The Brothers Sabey has always been and will remain a blog about “the issues”–and particularly about marriage and family, the culture wars, respectful dialogue, and our defense of what we believe to be valuable and right in the weakening traditions of our society. However, we have always written to a general audience and have tried never to assume that our readers shared our philosophical, political, or religious presuppositions. Our goal was to reach a diverse readership and not to alienate those who do not already share our views–the very people we would most wish to influence or at least have dialogue with. But as it turns out, as best we can tell, our readership is predominantly made up of like-minded people, and mostly fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Furthermore, to be hospitable, you have to occupy some place where you can host others. While we maintain our commitment to “courteous conversations” and hospitable dialogue across political and other differences, we also feel a need to acknowledge and explicitly speak from the particular place we occupy in American culture. In our minds, a fundamentally important part of that place is our membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Obviously we do not speak for the Church, nor are our perspectives (political or theological) necessarily shared by other members, but we realize that whenever we offer hospitality to the Other, we do so in part as sincere believers and practicing members of this religion. That community of faith constitutes a large part of the ground on which we stand and from which we speak; we no longer want to abstract ourselves from it. We have never attempted to hide our membership in the Church or some of the religious associations of some of our views. But going forward we will be addressing, among other issues, those of particular concern to the Church or the Christian community generally, and may sometimes adopt an overtly religious or theological stance. We do not consider this a “Church blog” (or a “Mormon blog” as we would have said before the last general conference). And we will still hope for a diverse readership. We hope to benefit all of our readers by this change–our fellow-members by addressing issues of importance to them, and our other readers across all political and religious divides by a more complete revelation of our views and identities, always hoping that they will respond in kind, affording us all a mutual opportunity for courteous and hospitable dialogue.