Utah still has a “keep sweet” problem — “Politeness doesn’t care about morality, and vice versa. If a Nazi is polite, does that change anything about Nazism or the horrors of Nazism? No. It changes nothing, and this nothing is the very hallmark of politeness. A virtue of pure form, of etiquette and ceremony! A show of virtue…

“More and more I could see a gap between what I had learned in Sunday school and what I was learning in college.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. went to college at the young age of 15 and was immediately enthralled with the conversations he encountered there. “My days in college were very exciting ones,” he writes. “There was a free atmosphere.” It was there he found Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience…

Too many are falling prey to conspirituality — Ram Dass, famed author of Be Here Now, fell for a con-artist. It was the early 1970s, and Dass longed for a new spiritual instructor after his former guru named Maharaj-ji passed away. One day a friend took him to the basement of her Brooklyn home to meet a woman…

Dear Charles — First off, I’m a fan. For years, I’ve listened to your interviews, followed your articles, read your book Sacred Economics, and more. I admire your thoughtfulness, the way you envision new ways of being in the world. Like you, I’m disillusioned with current systems in wealthy countries…

In his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Facebook investor Peter Thiel argues that founders should build startups that are so innovative they don’t have competitors. It’s best, as the title indicates, to go from zero (nothing) to one (something original). If you…

Forget a future “solemn separation.” Choose each other now. — Heaven is broken, at least as it’s currently envisioned by many Christians around the world. We could look at any number of denominational creeds to see why. For instance, the National Baptist Convention declares that on judgment day “the wicked will be adjudged to endless punishment and the righteous to…

A Meditation on Evolution and Purpose — For most my life, I’ve thought of my heritage as coming from a single tradition: Mormonism. That’s my people, who I am—part of a pioneer story. It’s like this: Six generations ago, my ancestor William Ogden joined the LDS Church in Lancashire, England and immigrated to Richfield, Utah. On my…

Two weeks ago, I wrote a letter to LDS Trump supporters that got far more attention than I expected. The response was almost uniformly positive, but I also received several messages I feel are worth addressing. Why? Because I’m haunted by the words of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. “Trump…

Growing up in Utah County during the nineties, I couldn’t hear the end of Bill Clinton’s sex scandal in the White House. It was one of the first stories in my political awareness, and the whole thing affected me so deeply that for years if you’d asked me what I…