Vote (for me!) in the 2011 Brodies!!

We have a huge number of fantastic nominees to vote for in this year's Brodie awards!! I'd like to call attention to my two entries (since I'm quite pleased with them, and I don't want them to be totally buried among all the other excellent choices):

What is Faith? This is a discussion I wrote to try to pin down what people mean when they talk about faith, and especially what they mean when they talk about believing something "on faith." I became curious about this question when I noticed misunderstandings over the word. People assumed that since they were all using this same word "faith" that they must be talking about the same thing -- when in reality the different speakers were talking about very different concepts. Naturally, this is a bit of a follow-up to my earlier piece It takes a lot of faith to believe that!!!. (running for Best Philosophical/Theological Discussion)

Building on a Religious Background is an essay I wrote for the October / November 2011 issue of Free Inquiry (the magazine of the Council for Secular Humanism). It's about how non-believers who were raised in a religion have a unique opportunity to foster cross-belief dialog. (running for Best Discussion of Mormon (or former-Mormon) Community)

Vote (for me) in the 2010 Brodies!!!

It's that time of year again! Time to showcase the best LDS-interest stuff posted to the Internet in the past year!! And vote for which ones deserve awards as the very best!

Several of my posts are in the running. Please vote for me -- unless, of course, you think someone else's post in the same category is better. ;^) There's some pretty stiff competition!

• for Best Interfaith Interaction: Our Heavenly Nico!


• for Best Philosophical/Religious Discussion: Faith vs. Bias


• for Most Interesting Commentary on Mormonism: Survival of the Fittest: Mormon Style!


• for Best Gender Issues Discussion: Career women vs. SAHMs round II: There Can Be Only One True Choice!


• for Best Book Review: The Church of the For-Profit Corporation: Daymon Smith's "The Book of Mammon"


• for Best Book Review: Steven H. Lee's "Falling into Life: A Gay Exmormon's Journey"

Plus, I was nominated for "Best Bridge Building" (overall). We'll see if I can beat John Dehlin -- he's a lot more famous than I am. ;)

Whether I win or not, though, I'm thrilled to see how many people are excited about these awards!! This is only the second year we've been holding Brodie Awards at Main Street Plaza, and I'm glad to see that people are having fun with them! :D

blogging/blogroll update from Outer Blogness and beyond!!

As you may have noticed, the service that was hosting Outer Blogness has vanished in a puff of smoke. Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll was using the same service, and has plans for something new. I'll probably use whatever service he finds (or founds), but that solution isn't coming any time soon.

In the meantime, if you have the Blogrolling code for Outer Blogness on your blog somewhere, please remove it and just link to Main Street Plaza instead. The whole blogroll is there. I'll try to come up with a nice button graphic for it soon. :D

While I'm at it, I'll probably try and update the ol' blog here, too (the way we spiffed up MSP). That code was the only thing keeping me from switching from an old-style blogger template to the more modern version (with "widgets" to choose from instead of just mucking around in the html code!). Maybe I'll even be inspired to create a new masthead -- something a tad more relevant to my current life here in Switzerland. We'll see if I manage to come up with something!

Naturally, it's getting to be about time to update my own blogroll. There are plenty of blogs on it that have kind of petered out, and there are plenty that I read regularly now (through my RSS reader) that I've neglected to add. So if you read this blog -- and have a blog yourself -- please leave a comment here so I'll know to put (or keep) you on my upcoming new-and-improved blogroll. Thanks!

*** Update ***

As I'd hoped, my fellow MSP permablogger Chino Blanco prepared some lovely buttons!!

If you're a part of Outer Blogness, I'd like to ask you to please link to Main Street Plaza, and perhaps even use one of these lovely images!





Either save your favorite image and link it to MSP on your own, or copy this code into your blog template:

<a href="http://latterdaymainstreet.com/"><img src="http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f394/Chino_Blanco/Brig-Blue-120-web.jpg" /></a>

Thanks, and I hope to see you in Outer Blogness!!

Announcing the William Law X-Mormon of the Year Award!!

If you follow the Mormon blog-o-sphere -- known as "the Bloggernacle" -- you know that two of the biggest blogs give yearly awards to famous people. Times and Seasons has the Mormon of the Year Award, and By Common Consent awards the Boggs-Doniphan Gentile of the Year to the non-Mormon who has had the biggest impact on Mormonism.


Well, Chino Blanco suggested that Main Street Plaza should step up to the plate and offer a corresponding award!!! Check it out and nominate your favorite exmo-who-made-the-news! :D

Sunstone exmo party and other fun in SLC!!

I hadn't been to Utah in seven years -- my last visit was long before I took up discussing Mormonism on the Internet -- so I was curious to have a look at this so-called "Main Street Plaza" I'd heard so much about.

(The group blog Main Street Plaza is actually named after the pedestrian passage separating Temple Square from the Church Office Building -- once a public road, it is now owned by the CoJCoL-dS, which prohibits gay people from kissing there.)

I had some fun touring the LDS sites with my brother. There's some interesting stuff in the Church History Museum, including the original golden Moroni statue and this Masonic-seeing-eye beehive quilt:



The Salt Lake Temple is a lot smaller than it looks in pictures (where they like to get close and point the camera up at it), and it doesn't help that they've surrounded it with other large and tall buildings.

Other surprises? Well, I saw a couple of Smarts, which I didn't expect:


I also saw an "erotic bakery" -- which I'd thought was just a joke that was made up for "The Simpsons". I would have gone to get a closer look and a picture, but it was on the other side of the road, and I'd gotten tired of crossing these crazy downtown streets that are eight lanes wide on every single block. (All of the main sites are within a few blocks of one another, but that doesn't mean they're anywhere near each other...)

Then I went to a fabulous party with some of the coolest folks in town:


I'd like to call it an Outer Blogness party, but some of these exmos' blogs aren't on the list yet. (Please leave a comment if you have the URL of any former/cultural Mormon blog that isn't on the "Outer Blogness" list yet.)



This picture illustrates why I sadly missed some of the Sunstone Symposium on Wednesday morning (including the Zelophehad's daughters panel and Margaret Toscano's presentation about God's genitals). I was really embarrassed, thinking, "Great, here I am giving a panel on overcoming stereotypes, and I miss the beginning of the conference because of a party-related headache..."

But that's not a stereotype or misconception -- it's totally accurate! When the exmo atheists come into town, partying is the first order of business. ;^)

Outer Blogness is back in business!!!

Well, sort of.

The blogroll update functions were working this morning, so I did a grand update of Outer Blogness, deleting dead links, adding all of the new exmo bloggers that have appeared since the blogrolling service wigged out six months ago, and updating the links for all those who have moved or changed their blog names. I started from the bottom and got all the way up to the d's when the update service crashed. So, unless your blog name starts with a, b, c, or d, your link has been corrected on the list. Please leave a comment if there's an error in your link (or if you don't want to be on the list).

Naturally, I updated the blogroll at Main Street Plaza at the same time. On that one, I was able to finish the whole alphabet!

Now, my goal with Outer Blogness is to provide a list of all of the exmo blogs out there, whether the blogger writes about Mormonism or not. I keep my eyes open, but I can't always find them all. If you know of an exmo blog that I don't have on my list, please leave a comment. Any blogger who has a strong personal connection with Mormonism (eg. you were Mormon or you have a close family member who is), can be a part of Outer Blogness.

Note that you can put the Outer Blogness list in your own sidebar (see the Outer Blogness page for instructions). Normally, it should just show the 25 most recently updated blogs in Outer Blogness, but that feature appears to be broken. I hope the Blogrolling guys will fix it soon. They've also included ads that appear at the top of the page when you click through to the other blog. That "feature" works. But the menu where I can pay a fee to turn the ads off doesn't.

Also, if you're not an exmo, but you'd like to be in my regular blogroll, you can leave a comment for that as well. :D

Calling all of Outer Blogness

I hope you don't mind if I make a few community-related requests... ;^)

1. I'd like my Outer Blogness list to be as complete (and hence helpful) as possible, so if you know of any ex-Mormon, post-Mormon, or DAMU blogs that aren't on my list, please email me: chanson dot exmormon at gmail dot com. Additionally, I understand that you Wordpress users cant post Javascript in your sidebars. So in case you're interested in using all or part of my list, I've posted an easy-to-import opml version of it here.

2. I've posted a fun story-collecting thread over at Main Street Plaza: From baptism to resignation or excommunication, and I hope you'll contribute!

3. Sideon was "thinkin' a collaborative Book of Exmormon would be nifty - we could pilfer the best and brightest ideas, concepts, images and create one serialized book that celebrates diversity, sexuality, the various isms or ologies, with a nice hat tip towards adult erotica (visual or textual)." Keep an eye on his blog for further updates and details on this exciting project!!! :D

Outer Blogness: the complete list

The complete "Outer Blogness" blogroll is currently hosted on our hub/community blog Main Street Plaza (as of October 2010).

For your blog to qualify as part of this Outer Blogness list, you must meet the following two criteria:

1. You have been Mormon (or at the very least you've had a strong personal connection with Mormonism in your life),
2. You do not currently believe the truth claims of Mormonism.

That's it. You don't actually have to talk about Mormonism on your blog at all. If you qualify and I don't have you on the list, please email me: chanson dot exmormon at gmail dot com. Ditto for if there's an error in your link or title or if you're on the list and would like to be removed.

We used to have a handy sidebar widget you could use to show the most-recently-updated Outer Blogness blogs -- and maybe one day we will again! But for now (Fall 2010), if you're a part of Outer Blogness, we'd like to ask you to display a link to Main Street Plaza on your blog. You can even use one of these handy buttons (courtesy of Chino Blanco)!





Either save the image and link it to MSP on your own, or copy this code into your blog template:

<a href="http://latterdaymainstreet.com/"><img src="http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f394/Chino_Blanco/Brig-Blue-120-web.jpg" /></a>

Thanks, and I hope to see you soon in Outer Blogness!!