Jacob Bender's Blog, page 15

Thoreau vs. the BYU

[Henry David Thoreau is not impressed by your BYU beard bans]  You can always tell when an English major got their undergrad at BYU by how vociferously they denounce Thoreau.  I don't just mean they roll their eyes at Walden or respectfully disagree with his Defense of John Brown, no, I mean they tear into him like a cornered dog, as though he has personally insulted them somehow.

Serious, almost every last BYU English grad I've ever met has at some point ranted (as though they were...

Further Adventures in Hitch-Hiking

(A continuation of previous adventures, obviously).

I'm not entirely prepared to rule out the possibility that he was some sort of Field of Dreams-esque traveling ghost from the 1920s.

He was a fiddler, you see.  A fiddler.  That's what he seriously called himself.  Had his violin with him, and there were patches on the case and everything.  He wore actual overalls.  Had a big black bushy beard and a cap.  I picked him up somewhere east of Boise, and he said he wa...

Against Streaming

Several months ago, a young undergrad looked at me quizzically when I mentioned off-hand a CD I had just bought.  "Wait, you buy CDs?" she asked in disbelief, "You mean you don't just stream Spotify through your smartphone?"  When I protested that I downloaded music onto my iPod, she said, "Wow, that's like hipster status right there!"  I was about to guffaw that iPods hardly qualify as vintage tech, but then I realized that iPods are now 10 years old.  Oh, man.  That...

Honesty as a Secondary Virtue

I gotta be careful how I phrase this, because I do sincerely believe in the grave importance of honesty, for I have been around enough salesmen to know how dishonesty can corrode your soul.  Nevertheless, in my years teaching, I've come to realize that honesty is only the beginning, not the end--that it is a secondary virtue perhaps, not a primary.

For example, near every semester I've taught, I've at some point started class by asking off-hand if everyone's done the reading, and inevitab...

Heavenly Mother

"In the heav'ns are parents single/No, the thought makes reason stare/Truth is reason, truth eternal/tells me I've a Mother there"
-Hymn #292 "O My Father," by Eliza R. Snow 

So I was invited to present at Sunstone Symposium a week ago, which was a fun experience; it being my first time, I often felt like an anthropologist, observing a whole new culture of sorts.  To a lot of leftie LDS folk, Sunstone is clearly kind of a safe place, to gather and share and support one another; for o...

Low and the Hermeneutics of Silence

(A version of the paper I was recently invited to deliver at the Sunstone Symposium, held at the University of Utah, 7/31/14, as part of a panel on Mormonism and Pop Culture . I first presented it over a year ago at the Association of Mormon Letters at Utah Valley University; the original version first appeared on
The Minnesota-based indie-trio Low, when they are noted at all, are typically noted for two points: 1) for being “that slow, quiet band” that produces minimalist mus...

A Sort of Defense of The Amazing Spiderman

This will not be as spirited a defense as my Man of Steel thing.  Part of it really is the whole reboot fatigue thing, what with this new version coming out a scarce 5 years after Spiderman 3; not to mention that the whole concept of "gritty" franchise reboots (fresh and novel when Batman Begins and Casino Royale first premiered in the mid-'00s) had already worn thin by 2012, and are mainly now just another sign of the utter creative bankruptcy of contemporary Hollywood.

Yet though I, too...

Jesus the Christ Revisited

The above image is the cover that probably most every one who's actually read James E. Talmage's Jesus the Christ is familiar with--not the fine, ornate hardback versions that appears on some LDS bookshelves to show-off but never crack open, but the cheap-paperback version that actually gets read.

It's the cover from the "Approved Missionary Reference Library"®; there's an incredibly narrow number of non-scriptural books (like, 5 of them) approved for LDS missionaries to read on their very lim...

A Defense of Man of Steel

If you went by sage wisdom of internet comment boards, you'd assume that Man of Steel is the most uniformly panned and despised superhero movie in the history of mankind; of course, if you went by the internet, you'd also assume that Community was the most popular TV show in America, so there's that.

Also, since the flick grossed well over a half-billion dollars globally, I think it's safe to say that not only is it probably not as universally detested as they interwebs might indicate, but tha...

Facebook Was NEVER Actually Cool, Kids

So every few months, some new clickbait appears about how the kids these days "say that facebook isn't cool anymore"; indeed, some of these kids have told me so in person, telling me that they spend so much time on the twitters and the instagrams and so forth that they're "hardly ever on facebook anymore"--yet these same 18-year-olds keep adding me on facebook, "liking" my statuses and photos, and updating their profile pics.  If this is what qualifies as "hardly on facebook anymore," I'...