the motivation for a post soon to come where i explain for myself as much as for you why i believe what i do

i have been so out of touch lately. i hardly catch the news in snippets over radio as i drive to and from work. i don't know that an op-ed and a blog post in response count as news, but i read them both and found them interesting. i thought you might too.

here's the short version in representative quotes.

op-ed by ian williams (never met him): "A culture that walks in such tidy lockstep has the advantage of homogeneity, and will always look good on paper. It certainly works for my many cousins, whom I love. But some of us who have experienced the Mormon life firsthand would rather choose a messy, colorful America lurching forward without so many confines — every day and twice on Sunday."

blog by james goldberg (friend of mine): "But you seem to think that your world is the real world, and that the real world is something I'm impossibly distanced from...You know the world, I would guess, far better from how it looks on paper than from how it looks up close."

yes, i find this stuff interesting because i belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or Mormon), but I also find it interesting because it raises these questions for me:

• is it possible to fundamentally understand or experience another person's reality?
• what habits, practices, etc. do i have that enhance or limit my ability to understand the people around me?
• how do we talk civilly about things that matter most to us?