Sheri Dew recently gave a Devotional Talk titled “Prophets Can See Around Corners” at BYU Hawaii on Nov 1st 2022. Bill and RFM take a deep look into this talk to see if what sort of apologetic tricks and absurd claims Sheri Dew makes this time around. Make some hot chocolate, grab a slice of fruitcake, and sit down by the fire, because Reel and RFM are going to fill your stockings with some Christmas Tidings and Apologetic Fallacies and Yuletide Cheer.
RESOURCES:
Sheri Dew’s Talk – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqFKbnzuF-M
Gordon B Hinkley’s 1998 Priesthood Talk – https://youtu.be/J2mcY_SkZSI
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1:27:26 conclusion by feeling
What I find most stunning about the conventional LDS perspective, so beautifully exemplified by Sherri Dew, is how proud the church leadership is for the most mundane accomplishments. A viral video, prescient calendar planning, a prudent allocation of financial resources. These can be good things. But these are things any committee accomplishes with a little effort and luck.
On things that matter the church leadership is struggling. Consider the challenge of organizing wards and providing places to meet. Where I live (aka mission field) the leadership has managed to build just two new chapels in the past 20 years, both of insufficient size. Then to mitigate this failure, the leadership is constantly shuffling boundaries, creating branches, eliminating branches. And in the midst of all that we switched to two hours church, then eliminated in person church for six months due to Covid and rebranded Home Teaching as Ministering because, well who knows?
The consequence of all these maneuvers is highly dysfunctional church congregations. And what does leadership say about this? Oh, isn’t it wonderful our prophet had the foresight to implement the Come Follow Me program for at home gospel learning.
This is like praising the captain of the Titanic for having a wonderful orchestra. Yes, an orchestra adds to the cruising experience, but it doesn’t forgive driving the ship into an iceberg.
Church leadership will never talk about its failures. Not at the general level. Not at the local level. The consequence is a church culture utterly immersed in mediocrity. For not only is mediocrity accepted, but in many cases it is demanded, seeing that going against leadership and challenging decisions is the worst thing a church member can do.
I’ve never liked Sheri dew. I thought I would, when everyone I knew was talking about how awesome she is. But her talks bothered me. Really, all the female speakers have bugged me. I think this episode explained ‘why’ pretty well. They’re all sucking up to the leadership and calling women some of the nastiest stereotypes on the planet… And in the same sentence, saying we’re wonderful and irreplaceable. It’s disgusting.
The Hawaiian/Korean lady at the end… Her story reminds me of the temple’s law of sacrifice. I had a panic attack when I went through for the first time… realizing that the church could and might take everything I have and leave me homeless. I was horrified that people were promising to agree to this type of treatment! It’s shocking to hear that they’ve actually done it to people.
Any mention by Sheri Dew about the “safe and effective” vaccines? Not much “seeing around corners” on that one. No. What we see is a church leadership that is especially earnest in delivering corporate / government approved messaging. What is special about that?
From what she describes in the talk, it doesn’t sound that hard to see something that Sheri Dew can’t see… Seems like a phenomenally low bar to clear.
By those standards, it’s a “miracle” that I got out of bed and had the foresight to brush my teeth this morning. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a state of perpetual emotional intensity and pause to ponder and study every time the prophet blows his nose.
Turns out, all you need to be a prophet is a grasp of the concept that paying off your home will set you ahead financially, and make some extremely basic decisions as to what you want to do for a social media post (make a video focused on Gratitude during Thanksgiving time and then pay to advertise your message? How visionary!!).
Why is she giving a devotional on any topic besides baking?
She has no authority in the Church.
Did President Nelson see that the COVID vaccine would harm and kill so many people?