Remember "Kolob Sunday"?

From the "backburner never got around to posting" department:
 
A question by message board participant "battlefieldboy" once sparked BYU professor Daniel C. Peterson's memory of the good old days:

battlefieldboy:
I have other Questions like how come the Church doesn't teach about Kolob anymore is it because it was such a silly notion that we would be laughed out of mainstream christianity. Kind of like believing the world is flat.

Daniel Peterson:
Actually, I didn't realize that we had ever been in "mainstream Christianity," or that we even aspired to join.

You're right, though. When I was a boy, the second Sunday of every month was "Kolob Sunday," when sacrament meeting talks were turned over to contemplation of Kolob and we attended dressed in spacesuits. There were at least thirty or forty hymns in the hymnal dedicated to Kolob. Every fourth year in the Sunday School and seminary curriculum was focused on Kolobology. Our stake used to run a group of observatories up on Mt. Wilson, above the Pasadena area, that we used to search for Kolob, and occasionally we got to go down to the even bigger Kolob-searching facility on Mt. Palomar, jointly run by the stakes near San Diego. But now there's only one rarely-sung hymn left, and we've sold off the observatories.

P.S. With John Gee and Bill Hamblin, I just published an article in the book Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant, focused to a certain extent on Kolob. I didn't realize that we don't do that anymore. Whoops.¹

FOOTNOTES

[1]
Conversation posted to the MormonApologetics.org message board, August 11, 2007.
The article to which Peterson refers is "And I Saw the Stars: The Book of Abraham and Ancient Geocentric Astronomy" by John Gee, William J. Hamblin, and Daniel C. Peterson in Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant by John Gee and Brian M. Hauglid.