose to have her tell me about Lena. I hinted and hinted in vain. I told her about every other crush in school but she never said a word about Lena’s, so at last I told her that I knew all about it but even then she would not say a word about the subject. I hope she will tell Lena so that she will speak to me about it next Saturday when we are driving.’’ The triangulation of such relationships increased the possibilities for intrigue. Agnes wearied a bit of the uncooperative Edith, though, observing that though ‘‘very nice . . . she did not get over her stiffness.’’

Agnes Hamilton seemed to be trying to do her schoolwork, but her roller- coaster social life intervened. One day when she was preparing for class, a friend came by to teach her a dance step, from which she was interrupted by the arrival of a buggy she had rented to take another friend for a ride, the same girl whose ‘‘jolly’’ crush had amused her the week before. (‘‘The more I see of her the better I like,’’ she now reported. ‘‘Her face is rather attractive at first and then it grows on one.’’) When she returned, she found another visitor who stayed till it was time for tea.

The result: ‘‘I have not looked at my Mental since Thursday.’’ By the end of the same day, yet a new ‘‘crush’’ had taken over when Agnes got word of someone’s interest in her, and Agnes wondered ‘‘if I have ever been as actively happy.’’ The frenzy had settled down a week later, when Agnes announced that she had all her walking days ‘‘just as I want them.’’ Each day of the week was assigned a different companion, with whom Agnes would exchange intimacies and gossip, using the rituals of girls’ school life to structure its emotional extravagance.

One must conclude that the intensity of the social life was seen to serve some purpose, for evidence suggests that it was allowed to flourish until the turn of the century. (Lily Dana noted that Miss Porter’s permission had been sought for at least one and probably more sleeping dates.) At that time, new sexualized interpretations of girls’ and women’s friendships brought a crackdown on such friendships. At the time, though, they appear to have received official sanction. In fact, one of the first of Ladies’ Home Journal ’s ‘‘Side Talks with Girls’’ took up the question of ‘‘School Girl Friendships.’’ The Journal endorsed such girlish relationships for their innocence and energy and their precious brevity, saluting ‘‘the giddy, gushing period’’ as one which ‘‘never comes to some and to most it soon passes.’’

In particular, it contrasted this girlish spontaneity with the superficiality of the jaded young lady. Its contrast of ‘‘young girls, lively, radiant, energetic, spirited, loving girls’’ with ‘‘young ladies who talk of their beaux, dresses and the surface shows of society’’ represented another version of a conventional warning against precociousness. Girls’ crushes on other girls were still perceived as innocent and healthy—and would be well after doctors first began to cast suspicion over such relationships in the 1880s and 1890s.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Competitive Practices: Sentiment and Scholarship in Secondary Schools.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#victorian #history #education #sexuality #american #jane h. hunter #how young ladies became girls

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messymormonmission · 3 years ago

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the discussion routine

If someone let you in, and you had between 30 minutes and an hour, you could do a Discussion (this was 1995). A lesson. There were six, we were supposed to do them in order. I guess it's more flexible now.

There was all the introductions stuff, where are you from, where are we from (Building a Relationship of Trust) and then finding a place to sit. Almost everyone had their TV on, we were to have them turn it off to keep the vibe fresh, to Allow the Spirit. Sometimes they kept it on, sometimes to keep the kids occupied, and we were like, 'but surely this fascinating church lesson will capture their interest as much as the PowerPuff Girls' which again shows how much we knew. Screens were distracting for me, I loved them and missed them so much. I remember one night talking to a guy while his kid watched Space Ghost Coast to Coast, I didn’t get a lot out of that talk.

Elder Me: Can we start with a prayer?

Almost no one said no. At least among Latinx folks, prayer was a General Good, they were generally housebroken Christianity-wise. It didn’t always fit the situation, though. I had comps that would try to wedge it in even if it didn’t. My approach was to try to and make as smooth of transitions as possible, no fuss no muss. Some companions would stomp in and lay down the law of Mormonism wherever they went – do things right, in order, as we say to do them. There's probably merit to this approach – it could prepare them for what they would experience a lot in the church. I leaned towards a smoother ride if possible, to reduce the chances of being let out early, seeking out potential bumps in the road.

Principle 1 - Elder Me: Like most people, we believe in God.

My mission had us memorize the discussions. I was Spanish-speaking, so I did it in Spanish. It was doable. It took time, but was something I have to admit the mission taught me - I could memorize, with time and effort. We were supposed to deliver them word-for-word. They were designed as a logical argument, a spiritual sales presentation, to build people towards a series of commitments.

Elder Me: We’re God’s children. He’s our father in heaven and created us in his image.

Lots of nodding.

Elder Me: He wants us to be like him and has prepared a plan to bring us joy in this life and a way to make it possible to live with him forever. He wants us to be happy. [End of my first part. I turn to my companion.]

Each discussion has principles – about 6, and we would switch between companions. After each principle you testify to the truthfulness of that principle, your companion testifies of the same thing, then starts his. In the mouth of 2-3 witnesses.

Elder Companion: I also know God lives…

There were specific things we were supposed to get people to do along the way, commitments – reading, praying, getting baptized. Here’s the first discussion:

God’s plan [I just did this]

Jesus [Elder C. will do this]

Prophets

Joseph Smith

Book of Mormon Commitment – read the Intro, a chapter, and a few verses near the end

Holy Ghost Commitment - Pray to see if Joseph Smith was a prophet Commitment - Maybe someday get baptized Commitment - Listen to another discussion

In my Spanish copy of the discussions, there is a pasted-in piece of paper saying “WHY THE BAPTISMAL CHALLENGE? It’s the Lord’s Will!!!” This meant, ask them to get baptized in the first discussion. First discussion. Yup. This probably came from a mission conference where they talked about how anyone who didn’t ask people to be baptized during the first discussion was a weak missionary, needed to repent, didn’t have faith that God could perform miracles in these latter days. That our Savior Jesus, were he to be on a mission with us, would be asking people to get baptized in their first discussion, because he was always asking people to make huge commitments, without even using the commitment pattern, because that’s his commitment pattern was like a huge aura that covered blocks in every direction and if we could just be more like him we could get people to be Mormons the first time we met them. What is not figured into that argument is, we were not Jesus. What is figured back in is, yeah but we should and could be, duh.

A theme of my mission was anger about things mission leaders (both the president and kids my age) said were true, that weren't, that were likely youthful enthusiasms pushed onto others because they had power, because they'd been Called of God, that I fought with internally because laughing at them felt like heresy. I wanted them to be true, even if they weren't. I wanted to believe what they believed. I wasn't old enough to see it for what it was, whatever it was. Youthful enthusiasms. My brain didn't call shenanigans when it should've (*1).

TBM Me interjects: Ha! That’s a perfect example of how you actually had the Holy Ghost and they didn’t because you’d been baptized and they hadn’t! [Finds a book and slams it shut.] It’s all true, case closed!

Logic Me: I want to buy windows when someone is in the house selling me windows but when they leave I usually don’t want the windows any more. That’s why salespeople try as much as humanly possible to get the sale when they’re around. The chance of you calling them back later is very low. I don’t think it’s a spiritual thing. I think it’s a ‘people can make you feel things’ thing.

Back to the discussions. In the first discussion, which I did maybe 7-8 times a week on a good week, here was the mood from most investigators [the person we were teaching]:

God’s plan - sure

Jesus - ok

Prophets - hmmm

Joseph Smith – oh, yeah gimme some of this.

Book of Mormon – seriously doubt

Holy Ghost – and we’re back but what was that book thing?

The Spirit (*2) was strongest when we talked about Joseph Smith. What we share is that he was a confused kid about religion who went and prayed and God said, hey, how about you start a church because everyone else has it wrong.

Almost every time, it set the mood. We didn’t talk about his wives or dishonesty. But if we were going to commit people to stuff we should have done it there. We had people at that point.

Sometimes after sharing about Joseph Smith’s story we’d ask people who they thought he was seeing descend down from heaven in a pillar of light, and literally about half the time people would share visions they’d had themselves. I never quite knew what to do with this, and in retrospect wish I’d been kinder. Here we were, leading them into this spiritual crescendo, and they wanted to be a part of it, and I blocked it with a ‘that’s nice you also saw God, anyway, this guy...’ We needed to get through two more principles before the time was up, and how dare they have visions, it’s Joe Smith we’re talking about, he’s the one with the visions. I wish I’d given them a little more time at the mic and validated their experiences. They were thought we were talking spirituality, and we were really just talking Mormonism. I don’t know if they saw God. I don’t know if Joseph Smith did. He could have. They could have. I wasn’t there. I’ve had spiritual experiences and I’ll be damned if someone is going to tell me I didn’t have those (*3). I mean, I’m probably damned anyway. Except there is no hell. Except for the one mentioned over and over in the Book of Mormon (*4).

Anywho. I wish I had been more open about their experiences, is where I was headed.

After Joseph Smith we talked about the Book of Mormon and it was a letdown. Mormons love the Book of Mormon, but everyone else is somewhere on the spectrum of “oh that’s nice for you” to “reason #3 you’re a cult.” Which was frustrating as a missionary. Most people, if they read it, realized it was scripturesque and did, in fact, talk about Jesus. People thought it was a trick to get them to learn more about Joseph Smith. Back then I was like, no, it’s all about Jesus and people getting to know Jesus, because I was literal and it literally is (kind of), but we were using it as a way to get them to buy into the religion in general, and to believe in Joseph Smith, so in the end it *was* a trick. So, now I get the skepticism.

The Book of Mormon was the crux of the sale, though (*5). If they got hooked on The Book of Mormon, got good feelings while reading it on their own, they were much more likely to stick with us and be baptized, and they were more likely to stay in the church because they would have an independent source of spiritual feelings (*6).

Finally we’d talk about the Holy Ghost, as a way to help them understand how they would get answers to the question, “do these 50’s-dressed teenagers both named Elder know anything about anything.” Problematic. The trick with the Holy Ghost is/was answers are vague and amorphous, manifesting differently in different people. (*7) We wanted them to pray and feel fuzzy about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. Nothing else. We would worry later about the stuff that might actually come up if they prayed (*8). We wanted them to be better people, eventually – right now we wanted to get them into the kingdom.

People generally understood the Holy Ghost. We were supposed to identify it if we felt it – “hey you feel that good feeling?” “yeah” “that’s the Spirit, man” so they knew what it was like. But that’s also hard to replicate.

TBM Me: How hokey are you going to get? Why do you talk around this stuff? At least be honest with yourself. It’s all true, and you’re trying to explain it away. [looks around for something to slam]

Logic Me: Most of the it isn’t true. Most of the Mormon-est parts of it, anyway, aren't. Sitting around talking about God with people who are by-and-large conditioned through religious upbringing to believe what you’re saying and having that feel good, that seems easy to explain sociologically.

We ended usually with whatever seemed like the right commitment – at the very least to meet again, and unless they totally balked at the Book of Mormon, to accept one from us and read a few parts of it. We try to close with a prayer, put down the next appointment in our little yellow planner, and leave. Usually feeling good, sometimes great if they were really into it, and sometimes bad if they really weren’t listening. But almost any discussion beat knocking doors or street contacting.

Also, as you can see, even out of the church for about 5 years, and 25 years later, I still have the TBM voice in my head yelling at me that I’m a heretic, that all these things are true and that if I would just have enough FAITH, just BELIEVE more because my lack of FAITH is a WEAKNESS and FAULT that keeps me from being HAPPY (*9). It's no fun. That early guilt sticks.

We did a lot more first discussions than anything else. Most people got spooked by one of the many problems they heard, or were just humoring us. But as one companion told me, discussions were the lifeblood of the mission. Without teaching people and connecting in that way I'd have been less motivated than I already was.

In retrospect, am I embarrassed or ashamed about teaching people this stuff? Kind of. Doesn't really matter. It's not a useful idea to sit with. I can't undo it, and if I went back in time and tried to get myself not to do it ("Hey, younger me, it's not true! Go home and go to college out of your hometown!") I'd have thought I was crazy. I had to have my own path out of believing it, and I wouldn't have been ready back then. But looking at it now, I'm more bothered by the idea that we all sin and need to repent. I think starting there is a good place to change direction.

----

(*1) I did ask people if they wanted to be baptized in the first discussion a few times, usually with people I knew weren’t interested. May as well push them away more quickly. It was a bet I was going to lose anyway. If there was someone who was actually interested, I would be scared to bring it up, but we had to eventually, it was the 5th principle of the second discussion. So at that point, if they still would have us, we’d ask them. The second or third time that we talked to them, ever, we’d ask them to change their life, with very little understanding or context about what it meant and what would be involved. We were asking them to do this based on basically the feeling they got when we were around. Like asking someone on a date after getting them to laugh, we were creating a spiritual mood in the room. That was the pattern. Create a mood, then when in the mood get them to commit, then when you leave and the mood is gone, hopefully they follow through. Most didn’t. When we left, usually the heat left.

(*2) which I then thought was a spiritual manifestation of God through a non-corporeal member of the Godhead which can be everywhere at once if needed and only could be manifest in Mormons who had received the Gift of the Holy Ghost, and now think is something like a common manifestation of belief in each other’s belief about inspiring events

(*3) Even if Joseph Smith saw God, it doesn’t make up for the shit he did later.

TBM Me interjects: We don’t know he did terrible things, faith-promoting historical sources blah blah blah just trust your FEELINGS unless they tell you he did terrible things.

Logic Me: Really this is a marketing thing. The church could pull back on Joseph Smith and they'd get a lot less heat but they double and triple down on him and have to spend time and money in counter-programming.

(*4)56 times, more than old and new testament combined

(*5) except we gave books away, a major advantage over Jehovah’s Witnesses’ missionary work, who had to literally sell their materials I think, which is like adding insult to injury for those poor missionaries

(*6) I don’t want to get too much into it here, but why does the Book of Mormon generate spiritual feelings? Grant Palmer argues that it’s because it talks about Jesus and being a better person, and that anything that talks about Jesus and changing to be better is going to do that. Which was helpful for me. The book is really problematic in so, so many ways, but Mormons go back to it again and again because it can, in fact, generate spiritual feelings when reading it, if you approach it a certain way.

TBM Me: Aha! That’s just the sort of the baloney someone who has left the faith would tell themselves to get away from the truth. It’s all true! [Finds an open door and slams it shut.] Case closed!

Logic Me: I’m not getting into whether the Book of Mormon was actually written by a series of dudes on gold plates a couple of thousand years ago. I’m talking about effect. Another post another post another post. Lemme alone.

(*7) I'm realizing I put this in without commentary. I'm still fuzzy on the Spirit, Higher Power, all that stuff. Another post for another time I guess because I still believe in getting answers from somewhere, I just don't know if they come from me or somewhere else. They sound a lot like me.

(*8) If you want to replicate this, wake up before everyone else and sit at a clean kitchen table, eyes open, lights on, for 20 minutes with only a piece of paper and pen. No phone, no music. If you wait the whole time things will come up, from wherever, and they probably won't be "Be a Mormon" they'll probably be "get that one thing done and for hell's sake be nicer to your partner." At least that's how it works for me.

(*9) I can then go back and do a logic chain from where my shelf broke and say, look, this isn’t true, therefore that isn’t true, therefore this and that and so on. And then it falls apart again, and I can see that the guilt is not really based on logic but on an emotional reasoning that leans on outcomes that are specifically geared for success only in the direction of the church being true. It’s not even a real logic test. We did this to other people and we did it to ourselves. The "test" looks like this:

Read the Book of Mormon and pray about Joseph Smith.

If you get a Burning in the Bosom (a warm feeling in your chest) then you know it’s true. a - If not, keep praying. Look for things in your life you need to change to be more in line with God, then try again. And again, and again, until you get the yes answer. If you don’t get the yes answer, there is something wrong with you that you are unwilling to face. b - If, heaven forbid, you get the no answer that’s the devil trying to deceive you. No joke, that’s the answer. From an outside perspective that must look ridiculous. "Check your floor for pentagrams. God isn’t telling you to be a Mormon. He’s on Our Side."

#exmormon #mormon mission #mission trauma #book of mormon

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new-sandrafilter · 5 years ago

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Timothée Chalamet and Eileen Atkins Interview - British Vogue May 2020

“Maybe your knuckles weren’t bleeding, but there was ice,” Timothée Chalamet tells Dame Eileen Atkins. He is recounting, with no small amount of awe, how he first came to hear of the legendary 85-year-old actor with whom he is about to appear at The Old Vic. It transpires that Oscar Isaac, Chalamet’s co-star in the upcoming blockbuster Dune, was at the receiving end of Atkins’ fist in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (all in the name of acting, of course). Chalamet was duly impressed.

“I gave him the worst time of his life,” says Atkins, bristling at the memory, before merrily launching into several candid, very dame-like stories from her time on set – “That was a nightmare movie. A nightmare.”

It is a Saturday afternoon in late February, and the two actors – one a titan of British theatre with an eight-decade career; the other, Hollywood’s most in-demand young leading man, with an insatiable Instagram following – have just finished being photographed together for Vogue. Chalamet, 24, in louche, low-slung denim and a white T-shirt, has folded his Bambi limbs into a chair next to Atkins, whose hawkish frame, in a navy jumper and jeans, belies her 85 years.

“Do you like being called Tim or Timothée or what?” Atkins asks in her warm but brisk RP, all trace of her Tottenham upbringing erased.

“Whatever works,” he replies in a bright American accent, that shock of chestnut hair falling into his eyes. “Anything.”

“So you won’t object to ‘darling’? I call everyone darling. I’m told I mustn’t say it these days.” He assures her he is fine with it: “It’s a rite of passage, being called darling by Dame Eileen Atkins.”

“You always, always, have to put the dame in, otherwise you can’t address me,” she jokes.

It’s good the two are getting all this sorted now. A couple of days after our interview they will begin rehearsals for a seven-week run of Amy Herzog’s play 4000 Miles, in which they star as a grandmother and grandson, each quietly dealing with their own grief. Chalamet takes on the role of Leo Joseph-Connell, a somewhat lost 21-year-old who experiences a tragedy while on a 4,000-mile-long cycle ride with his best friend. Atkins plays Vera Joseph, his widowed 91-year-old grandmother, upon whose Manhattan doorstep Leo unexpectedly arrives in the middle of the night, unsure of where else to go. What follows is a wonderful, and wonderfully witty, study in human relationships, a portrait of two generations with decades between them trying to make sense of the world.

Its stars, who’ve met twice previously, in New York last year, are still very much getting to know each other – and are confident in the appeal. “There are things like this play – hoping I don’t butcher it – where you can just sit back and go, ‘Oh, this is a delicious meal,’” says Chalamet. Atkins agrees. “I have a phrase in mind that I shouldn’t really say because it’s going to sound terrible in print.” Which is? “I find it a dear little play, a really dear little play. I think it should be very moving. But who knows? We might f**k it up.”

It’s unlikely. Atkins has been a regular on The Old Vic’s stage since the 1960s, going toe-to-toe with greats from Laurence Olivier to Alec Guinness, and fellow dames (and close friends) Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. Chalamet, meanwhile, is a relative novice, with only two professional plays under his belt. But since his turn as Elio in 2017’s Call Me by Your Name (for which he was Oscar-nominated), his celluloid rise has been meteoric. Roles in Lady Bird, Little Women, The King and Wes Anderson’s upcoming The French Dispatch have not only earned him the slightly fraught badge of “heart-throb”, but proved him to be among the most captivating actors of his generation.

He says he couldn’t resist the opportunity to come to the capital. “There was something exciting about doing a play that feels very New York in London,” Chalamet explains of taking on the part. He’s a diehard theatre fan, too, revealing he saw the six-and-a-half-hour epic The Inheritance – twice. “There are films like The Dark Knight or Punch-Drunk Love or Parasite that can give you a special feeling. But nothing will be like seeing Death of a Salesman on Broadway with Philip Seymour Hoffman or A Raisin in the Sun with Denzel Washington.”

Herzog’s writing particularly spoke to him. “Leo’s in a stasis that was very appealing to me,” he continues. “We find our crisis in moments of stasis, but there’s an irony to it when you’re young, because the law of the land would have you think that to be young is to be having fun, to be coming into your own. But as everyone at this age who’s going through it knows, it’s often a shitshow.”

It’s safe to say that, in casting terms, director Matthew Warchus, also artistic director of The Old Vic, has hit the jackpot. He first took the play to Atkins three years ago, but it was only towards the end of 2019 that Chalamet came on board. When it was announced, in December, that Hollywood’s heir apparent to Leonardo DiCaprio would be making his London stage debut, the news was met with a level of hysteria not usually associated with the 202-year-old theatre’s crowd.

“Oh, my friends have told me who the audience is,” Atkins chimes in when I ask who they think will be coming to see the show. “It’s 40 per cent girls who want to go to bed with Timothée, it’s 40 per cent men who want to go to bed with Timothée, and it’s 20 per cent my old faithfuls.” Is Chalamet prepared for the onslaught? “I think it will be 100 per cent Eileen’s faithfuls,” he demurs.

On the surface, they can seem quite the odd couple. Chalamet, raised in Manhattan by an American dancer-turned-realtor mother and French father, an in-house editor at the United Nations, may be living a breathless, nomadic movie-star life but there’s an iron core of Gen Z earnestness there. He arrives on set with minimal fuss, even deciding to wear the clothes he came in for one shot, before knocking out some push-ups, politely ordering an omelette and generally being divinely well-mannered.

He turns on the star power for the camera, though, and I can confirm it’s as dazzling up close as it is on the red carpet, where he has, famously, casually redrawn the rules for male dressing. From that Louis Vuitton sparkly bib at the 2018 Golden Globes, to a dove-grey satin Haider Ackermann tux at Venice last year, he’s a true fashion darling. Then, of course, there’s his dating life – from Lourdes Ciccone Leon to Lily-Rose Depp – that remains an endless source of fascination to millions worldwide. (All this, it must be said, is of significantly less interest to Dame Eileen.)

Atkins started dance lessons aged three, shortly before the start of the Second World War. By 12, she was performing professionally in pantomime, not far from where she grew up in north London, the youngest daughter in a working-class family. A fast-established theatre star, wider fame didn’t find her until late in life. Despite memorable turns in Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park, it was the 2000 television hits Cranford and Doc Martin, when she was in her early seventies, that finally made her a household name. Today, she lives alone in west London, since her second husband, the TV and film producer Bill Shepherd, died in 2016. She has often spoken of being happily childless, and has zero time for razzmatazz.

And yet, despite their differences, the pair appear perfectly matched. They already have their grandmother-grandson dynamic down pat. Atkins does a fine line in mischievous eyebrow-raising, and at one point recites a limerick that is, honestly, so rude it almost makes her co-star blush. Chalamet, meanwhile, is politeness personified, still trying to work out his thoughts on various subjects, less inclined to give so much of himself away. There is a physical likeness, too, in their delicate features and fine bone structure. They share a naturally melancholic look, one that melts away when they laugh.

Their upcoming play, which premiered to rapturous reviews Off-Broadway in 2011, “about a block” from Chalamet’s high school, LaGuardia, could have been written for them. “Other than not being American, I’m very like the old woman,” says Atkins of the Pulitzer-shortlisted play. “I can’t be bothered to learn the internet.” If there’s one thing she won’t tolerate in rehearsals, it’s people on their phones. That’s the only thing that will “piss me off ”, she says, brusquely.

Ah, phones. Are they really the symbol of generational disconnect? “It’s easy to point to these things,” Chalamet says, tapping his phone on the table, “as the cause or the symptom, but I think my generation is a guinea pig generation of sorts. We’re figuring out the pros and cons and limits of technology.”

Equally, Atkins is keen to distance herself from some of the criticism levelled at her age group. “There’s a saying isn’t there: if you’re not very left wing when you’re young, you’re heartless. And if you’re not very right wing when you’re old, you’re foolish. I’m not political, but I’m not with this government I can assure you – and I’m not with Brexit. I wanted to wear a sweater saying ‘I did not vote Brexit’, because it was all old people who did. Not me, not me,” she snaps. “I went on the march.”

Both are in agreement that intergenerational friendships are too rare these days. “So. Important,” Chalamet says, hitting the table between each word. “There is so much to learn from people who have walked the path of life. That’s why I’m so looking forward to these next couple of months.”

Atkins is thoughtful on the matter. “I don’t miss the fact I don’t have children, but I do envy my friends who have grandchildren,” she says. “About five or six years ago I met a couple of young people – they are just about 30 this year – and, do you know, we go out together. And people immediately say to me, ‘Are these your grandchildren?’ And I say, ‘No.’ And they say, ‘Your godchildren?’ And I say, ‘No, they’re just friends.’ Everybody thinks there is something weird about all three of us. They just don’t get it. But the boy makes me laugh more than anybody and the girl is enchanting. I have more fun with them than I do with almost anybody else.”

I remind Atkins about her description of today’s youth as being overly serious. “I do call them the New Puritans, yes,” she says, before motioning to her young co-star. “He probably drinks like a fish.”

Chalamet, currently single, is remaining tight-lipped about plans for his new London life, and how many late-night manoeuvres in Soho or Peckham it may involve. “I’ve got friends here, which is nice. But I’m here for this – to be terrified at The Old Vic.”

Before we leave, there is a final thing to clear up – Atkins’ aforementioned limerick. “Do you know about the Colin Farrell situation?” Eileen asks Timothée. No, comes his reply. “Better get it over with now because someone will tell you,” she says, proceeding to explain how, when she was “69, about to be 70” and filming Ask the Dust with a 27-year-old Farrell, “he made a pass at me. He came to my hotel room. He was enchanting. I let him chat for two hours, thoroughly enjoying it, but no not that. He was very cross I didn’t.”

But then, she explains guiltily, she later told the story during “some stupid TV show” (Loose Women), where despite her best efforts at keeping Farrell’s identity secret, the internet did its thing and news got out. An apology to Farrell was required. “So I left a limerick on Colin’s phone…” she says. She clears her throat: “There once was a **** of a dame…” she begins, in her imitable theatrical timbre, before reeling off one of the filthiest rhymes I’ve ever heard.

There is a moment of stunned laughter. “Wow, that’s sincerely amazing,” comes Chalamet’s response, as Atkins finishes the verse. He gives her a solemn oath: “I promise I won’t hit on you.”

4000 Miles is at The Old Vic, SE1, from 6 April

#timmy #timothee chalamet #4000 miles #british vogue app #Eileen Atkins #my edit

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mindfulldsliving · 4 days ago

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CFM | Understanding the Spirit of Elijah: Doctrine and Covenants 2 and Joseph Smith's History 1:27-65

This week’s Come Follow study of the Doctrine and Covenants highlights the eternal connection “The Hearts of the Children Shall Turn to their Fathers.” Understanding these scriptures help us understand the fulfillment of Elijah’s return, restoration of priesthood keys, and the sealing power of in temples uniting families beyond mortality. Through the Angel Moroni, Joseph Smith received divine…

#Abrahamic covenant promises #Bible #Christianity #Doctrine and Covenants Section 2 #Elijah&039;s mission in the Restoration #Elijah&039;s sealing power and its impact on temple ordinances #Eternal family relationships #faith #Family history and genealogy in Latter-day Saints #God #How Doctrine and Covenants 2 explains Elijah&039;s role in the Restoration #How genealogical work fulfills prophecies in the last days #How priesthood keys ensure eternal family connections #Insights from Joseph Smith-History about the restoration of sealing power #Jesus #Joseph Smith-History 1:27-65 #Lessons from Joseph Smith&039;s early revelations #Lessons from Joseph Smith&039;s experiences with the angel Moroni #Malachi&039;s prophecy in the last days #Moroni&039;s message to Joseph Smith #Moroni&039;s visitations to Joseph Smith #Preparing for the great and dreadful day #Priesthood keys restoration #Prophecy fulfillment in the Book of Mormon #Restoration of priesthood keys #Role of Elijah in the Second Coming #Sealing ordinances in the temple #Sealing power of Elijah #Significance of vicarious temple work #Spirit of Elijah and genealogy

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itsuhtrap42 · 4 years ago

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The Last Jedi and Nonviolence

Peace and Purpose:

The Philosophy of Nonviolence in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Evan M. Banks

Spring 2019

“And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

-Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”

-Yoda, Revenge of the Sith

“Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.”

-Kylo Ren, The Last Jedi

“Your weapons, you will not need them.”

“What’s in there?”

“Only what you take with you.”

Yoda and Luke, The Empire Strikes Back

Studying religion and philosophy in the Star Wars universe has been a time-honored tradition among eccentric scholars with a penchant for all things geek since the first film debuted in 1977. What is widely regarded as one of the best qualities of the franchise is that it follows relatable characters and tells relatable stories in a fanciful and faraway place. Moviegoers from all over the globe identify with these characters as they face Earthly problems—love, betrayal, slavery, loyalty, devotion, religiosity, pain, loss, anguish, and triumph. It is in this reality that the developers of the franchise discuss complex philosophical, religious, and moral questions that humanity has struggled with since time immemorial. However, what sets these conversations apart from the human condition as we know it is the ever-present existence of the mysterious energy field that is commonly referred to by Star Wars’ pantheon as, “The Force.” At no period throughout the experience can a viewer reasonably argue that in the Star Wars universe, the Force does not exist. Yet, to what degree does the Force affect itself upon actors within the universe? This is a question that, throughout the stories, the creators of this morality play try and tackle—or at least use to explore the possibilities of what truth is. The existence of an interconnective power that may or may not influence actors’ decisions, thoughts, and actions comes with it the necessity of religions and philosophies within the universe itself that attempt to explain or interpret this phenomenon. These in-franchise vehicles are necessary to characterize the feasibility of the otherwise impossible feats carried out by benevolent or nefarious space-wizards who can harness and observe this powerful Force.

For over forty years fans and scholars have discussed the subtle and overt nuances in Star Wars and it does not take much to get two fans together to begin arguing about the nature of the Force, the role of government in society, what makes goodness and evil, and even the intrinsic value of a life, i.e. was Han justified in shooting Greedo in Episode IV? But by 2017, forty-one years later, the narrative started to take a turn. Filmmakers were criticized for rehashing the same old stories over and over again—which is wholly ironic considering that George Lucas derived a great deal of his inspiration from Joseph Campbell who posited that many of the Earth’s great myths were of independent invention yet held the same truths, and every great epic story since their advent were variations and derivations of these same morality plays. In light of these criticisms it was essential that the filmmakers explore new ideas and communicate a new message—at least one they had not communicated before. And in Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, that message pertains to how effective nonviolent action can be in the face of extreme tyranny. To discuss this relationship, a foundation in established Star Wars philosophy is essential.

There is no better place to start than Joseph Campbell. As a prominent and influential scholar, Campbell posited many theories regarding the nature of myths and their relationships with culture and even one’s own being. George Lucas is known for utilizing Campbell’s mythological models of storytelling.

Star Wars became an immediate, global phenomenon in large part because it portrayed a cosmic struggle between good and evil that was vivid enough to resonate with the audience but general enough so that any person, from any religion or background, could identify with the heroes and root for their struggle against the villains. This universality was completely intentional; George Lucas, adhering to Joseph Campbell’s concept of the mono-myth, believed that all moral teaching share certain core messages about good and evil. Lucas envisioned Star Wars as a galactic version of this one mythic story that would crystalize the basic truths that he believed resided in the heart of every religion or philosophy. For Lucas this was the idea that we all face an internal struggle between kindness, selflessness, and compassion, on the one side, and greed, corruption, and cruelty, on the other.[1]

Campbell himself even cites Luke Skywalker specifically as a mythic hero that the audience is to learn with.[2] Campbell illustrates that aspect of humanity—the need for society to have rightness modeled for it, what that rightness looks like, and how good and evil interact with that rightness. In Star Wars, evil and good are elements brought upon by actors but evil does not exist within the Force itself. Nature does not have the capacity for evil. Nature just is. The Force is. But when individual actors or actors en masse begin to learn to manipulate nature—manipulate the Force, that power is capable of being abused. And out of that abuse, a perversion of the nature of The Force is born—an Evil that is not only physical, but structural, and spiritual. This perversion must be combatted. How best to combat it, not whether one can win against it, is the question posed in TLJ.

Star Wars presents a dilemma in how one associates themselves with power balances and the role of an individual within these power structures.

Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn’t help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That’s something else, and it can be done.[3]

Considering this, Campbell comments on the accessibility of such a humanist philosophy and states that Star Wars asks the question, “…are you going to be a person of heart and humanity—because that’s where the life is, from the heart—or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called ‘intentional power’?”[4] In this question lies the heart of the nonviolent argument that Rose in TLJ articulates. She states plainly explaining the moral lesson of the film, “That’s how we win, not by fighting what we hate, saving what we love.”[5] Campbell argues further that this idea of the “heart” is what is effective at challenging the machinations of evil, or in the case of TLJ, an extrajudicial tyranny. That positive change starts from within oneself and only once one achieves this balance and contentment with humanity and its role in love against tyranny can evil be triumphed over and redemption had.[6]

Campbell is very clearly speaking in the vein of nonviolent resistance much in the same way that Gandhi purports that the means and ends are one—that in order to truly achieve peace through nonviolent means one must embody the principles they preach. “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him…We need not wait to see what others do.”[7] This concept of embodying change through a personal and in an inwardly-focused fashion is rife throughout TLJ. This message of inward change permeates throughout the franchise but reaches its most tumultuous as Luke Skywalker suffers a crisis of self when he turns from nonviolent means for a fleeting second as he stands over a sleeping Ben Solo with an ignited lightsaber assuming he can deny his nature and take a life in the interest of goodness. Luke had already learned the effectiveness of nonviolence from his encounter with The Emperor in his quest to change the Satyagraha—Gandhian “Soul Force”—of his father, Darth Vader. When Luke fails his own humanity, his own nature, and betraying his love, the galaxy is once again occupied by a systemic evil promulgated by a betrayed and confused power figure. While Luke fails in this respect, what he has passed on from his experiences with Vader, continue throughout the leadership of The Resistance in Leia.

It is important to note that The Resistance is not a state-sponsored entity but one that stands in protest to The New Republic’s appeasement of The First Order. The aptly named, Resistance’s primary focus in the films has been to flee as they work to destroy weapons of mass destruction. While not entirely nonviolent, these fighters do not entirely belong to the order of the Jedi and are thus not required to adhere to the tenets that Luke Skywalker purports. Which means there are elements of evil among them. Scholar Charles C. Camosy in, Chasing Kevin Smith: Was It Immoral for the Rebel Alliance to Destroy Death Star II, argues that it is a matter of motivation in determining whether taking lives in the interest of removing a WMD from the arena is moral. Essentially, the difference is that while Grand Moff Tarkin in A New Hope, and thus like the First Order in The Force Awakens, is pleased with the destruction of whole planets as a symbol of power with the intention to subdue whole populations to the will of The Emperor and the machine, the Rebellion akin to The Resistance are primarily concerned with the saving of lives and indeed mourn the mass death that came from the destruction of these weapons. In the opening sequence in TLJ, Poe takes out the deck cannons of the dreadnought and as soon as the evacuation is complete, Leia commands that he returns—intending only to secure the escape. A disarming tactic. Poe is to learn that engaging with violence beyond what is completely necessary is unjust. But doing violence even as a defensive countermeasure comes with it some intrinsic badness in that there is harm done. In this line of argument, Camosy is supporting the notion of Just War Theory. Yet, he does acknowledge the conflict inherent to Just War Theory in that there are no clear distinctions between good and evil on Earth as there are in Star Wars.[8]

From the opening scenes of A New Hope, the “culture” of Star Wars conditions us to root for the Rebels. Looking at the movies through this lens can blind us to the questionable decisions of those we are told are the “good guys.” The ability to challenge the dominant cultural lens through which most of us look at the world and ask critical questions of our own “side” is as rare today as it is important.[9]

And here viewers can see the crux of the argument in TLJ. The unnamed Benicio Del Toro character, “DJ,” very blatantly demonstrates to the protagonists Finn and Rose that The First Order does not have the monopoly on evil. Evil permeates society and even their own organization—the Resistance. Finn and Rose had just escaped from the casino city of Canto Bight that that was filled with arms dealers flaunting their spoils. Its not enough that they harm in business but even these arms dealers’ hobby involves enslaving children and harming animals.

After Rose communicates a personal connection to the harm that developing weapons can cause, she shows Finn the dangers of the military industrial complex—a true perversion of nature: metal twisted to destroy as quickly and efficiently as possible. As viewers are enraged with the idea of these developers testing weapons on the same people that built them, they are momentarily ripped from the idea of “good guys” and “bad guys” when DJ illustrates that The Resistance has been buying weapons from these same people, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence. “Good guys? Bad guys? Made up words…Finn, let me learn you something good, it’s all a machine partner, live free, don’t join.”[10] Barry Gan in Violence and Nonviolence takes an in-depth look at “The Myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys.”[11] He deconstructs the notions of the two types of individuals and illustrates that as one perpetuates this myth, they feed a beast that treats others as less than human and in turn justifies the maltreatment of individuals who are, more than likely, just like themselves. And in an interest of defending groups against a “bad guy” that does not actually exist in logic, “we become convinced that it is wiser to spend money on arms rather than education, on training people to destroy communities instead of build them.”[12] By choosing to juxtapose arms with education, Gan is demonstrating that society’s most powerful tool in the promulgation of nonviolent interests is education. This is something that the Jedi religion and indeed, Luke Skywalker’s crisis touches on extensively during the experiences he has in TLJ.

The morality and nature of myth explored throughout Star Wars is typically dichotomized between two entities in conflict with each other wherein either persuasion is plainly categorized as “good” or “bad.” The goodness and badness of entities and actors is more or less hand-fed to the viewer. It is clear who one is supposed to root for in the story. Yet, as the characters become more complex through their story arcs, so does the philosophy and differing opinions on the nature of the Force and its relationship with goodness and badness or good and evil. Indeed, they vary in opinion regarding the nature of good and evil itself. The Last Jedi attempts to bridge gaps in conflicting interpretations of the Force and brings with it the approaches to violence supported by two competing cosmological arguments—cosmotic and acosmotic.

These concepts lend themselves to the conversation regarding evil itself in such a way that is quintessential to Star Wars’ in-universe philosophies that support or denounce the use of violence. In “Balance through Struggle: Understanding the Novel Cosmology of the Force in The Last Jedi” Terrance MacMullan characterizes cosmotic beliefs as holding “that there is really only one true thing or order in the universe, that is morally good and that evil is just a corruption of this one true thing.” This is best demonstrated by the fact that while the Jedi submit to the will of the Force, the Sith harness The Dark Side. The Jedi do not submit to the will of the light side but just the nature of all that is The Force. The Dark Side is a delineation of the natural and thus requires a modifier. Never once has the term “the light side” been mentioned in the films. Service to the Force is understood by the old Jedi Order to perpetuate the continued dominance of good. This is opposite of the acosmotic.

Acosmotic beliefs consider good and evil both being natural phenomenon and while not necessarily diametrically opposed but exist in tandem as encouraged by Daoist beliefs surrounding the Yin and the Yang.[13] So what does this have to do with Star Wars? In the cosmotic interpretation of Luke’s new Jediism, the struggling Jedi Master is attempting to come to terms with the idea of balance between good and evil instead of inherent good. He is moving the conversation away from the inherent goodness of the Jedi and the inherent badness of the Sith and discussing a more nuanced balance of the Force. “…And this is the lesson. That Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies, that’s vanity.”[14] Luke is demonstrating that as actors within a violent system, the promulgation of Star Wars’ equivalent of the Yin, as if the Jedi have agency over it, has resulted in their hubris and this their diminished ability to affect good on the galaxy. That in this, the Yang would also require agents. Supreme Leader Snoke mirrors this sentiment when he encouters Rey aboard his flagship, “Darkness rises and light to meet it.”[15] But the film does not end on this notion of balance; it takes a turn to a different lesson.

This film is not only Luke teaching Rey, it also has a component of him learning that he does indeed, as an actor in The Force, have the ability to affect change in a positive way. And he calls upon his past experiences to draw wisdom. Yoda, when Luke attempts to burn down the tradition of the Jedi, appears as a teacher, and in standard Yoda fashion, delivers yet again, a very powerful lesson—that he need not try to uphold the traditions that he believes damaged the galaxy but simply, “pass on what [he] has learned,” and strongly consider his failures.[16] As Luke reconnects himself with the Force it is possible that he looks back on his greatest successes—times when he was present, yet takes no violent action at all. For instance, when he destroys the first Death Star, he allowed the Force to do it for him. When he defeated The Emperor through Darth Vaders’ redemption, he did nothing but throw his weapon away. These occurrences demonstrate that the nature of the Force is interested in the vanquishing of evil and Luke’s greatest victories came when he released control of his weapons and turned his mind to the Force. But Yoda required he consider his greatest failures. Every time he failed, the Force seemed to very obviously return the harm back unto himself. When Luke turns to weapons and conflict as a means by which he could do good, such as confronting Vader in Cloud City and losing his hand, and when he takes up arms against Ben during his training and loses everything, The Force is telling him that courting violence comes with consequences. It is during these realizations in TLJ that Luke seemingly retracts from the acosmotic and embraces yet again the cosmotic with a newfound understanding of how effective his nonviolent actions can be. So Luke astral projects himself in front of the First Order army and performs the greatest feat ever displayed by a Jedi on screen. It is one of extreme nonviolence and in so doing humiliates those that would do harm and removes entirely the value the First Order places in violence and destruction. This story is the last thing that the next generation of freedom fighters tells—one of “peace and purpose.”[17]

As Rey says those final lines while she and Leia consider Luke’s broken weapon, Leia responds to Rey’s concern about how to move forward suggesting that with the weapon broken, “we have everything we need” thus mirroring Yoda’s warning to luke when he enters the dark side cave in Episode V when he tells him, “your weapons, you will not need them.”[18] While it may have taken 37 years for Luke, Leia, Rey, and the rest of Star Wars fandom to actually heed Yoda’s powerful words, it seems that the overwhelming message in Star Wars: The Last Jedi is that active political resistance through nonviolence and the destruction of weapons is the best way to resist tyranny and promote peace and justice throughout the galaxy. Indeed, that only the Force should be the deciding factor on whether a life is to be taken, or harm done. There is no telling whether this narrative will continue in December 2019, but it is sincerely the opinion of this author that this message needs to be carried through to its ultimate conclusion and that peace come not at the hands of destruction and death but by the promulgation and promotion of passive political resistance.

[1]Terrence MacMullan, “Balance through Struggle: Understanding the Novel Cosmology of the Force in The Last Jedi,” The Journal of Religion and Pop Culture 31, no 1, Spring 2019, 103.

[2] Joseph Cambell, The Power of Myth: With Bill Moyers, Apostrophe S Productions, 1988, 23.

[3] Ibid, 178.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Johnston, The Last Jedi, 2017.

[6] Ibid, 23.

[7] M.K. Gandhi, “General Knowledge About Health,” Indian Opinion 13, chapter 153, New Delhi, India, 1913, 241.

[8] Charles C. Camosy, “Chasing Kevin Smith: Was It Immoral for the Rebel Alliance to Destryo Death Star II,” in The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy: You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned” ed by Jason T. Eberl and Kevin S. Decker,” 2016, John Wiley and Sons, 67.

[9] Ibid

[10] Johnston, The Last Jedi, 2017.

[11] Barry Gan, Violence and Nonviolence: An Introduction, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2013, 25-38.

[12] Ibid, 37.

[13] Terrence Macmullan, “Balance through Struggle: Understanding the Novel Cosmology of the Force in The Last Jedi,” The Journal of Religion and Pop Culture 31, no 1, Spring 2019, 101-102

[14] Rian Johnston, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Los Angeles, 20th Century Fox, 2017

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Irvin Kershner, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, 20th Century Fox, 1980.

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nerdygaymormon · 2 years ago

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Joseph Smith--History : God can be found outside church

I think there’s many lessons for queer people in this book.

It’s interesting to read how Joseph chose not to join the church his mom attended and she was okay with that. That’s a level of self-determination not often found in LDS households. Studies have shown that attending a conservative church, such as the LDS church, is harmful to queer people and what a wonderful thing it would be if they were free to explore other churches or even to choose not to go, not required to go to unsafe spaces.

Joseph read James 1:5 in the Bible and decided to ask God which church to join. He relied on personal revelation as to what to do about church attendance.

Joseph shared his answer with a preacher who treated the answer with contempt, saying it is from the Devil. Wow does this hit home, the number of times I’ve heard it said that if a person received an answer that doesn’t match what the current church president says on the subject that the person was deceived, the answer is from the devil. We should trust people when they tell us the answer they received to a heart-felt, sincere prayer.

Not only did the preacher say this answer to Joseph’s prayer was from the devil, he also said that there is no such thing as visions and revelations, those ceased with the apostles and there would never be any more. When church members today tell queer folks that there’s not going to be more revelation concerning their place in this church, we sound like those preachers. Who are we to limit God?

Whether it was in his home, in his bed, or in the woods, many of Joseph Smith’s most important spiritual experiences did not occur in the pews of a church. Most queer people leave church, and fortunately church is not the only, or even main place, that we can connect with the divine.

#queer faith #queer scriptures

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relatablemormonmoments · 5 years ago

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April General Conference 2020

These are my personal notes on each of the talks given. This is to give those who chose not to listen to conference a chance to select which talks they would be comfortable listening to or reading.

Talks will be marked as such. This is the level of suggestion I have for interacting with each talk

Read and Listen to

Listen/Watch

Read

Don’t bother

Saturday Morning Session

Russell M. Nelson (Listen/Watch)

Life’s personal trials stretch far beyond this virus

If you are prepared you shall not fear - personal spiritual storehouses

Stand in holy places and be not moved

Seek to hear Jesus Christ who speaks to us through the power of the Holy Ghost

As our hearts change and we commence a lifelong quest to hear him

M. Russell Ballard (Read)

The Lord has watched that family forever, Joseph Smith was ordained in the premortal life for eternity.

Because the family was united, they survived these challenges when starting over in Palmyra, New York.

Joseph: Felt great confusion from many religious revivalists contradicting eachother

The bible did not contain all the answers to life’s questions, but rather told men and women how to find these answers through fervent prayer

Joseph asked the personages which sect was right -> fullness of the gospel would be noted to him at some future time

Joseph prepared to be a prophet of G-d

“No such things as visions or revelations”

Joseph was persecuted for his visions

Moroni appeared to Joseph to tell him about the plates

Hyrum witnessed the Gold plates and was one of the first members of the church in 1830.

Hyrum was promised the power to escape if he wanted to, or to lay down his life to glorify G-d

Hyrum sealed his testimony in blood

A faceless group of cowards became the mob that killed them

In life they were not divided and in death they were not separated.

“Mother, weep not for us, we have overcome the world”

“And G-d shall wipe away all tears from their eyes”

They come to know G-d through their suffering in ways that could not happen without it

As we listen to the spirit, share it and be courageous.

James R. Rasband (Read and Listen to)

Without the Book of Mormon, where would I turn for peace?

Trust in His atoning sacrifice

The more we understand, the more we will have reassurance that the Book of Mormon can comfort our souls

To bring about the plan of mercy and the demands of justice

Alma tormented by the pains of hell, believing he had murdered G-d’s children by leading them away, but then realised that they were saved by Christ’s Atonement

The thought that rescued Alma was the Atonement

King Benjamin declared that the glad tidings of joy came in the righteous judgement of men

We are accountable when we are not ignorant and we still sin - we can repent

How can those we harm be made whole?

ALL G-d’s children will be given the opportunity

The pain of our own mistakes is the fear of limiting our childrens’ joy.

Commands us to do all we can to make restitution

Can require a simple apology or years of humble effort

Joy D. Jones (Read and Listen to)

Women’s continuing roles in the restoration

As exemplars and devout leaders of the faith

Early sisters unitedly followed the prophet

“Sisters, it is our turn!”

To be a woman in this time is an especially noble calling

What children can do as they step forward->Is it hard to be the prophet?-> Hard to strive to be like Christ, Follow the example of Moses (the Lord loves effort), like piano lessons, requires practice to progress -> I want little Pearl to be the next prophet

Our journey indeed takes effort, hard work, and study

Offer up the desires of our hearts to G-d

G-d knows each of us by name and has a role for each of us to fulfill

The Lord expects us to receive revelation from him

“Increase your spiritual capacity to receive revelation.”

We are promised a crown of righteousness

Prevent General Conference Overwhelm

The spirit helps us determine which work to do today

Our continuing ride is to receive revelation

We can then inspire the rising generation to do the same

Every woman and every man has direct access to the power of G-d

As women we must recognise our covenants as direct access to G-d

World’s greatest champion of women and womanhood is Jesus Christ

Neil L. Anderson (Read and Listen to)

Despite living in danger, Joseph continued proclaiming his truth

We are being blessed openly and spiritually, and in times of difficulty, the saviour brings these experiences back into our mind

“What I received was from Heaven, I know it and G-d knows that I know it.”

President Nelson was a heart surgeon uwu

“It’s a miracle” -> President Nelson had been directed by G-d

Glasses lost in ocean -> prevented driving car -> would be stranded -> “Praying would do nothing” ->his pair of glasses rested in her hand

114 years old -> missionaries give a blessing to critically ill baby -> miraculously recovered -> baptized at 103 years old, endowed at 104, now takes 14 hour bus ride to visit temple every year.

“Help me to never forget what I have felt” (on woman reading Book of Mormon and knowing it was true)

Abish believed! ABISH!

"A beautiful, warm, loving spirit surrounded me”

Sometimes fire, sometimes ideas, sometimes intelligence

Signs may not be grand or loud

Many have heard him but not realised it

We worthily do

Prayerfully listen and keep commandments

These experiences are for children as well

“Did G-d send a message that was just for me?”

ooo animation

Our book of life, luminous stones that help brighten the world ahead

I met this dude (Neil L. Anderson), he’s a sweetheart. He shook my hand. I had just joined the church at the age of five and had not yet seen more than 2 conferences

As you acknowledge and treasure the spiritually defining events in your life, you will find more.

Douglas D Holmes (Read)

New children and youth initiative

Principles the program is built on

The Lord is trying to help all of us

Relationships in our ongoing journey to Christ

Parents, friends, family members, leaders

Be open and honest with each other as we strive to be better together

When we see through Heavenly Father’s eyes, we will see their eternal worth

What you learn is who they are and who they can become

Knit our hearts in unity and in love

It’s not enough just to be bound together, we also need experiences

Word of G-d is spiritual power

Fuels our desire to repent and walk the covenant path.

We allow the saviour to change us and become the best version of our selves,

Allow G-d’s children to choose to do what is right

Invitation to choose to become like saviour.

Goals are a tool that can help us come to heaven.

We need to engage in it

“They desire a cause”

“Only the Gospel can save the world from the calamity of its own self destruction.” ------> ew this is kind of a yucky way to say it

Empowering the youth

“You have the capacity to be smarter and wiser and have more impact on the world than any previous generation”

See the youth as President Nelson does

The youth will amaze you with their abilities and insight into the Gospel

Ultimate Purpose

Henry B. Eyring (It’s my boy!!!!) (Read and Listen to)

Inspiration has come to us

“In what way is my part vital”

Feel more joyful, optimistic and determined in serving the Lord

He will lift each of us

The work of the Lord is almost incomprehensible to mortals

Glorious promises made to the fathers

Energy, skill, and abilities of the Saints

Prophet Daniel

The Lord will offer the gift of his gospel to every nation and people

The power of G-d is upon it

Take upon them the name of Christ to grow in spiritual power

Obeying the commandments increases spiritual power

Pray in faith = revelation

As we face today’s challenges, every breath should be a prayer to G-d

Always remember him and keep his commandments

Use all your power to call upon G-d to unleash the chains that bind you

Our determination can strengthen us in our resolve

Like Enos, have faith, be made whole

Goatee!!! XD

Pray while smiling, speak to Heavenly Father with joy in your voice

Your prayer will be received with a smile

May we find joy in the work

#lds #lds conference #general conference #lds general conference #gencon #ldsconf #mormon #ldsteen #exmormons please dont interact #queerstake #tumblrstake

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woodedcove · 4 years ago

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All These Things Will Give Thee Experience

This abstract was given to us by a wonderful friend and hangs on our living room wall. Unfortunately I don’t know who it was painted by.

The past couple of days I’ve been having problems with Trigeminal Neuralgia. Some have described this pain as one of the most severe that a human can suffer. I don’t know if that’s true but I can say it doesn’t feel good. Imagine a Kitchen Aide mixer scrambling your brain while a cattle prod polks your face, now imagine it happening at random moments throughout the day and you’ll have the idea. I’ve struggled with this pain off and on for the last two and a half years. It could be a complication of Ankylosing Spondylitis or a side effect of the neck surgery I had a couple of years ago. It also could have developed all on its own.

So why, on top of all the other forms of pain that I experience, do I have this? Perhaps some might think God is angry with me because of something I've done. Others might wonder how I can believe in God when the things that have happened in my life has been so unfair. I’ve had one person tell me once that all my trials had made her lose faith in God. But my faith in a loving Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ allows me to have hope and teaches me humility. Let me explain.

Faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a wonderful thing. It is a miracle. But the miracle doesn't end with Christ's resurrection. Jesus Christ suffered and died so that we may live again. That's so amazing that words just don't cover it. My faith in Jesus Christ teaches me that I will live again and I will be pain-free. My body will be restored to me but it will be renewed and perfected, with no Crohn’s, or Ankylosing Spondylitis or Trigeminal Neuralgia. I will be able to turn my neck. I’ll be able to run and I won’t be fatigued all the time. My body will be able to regulate itself and hot summers and cold winters won't bother me anymore. What's more is I will be able to be with my loved ones, hold them, talk with them, and share eternity with them. All of this gives me great hope and that hope carries me through the hard times.

But how does pain teach me humility?

Job was a righteous man, yet he lost everything; his children, his property and his health. Even his friends turned against him and his wife told him to curse God and die. But when Job finally did complain to the Lord, the Lord said to him:

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding.

“Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

“Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof?

“When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-7)

Job repented and humbly replied " ... I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me which I knew not." (Job 42:3) In the end, the Lord blessed Job with more than he had in the beginning.

Sometimes, though we’ve been trying to do everything we can to be good people and to live according to God’s commandments, things still go wrong. But Our Heavenly Father sees the big picture. He knows the experiences we need to help us reach our full potential.

Another example is Joseph Smith. From the time that he saw a vision of the Father and the Son, he was persecuted. Joseph was beaten and thrown in jail without cause, he was tarred and feathered several times, and he was dragged from his home and had poison shoved down his throat. All of this persecution would have stopped if he had simply said that the vision he had and the Book of Mormon were lies, but he never did. And because he refused to deny what he knew to be true, he was thrown again into jail where he, his brother and two other men were kept for four months during the coldest part of the Missouri winter. Finally, in Joseph’s darkest moment he pled with the Lord:

“Oh God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covered thy hiding place?

“How long shall thy hand be stayed and thine eye, yea thy pure eye, behold from the eternal heavens the wrongs of thy people and of thy servants, and thine ear be penetrated with their cries?” (121: 1-2)

The Lord’s reply to Joseph was:

“My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment;

“And then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes.” (Doctrine and Covenants 121: 7-8)

The Lord reminded Joseph that he was not yet as Job because his friends hadn’t turned against him. Then the Lord instructed Joseph with words I have clung to throughout all my life. He said:

“If thou art called to pass through tribulation; if thou art in perils among false brethren; if thou art in perils among robbers; if thou art in perils by land or by sea;

“If thou art accused with all manner of false accusations; if thine enemies fall upon thee; if they tear thee from the society of thy father and mother and brethren and sisters; and if with a drawn sword thine enemies tear thee from the bosom of thy wife, and of thine offspring, and thine elder son, although but six years of age, shall cling to thy garments, and shall say, My father, my father, why can’t you stay with us? O, my father, what are the men going to do with you? and if then he shall be thrust from thee by the sword, and thou be dragged to prison, and thine enemies prowl around thee like wolves for the blood of the lamb;

“And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.

“The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?” (Doctrine and Covenants 122: 5-8)

The prophet leader Benjamin explained to his people what Christ would suffer for us this way:

“And lo, he shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than a man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and abominations of his people” (Mosiah 3:7)

And Christ himself described the suffering He went through while offering His atoning sacrifice this way:

“For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent.

“But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I;

“Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit - and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink -

“Nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.” (Doctrine and Covenants 19:16-19)

I have gained a lot of experience in this life even as the Lord told Joseph he would, through the things that I’ve gone through. And maybe, in the very tiniest degree, I have experienced a pain that is about as close to our Savior’s suffering as I can get. Maybe. When I think of this and think of the unimaginable, unfathomable pain my Savior has suffered just for me, my heart is humbled and I am convinced of His incredible love for me. Maybe that’s what all my pain and suffering is about. To help me understand, to become convinced, and to be converted to my Savior’s love, His gospel, His good news. If so I will be patient, try to be humble, and pray that I learn my lesson well.

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ramrodd · 5 years ago

Video

youtube

A Protestant Talks With a Catholic Priest

COMMENTARY:

I'm writing as I watch this and I have paused at timestamp 4:48. So far, so good. I was raised in the communion of the Army Protestant Chapel and I was confirmed in the Chapel of the Centurion at Ft. Monroe sometime in my junior year of high school, 6 months before I heard Sergeant Pepper's, Ode to Billy Joe for the first time and that John McCain was having Christmas in the Hanoi Hilton, after a tour of the medical services of a city being bombed by guys just like him before he intercepted a SAM in his F-8. That can spoil your wholle day.

I'm not Catholic and an really don't trust their version of Jesus because of all the blatant pedophiles in the cloth. The orthodox understanding of St. Paul, the man, is that he is like Peter, a confirmed celebant long before he was crucified. He had effectively given up sex by the time he gave up fishing for a living, but it was just like Spencer Tracy in "The Old Man and the Sea". As a history major, you do understand that Hemingway wrote that as a fable of St. Peter fulfilling his commission to "Feed My Sheep". It is a very elegant Catholic parable. A lot of spanish sunlight, like the moment of truth in “7 Spanish Angels”. This is I'm writing as I write this and I have paused at timestamp 4:48. So far, so good. I was raised in the communion of the Army Protestant Chapel and I was confirmed in the Chapel of the Centurion at Ft. Monroe sometime in my junior year of high school, 6 months before I heard Sergeant Pepper's, Ode to Billy Joe for the first time and that John McCain was having Christmas in the Hanoi Hilton, after a tour of the medical services of a city being bombed by guys just like him before he intercepted a SAM in his F-8. That can spoil your wholale day.

I'm not Catholic and an really don't trust their version of Jesus because of all the blatant pedophiles in the cloth. The orthodox understanding of St. Paul, the man, is that he is like Peter, a confirmed celebant long before he was crucified. He had effectively given up sex by the time he gave up fishing for a living, but it was just like Spencer Tracy in "The Old Man and the Sea". As a history major, you do understand that Hemingway wrote that as a fable of St. Peter fulfilling his commission to "Feed My Sheep". It is a very elegant Catholic parable. A lot of spanish sunlight at the moment of truth in “7 Spanish Angels”, only it's just another day in paradise, doing the Lord's I'm writing as I write this and I have paused at timestamp 4:48. So far, so good. I was raised in the communion of the Army Protestant Chapel and I was confirmed in the Chapel of the Centurion at Ft. Monroe sometime in my junior year of high school, 6 months before I heard Sergeant Pepper's, Ode to Billy Joe for the first time and that John McCain was having Christmas in the Hanoi Hilton, after a tour of the medical services of a city being bombed by guys just like him before he intercepted a SAM in his F-8. That can spoil your wholale day.

That's who Peter is, That's who this priest is selling and it's a true portrait, but both Rome and Canterbury do a bit of bait and switch and hand off most of their intellectual grounding to Paul and Paul is as queer as a $3 bill, but everybody pretends he is just exactly like Peter OR if he's queer, then so is Jesus and it goes on and on. Peter was raised as a Jew in a very circumscribed sexual climate focused intently, and exclusively, on reproduction. Producing children as a divine obsession. The reason they rested on the 7th day was so they could fuck and if you only fucked on the Sabbath, the law of averages was working for you to that end. And women, who have had children and like the process, come to know exactly when they are ripe for baby making. I've had a lot of sex with a lot of women who had acquired that sense of their own bodies and I've had sex with a whole lot more women who didn't but knew that when they needed to fuck they could count on me.

Paul came from a Greek culture where naked wrestling was encouraged and there was (and may still be) a respected tradition of legal male union as a religious pre-Christian ritual, which is exactly what the circumcision of Timothy is all about, but everybody pretends is an expedient measure allowing Timothy to move in and out of Synagogues, legitimately. It's is an expedient measure, but it provided Paul the sexual outlet he required to soothe his “thorn in the flesh”: he was into twinks, like Roy Cohn. Pretty boys. He made a pass at John Mark, mistaking him for Jesus's “Pretty Boy” and John Mark wasn't that kind of guy and neither was Jesus. Neither was Socrates. It was universal, the Greek Love traditions, but it travels well and the Catholic Church would profit from making long term relationships in the Church the norm, like the Salvation Army. Most of their abuse would resolve more or less naturally and painlessly.

So,, anyway, there is no one in the Catholic Church I identify with except Cornelius. The one thing I identify about Jesus is that He had been through Ranger School, because He was absolutely mission oriented. The phrase “Give us this day our daily bread” translates into Ranger Speak as “MISSION” in a 5 Paragraph warning Order. Just like “Mission” Impossible”, only, just getting the order means you have accepted its premis, its assumptions, its legality and its imperative without qualification. “Instant Obedience:Self-Discipline”. Jesus is community organizer and the Squad Leader in a TO&E USMC Squad. 13 people. 1 leader,-player 12 players. The followers of Jesus showed up for the breaking of the bread, but, as your priest says, the Apostles are players under the authority of Jesus and His authority conveys directly in a chain of command kind of way.

So, I see Jesus as operating at the matrix between the economies of scale of the task environment, the battle space, and the economies of scale of the next higher command and the whole rest of the Army It is US Army doctrine that the squad is the basic unit of the military organization. Jesus is running an Army squad engaged in social engineering, just like the Green Berets in Vietnam before the commie cocksuckers in Hanoi decided to steal the Republic of Vietnam for Uncle Ho and Joseph Stalin.

So, here's the thing to understand about Cornelius that's pertinent to your experience: Cornelius is a republican soldier serving his nation in a foreign, and actively hostile, territory, Indian Country, and he, Cornelius, is doing his most important work outside the wire just like the Green Berets in Vietnam before the commie cocksuckers fired on Ft. Sumter, in effect. Cornelius is working outside the wire just the the 38th Indiana “Cyclone” Division in Afghanistan right at this moment. Out in IED land. That's where Cornelius is. Jim Kimsey, the venture capitalist that backed Steve Case and AOL, was a Green Beret in Vietnam back when it was cool to be in Counter-Insurgency in the Army, and he and his team built an orphanage for the same reasons Cornelius helped build the synagogue in Capernaum. The same imperative. Kimsey's orphange is still in operation. If you want to understand why Afghanistan is so important, it's because we are using the lessons learned from Vietnam to help Afghanistan, including the Taliban, bot adopt a superior form of national problem solving and organically spiritual health and economic equity as an expression of the economics of Jesus as explicated by Adam Smith as a moral science which I call process theology.

Before I go back to the video, I wanted to complete my thought about women knowing when their eggs drop is that the Samaritan woman in John 4 is at that moment and she wants to get pregnant, just like Tamar with Judah. The interpretation that she, the Samaritan woman in John 4 is a whore is as much bullshit as anything that comes out of Canterbury. I don't know Rome's version of the passage, but if you want to understand what bullshit the Pro-Life/Salvation Gospel is, ask your wife if it makes a difference whether the women in John 4 is a whore or just a woman with a mission and a window of opportunity.

St. Peter is asexual. St. Paul is a South Beach drag queen without the wardrobe. Both Rome and Canterbury are selling St. Peter, but you are getting St. Paul.

4:48: lift off.

Hover at 8:17 St. Paul is the dominant Apostle of American Evangelicals: Peter is your favorite from the perspective of Paul.

Evangelicals lean heavily upon Paul because of his emotional appeal relative to the “Just the Facts” testimony of Peter. Here's an example where God doesn't not consider our expectations as a critical factor in His design, Paul, in particular, appeals to women. According to the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Peter was actively hostile to everything Mary represented. Part of this is a problem Peter had with the whole idea of eating with gentiles and there is little question in my mind he at least agreed with the prayer of pharisees of the age “Thank you, Lord, that I was not born a slave, a dog/gentile or a woman”. I mean, Peter was fighting an up-hill battle all the way in regards to the implications of Mark 7:19 and Acts 10, while Paul was a pig in shit with the whole abrogation of all things kosher. And that whole drag queen aspect of his personality evident in his writing attracted women in ways very similar to the way Jesus did. I mean, Peter sent a woman to argue Romans in front of Theophilus and the covert Christian cell in the Praetorian Guard that represented the Church of Rome and why the Catholic Church remained in Rome. The Christian Church is a legacy of the Italian Cohort both Pilate and Cornelius were employed by: they got their paychecks via The Praetorian Guard, just like Julius Caesar. Except for the whole arising from the dead thing, the whole l'Affaire Crist was handled in a routine manner and His file happen to land on a desk in Rome and there it stayed until Constantine disbanded the Praetorian Guard after the Milvian Bridge, no hard feelings, we're just moving you to Iowa to be closer to real people sort of thing.

8:17 Resume:

9:52 pause: Everywhere the legions are, Christianity appears. The whole story of the experience of the Roman soldiers in Matthew 27:66 and Luke 23:26 – 47 goes throughout all the legions by that mysterious grapevine of the soldier's Rumor Control that relayed the murder of the negro soldiers at Ft. Pillow to the negro soldiers in the Army of the Potomac before Petersburg before the publication of Stars-and-Stripes, which wasn't created until the first world war.

Christianity is a creature of the Roman legions and a legacy of the Profession of Arms. The soldiers of Rome were in service to Rome but they offered their oaths to Yaweh, Queen of Battle and performed their Duty to Rome on that basis. That's a central tenet of Paul's legal argument in Romans.

Jesus placed a bet with The Satan that He could create a church without a bureaucracy. And He realized at the Transfiguration that He couldn't, which is why He was so brutal with Peter “Get thee behind me”. The Temptation is a continuation of the wagering between God and The Satan begun in the Book of Job and The Satan went long on the assumption that, to complete the process begun with Moses to create a universal consciousness of The One, Jesus was going to have to perform demonstrations of logistical competence, organizational efficacy and some death defying stunt and Jesus went short. Feeding the 5000 and the 4000 established His logistical competence, His scourging of the Temple merely emphasized the practical necessity of organizational efficacy in order to sustain His logistical competence but He believed He could finesse the death-defying stunt, personally, by avoiding fatal confrontation in the manner of wily Odysseus. And then, the Holy Spirit tossed Lazarus into the mix and, after four days, there is your death defying stunt. It is useful to remember that the Book of Job is a cosmic farce, with God, the Father, as the butt of the joke. The Satan tricks God, the Father, twice to beat up on Job for no other purpose than to exploit God, the Father,'s pride, And it works. And the Temptation of Jesus is a similar farce, a game of cosmic Three Card Monte, where Jesus believes He can always find the Queen of Spades until He discovers it was the Queen of Hearts, all along.

Jesus is absolutely correct that the Church He envisions is organic in nature, but even a jellyfish has structure and man has a spine to support the cathedral of the Spirit and it isn't even a paradox: the spine serves the spirit, The law was made for man, not man for the law. And the law propels mankind in a manner similar to how the spine propels the man and that's exactly what Jesus had in mind, but He didn't know it until The Satan made it apparent.

9:52 resumes.

14:52 full stop. The Canon Law, as ratified in 1918/1983, is what the Roman Empire lost when Constantine disbanded the Praetorian Guards, essentially, the Inspector General function that Baron von Stuebin brought to Valley Forge. A great strength of the Roman legions, as personified by the centurions, was uniform doctrine, training and the operational arts and that was maintained by the Praetorian Guard in pretty much the same function as the Pentagon, today (actually, all elements of the Executive of the constitutional government, i.e. The Republic).

In terms of Canon Law, I am a Protestant and the Presbyterian structures of Canterbury inform my own notion of the Body of Christ. It's why I say the Pro-Life doctrine is such heretical bullshit. It's a made-up doctrine established entirely for political fund raising.

From the description here, Canon Law became, in 1918, what John Knox presented with the Book of Discipline in 1560. Federalist 10 is basically a recapitulation of the Book of Discipline, which reflected the structures as processes of the Praetorian Guard, which was a practical application of the concepts presented in Plato's Republic, As Bruce Gore observes, the Romans were good students of philosophy but never professors of philosophy. And that's worked out pretty well.

14:52 restart:

15:25 “How does one go to heaven?”

One fucking dies, shit for brains.

There is no mystery, Going to heaven is why Jesus went to Hell, for Christ's sake! Review John 3:16, if you don't understand. As a paratrooper, you have a far better chance of going to heaven, in the final analysis, than your parachute opening and that's something like a 98% certainty. You are worried about the wrong fucking thing.

This is the problem with the Salvation Gospel of Campus Crusade for Christ (which is where I first encountered, and rejected, Salvation Gospel). I went to Vietnam on the basis of Liberation Gospel: that's what Jim Kimsey was doing as a Green Beret in Vietnam. Everybody at that time believed in the Liberation Gospel of the Marshall Plan. Salvation Gospel is an exercise in monetized navel gazing.

15:25 Begin again.

I'm listening to Kellyanne Conway on FOX News Sunday. She is as anchored in existential reality as the Pro-Life doctrine reflects anything Jesus represents except His repulsion of the den of thieves in Jerusalem.

22:11 this gets back to the Book of Job, In my experience, it is impossible to actually know The One, as I do and Job did, and, subsequently, not know The One and to know, know, know Him is to Love Love Love Him, The mind will not allow not knowing while remaining whole and healthy. That's the thing about having a relationship with The One that Job has that God in the Book of Job doesn't understand: you cannot run away from God. And to actively hate The One is, as your priest says, virtually impossible beyond the conceit of Satan in Paradise Lost.

The issue of a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, as a proxy for The One, is awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit in your consciousness in some manner. Most people begin with dreams. Making two parachute jumps is a good way to calibrate your Pucker Factor to distinguish between the Fear of the Lord and garden variety fear of fire, heights, the dark and death and dismemberment by tooth and claw. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever, while pure animal fear is not. You can get over pure animal fear, which brings us back to the Book of Job.

22:11 restart

22:46 Resurrection validates the God Hypothesis. It's the thing the Richard Carriers of the world cannot conveniently dismiss as myth: the entire Roman army understood the nature of crucifixion and the anomaly of resurrection was big medicine for people who had already been baptized by fire and baptized by blood and had a working, professional relationship with Yaweh, Queen of Battle.

In the final analysis, The One remains a mystery. The great gift of Jesus is that He represents the existential evidence that the mystery is the universe, itself, saying “Hi!”

22:46 restart

23:48 - 25:00 The reign of God in the Kingdom of Heaven here, on earth, brings us right back to Liberation Gospel. Because our salvation is a given, our obligation arising from John 3:16 is to go forth unto the world and bring on Earth as it is in Heaven which brings us right back to Ranger Jesus and the 5 Paragraph Field Order.

25:00 It's not about you going to heaven. Rome and Canterbury agree, at least as far as N.T. Wright is concerned. This is not the Campus Crusade for Campus position, which is like proposing to compete in the Tour de France on a bike with training wheels. I mean, the 4 spiritual laws are great, but then what? For the Charismatic, it's sexualized navel gazing rebranded as the Spirit of God moving on the waters.

25:35 Great video. As a Protestant, the idea that there was anything that needed to be pushed back against is just someone looking for a fight. I'm not going to become a Catholic for the same reasons I'm not going to become Jewish or Muslim: the essence is available to me from where I am,

Anyway, good show.

#transformingamericafirst eisenhowerrepublicansforAOC

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