Just another Jess

I was asked to speak at the October 2019 Alpine Utah YSA stake conference about doctrine and clarity. Anyone who knows me well knows this is one of my favorite discussion topics. Enough people asked me to send them the talk afterward that I thought I'd post it here with the sources to aid in future study. Enjoy! Doctrine & Clarity William Shakespeare once wrote: “The prince of darkness is a gentleman” (King Lear, Act 3 Scene 4 Line 143). I think about that a lot. While we know that truth exists, it can sometimes be difficult to ascertain because the adversary does an excellent job disguising deceit. In conference just two weeks ago, we learned from David A. Bednar that "[Satan camouflages] spiritually dangerous ideas and actions" ( Watchful unto Prayer Continually , 5 Oct. 2019), and from Gary E. Stevenson that Satan disguises sins as harmless, and that "there are forces at play today designed to deliberately lead us away from absolute truth&q

I sent a couple of tweets a little over a week ago about being on my period. Nothing graphic—just two generic tweets, one promoting menstrual cups (yeet) and the other about how my period was exacerbating my emotional response to an Avengers meme (still not over I love you 3000, tbh). This weekend, I had a few people approach me about these tweets and inform me that they felt I was oversharing, insinuating that social media was an inappropriate platform to share this kind of information. As a sociologist with a special interest in social issues, I, of course, took to Instagram to collect some additional data from my social circle. I posted a poll to my Instagram story asking about whether it was inappropriate to talk about periods on social media, and got the response that I expected: the majority of poll respondents voted that talking about periods on social media is acceptable. One hypothesis to support these findings is that the millennial social atmosphere encour