Provo is badly oversalted.

Is it weird to say I miss Texas for the diversity? Back home, I took for granted the fact that I had friends from all over the world, from so many different faiths. Now, I can't remember the last time I talked in person with someone who wasn't Mormon. In the rest of the world, I suppose the Church is viewed as a tiny, peripheral minority--I still remember being galled by my high-school government teacher discussing the electoral impact of the United States' 5 million Jews, and then telling me that the six million Mormons in the US were "not statistically significant". Here in Provo, however, "we" are suffocatingly numerous.

I'm reading this book, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", by David Landes; and there's a chapter on the intellectual decline of Portugal and Spain in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. Obviously the Church is not the inquisitorial Moloch that sixteenth-century Spanish Catholicism was; institutionally, the Church is carefully, self-consciously tolerant. But there is an intellectual dearth that seems inevitable when you surround yourself with ostensibly like-minded people.

I didn't expect it to be this way. One would think that having so much of our intellectual foundation in common, we would save time arguing and be better equipped to explore the frontiers of what we don't know; but unfortunately, it seems that the uniformity is more pretended than real. We are supposed to believe the same things, but our worldviews are far more colored by upbringing, cultural milieu, socioeconomic status, and political leanings than one would hope.

Faith permeates every aspect of our intellectual life, so that you'll find it wherever you cut--and this is a good thing--but it breeds a kind of polite silence on certain issues. Since we use all the same religious materials to defend radically divergent points of view, discussions have a danger of becoming uncomfortably personal.

The beauty of growing up in Texas was that I didn't expect anyone to agree with me. I could talk to my friends about almost anything, and because we acknowledged our vastly different intellectual origins, we could just relax and enjoy it. I want to have that again.

On the other hand, my education is currently 70% subsidized by tithing, and it's hard to say no to $2,000 a semester.