Inside Tad's Mind

Amy and I were privledged to go see the "Broadway Across America" performance of the musical hit Wicked at the Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake last week. This is a charming retelling of the Frank Baum classic, The Wizard of Oz, that fills us in on the details of the relationship between Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, and Glinda, the good witch of the north. Like its inspiration, Wicked is a political satire masked as a fantasy musical. Where the original was a parody of government meddling with the prices of silver and gold. (Dorothy's slippers are silver in the book, and the name of the magical place, Oz, is the abbreviation for the word ounce.) In this telling of the story, the wizard isn't so wonderful. In fact, he makes up false enemies of Oz to build fear to make him appear "wonderful." Glinda is also not quite as "good" as her title would have her. Though she is not a bad witch, she is not completely innocent either. Elphaba is not wi...

There are several very successful people that I know that pay tithing. They are not LDS, so they don't pay their tithing to the LDS Church, but to other worthwhile charities. These people, and others that I don't know but have read about, all say that the act of paying their tithing, and of being charitable in general, are part of the reason that they are so successful. I have no reason to doubt them, so I accept what they say as true. And almost all practicing Mormons will "testify" that the law of tithing is true. They pay their tithing and have some anecdotal story to tell about how paying their tithing had some sort of mystical blessing effect that got them out of a jam. So the law of tithing, as taught by the LDS Church must be true, right? If tithing is a natural law (and Mormon theology says that it is) then there should be a metaphysical way of explaining it. (For those that don't know, metaphysics means the philosophical study of what is real.) Since tit...