Jana Riess
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Jana Riess’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You guys want to go get eggs with your brothers? So every day the kids have to gather eggs.
A reporter got to do a deep dive and essentially spend time with this family and found that it was hard to get the woman, Hannah, to speak for herself. Either she was constantly being interrupted by her eight children, which is understandable, or being spoken over by her husband, which is not going to be so understandable in today's world.
That is a really good question. I think that certainly it is a church that for decades has taught its members, quote, every member a missionary, unquote. That has been a mantra. And, you know, we see these missionaries who are going out into the world and they have their name tags and they're giving a year and a half to two years of their lives as volunteers. That's one kind of missionary work.
But even ordinary people who are just living their lives and raising their kids and going to PTA meetings and they are supposed to consider themselves to be missionaries as well. And so one of the things that we could see happening 20 years ago as these blogs start taking off, these Mormon mommy blogs that you were talking about, is
In the little corner, you would see discreetly, oh, you know, here's a link to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And it wouldn't necessarily be overt. It wouldn't be, let me tell you what I believe about Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
No, it was leading through lifestyle. So I'm going to show you my happy family and I'm going to show you that we're not perfect. You know, we're going to show you some cracks that are fine. Really nice looking cracks, right? I mean, as cracks in the facade go, we're going to show you just a few that are not that hard to look at just to make us seem more palatable, right?
Mormons have long been instructed to keep a record of our lives. One of the previous presidents of the church, Spencer W. Kimball, actually told Latter-day Saints in the 1970s that angels in heaven would be reading their journals someday.
You know, that our lives living in this particular time and place in history would be so inspiring that even the angels of heaven would want to know, how did you conduct your life?
Which is really an interesting thing that maybe if you do journal, you don't want to have that be the bar. Like that's a lot of pressure.
Right? No, you don't want to think that. But it does elevate the act of diary keeping to a sacred degree.
This is not just, and I went to the football game today and I saw so-and-so. This was casting your daily life in some kind of almost cosmic, holy umbrella.
Scrapbooking in LDS culture definitely has been a thing. Digital scrapbooking has kind of supplanted the stickers and having a crop night on a Friday night kind of thing that we used to do back in the day. But the impetus of recording this, of making it beautiful, making the record itself into an artifact that can be passed down, that's still very much present.
So there is a precedent for Latter-day Saints to do missionary work. There is a precedent for them to keep a record of their lives and their families for their posterity, so their descendants. And All of that, I think, feeds into the early success of Mormon women who are getting into this platform 20 years ago.
It's such a love-hate relationship. So on the one hand, you do have this emphasis from the church that this could be a tool that is used for good things. So in 2007, one of the highest leaders of the LDS church, M. Russell Ballard, gives a speech.
He said, I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the internet to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the restoration.
And so the church explicitly promoted this idea that you would write something, that you would post something to present your religion and possibly also yourself and your family in a positive light. And they got a very good response to that in 2007 with a lot of members using their own personal social media or Internet presence to share the gospel.
And then on the other hand, at the same time, you have the church trying to control its own narrative in a way that it's always been able to. It's always been able to write its own history and publish its own books about that history. And suddenly on the internet, you have people saying, well, actually, Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old girl. And what do we think about that? And then
In the past, many Latter-day Saints, I think, would have simply responded and said, well, that's just an anti-Mormon lie. There's no evidence for that.
And then in the age of the internet, suddenly confronted with the mountain of evidence for a lot of things that people weren't necessarily taught about LDS history at church, suddenly they have to say, oh, what else don't I know about the church's own history? And so the church has...
not enjoyed, I think, that part of the internet, the idea that everything is available out there for better or for worse, and that it can no longer control even its own story, let alone all the other stories, right?
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