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It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant. The visit of Moroni to Joseph Smith provided one of those so-rare glimpses into the aetherial beyond when Joseph Smith tried to describe Moroni with the quote above, and I’ve always been a little curious about what it could have meant exactly. So, for your occasional dose of a harmless but not very useful mystery speculation, two possibilities if we assume the validity of the claim: He was describing something that… Read More
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The latest offering from the Brigham Young University Religious Education Symposium in Honor of Sidney B. Sperry is Joseph Smith as a Visionary: Heavenly Manifestations in the Latter Days. Joseph Smith, Jr. is known for experiencing several visions, such as the First Vision, the visits of the Angel Moroni, the Vision of the Three Degrees of Glory, and the 1836 vision of the celestial kingdom. These experiences both made him comparable to contemporaries and moved him to the margins of society as well. In addition, the visions he recorded had a major impact on his theology. The book is a… Read More
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Most of this lesson comes from D&C 25, the revelation in which Emma Smith is called to select the hymns for the Church’s first hymnal. But that calling is a small part of a revelation meant to provide Emma with help and support, as well as guidance in where she should devote her efforts—in “the Things of a Better World.” The lesson mostly leaves it up to us to determine what constitutes a ‘better world’—and it’s probably better that way. These selections are often involve complex ethical and moral judgments, so the lesson teaches the principles we should use to… Read More
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Note: This post was in the queue before this piece by Matthew Bowman went up at the Salt Lake Tribune. So it wasn’t created as a response to it, but in a way it does respond to the idea that the Catholics have figured out a way to effectively balance free thought with the religious character of a university that BYU would do well to adopt. They’ve had their own boundary maintenance and messiness as well. Sometimes as members we can get a little navel-gazy and think that a particular situation we are in is unique when it’s not. In… Read More
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The history of the Church around the world is still a developing field and while Mexico is one of the countries that has received attention, Fernando Gomez‘s A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Mexico, 1875-1946 shows that there is still more to learn and discover about the history of the Church in Mexico. In a recent interview with Gomez at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, more about the early history of the Church in Mexico was discussed, focusing on the events of the 1930s that led up to the schism known… Read More
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Personalist autocracies are bad for 99.99% of the people who live under them. By enabling bribery and corruption, they’re a significant drag on the economy. A few people get rich, while everyone else ends up worse off. By promoting incompetent but loyal functionaries, they make it difficult to accomplish important government tasks or provide the kind of information – about the economy, health, even the weather – that individuals and institutions need for basic decision-making. With scientific and academic research deprecated and artistic direction dictated by the autocrat’s tastes, science and culture tend to stagnate, and talent migrates to greener… Read More
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Note: It looks like we’ve missed our monthly “cutting-edge research” installment, but I haven’t forgotten…there was just no peer-reviewed articles dealing primarily with the Church this month! Hopefully to be continued next month. One of the more interesting studies in political science was the famous diplomat parking paper. In New York City and Washington DC one often sees vehicles with blue-plated tags that signal that its owner has diplomatic immunity. Among other things this means that they can basically park where they want and they don’t ever have to pay traffic tickets. Researchers measured how many traffic tickets each country’s… Read More
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As I’ve been working on my annotated Doctrine and Covenants this year, one resource I’ve enjoyed reading is The Doctrine and Covenants Study Guide: Start to Finish (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2024), ed. Thomas R. Valletta. The book is formatted as the text of the Doctrine and Covenants with comments in wide margins and footnotes. The commentary is a blend of historical and linguistic context and devotional commentary and offers a variety of insights into the text and the people who are being addressed in the revelations. Read More
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I’m currently spending time looking at the idea of ‘restoration’—probably the key idea that early members of the Church sought after. Our denomination is, and was then, considered a restoration of Christ’s original church. This lesson, covering mainly D&C 20, sometimes called the ‘constitution of the church, looks further at exactly what this means, and suggests that the main elements of the restoration can be divided into four categories: Doctrine, Ordinances, Priesthood Authority and Prophets. And as a result the lesson is divided into those four categories. Read More
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The 2024 PRLS just dropped. Taken every 8 or so years, the PRLS is one of the primary sources of religious beliefs and practices of Americans. While there are other, larger and more consistent surveys that either have a larger sample size (the CES) or a larger range of questions (the GSS), the PRLS is unique in that it has a large number of specifically religious questions and a large enough sample size that we can get a significant number of Latter-day Saints. I am slammed with work, so I don’t have time for more than a few cursory, drive-by-observations… Read More
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In AI world Anthropic recently released Claude 3.7 with extended thinking. The “extended thinking” function is the fruit of a realization in the AI labs that if you give the AI longer to think their responses are more thorough and accurate, so in addition to expanding the compute size you can expand the compute time parameter. Claude is best known for coding and application development, so since the announcement the AI Twitterverse has been exploding with people creating all sorts of (relatively) sophisticated games and simulations using a few lines of prompts. This has the potential to be a gamechanger… Read More
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The recently-published book Seven Visions: Images of Christ in the Doctrine and Covenants by Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch is a fantastic opportunity to listen in on a conversation between two brilliant theological minds as they explore seven different sections of the Doctrine and Covenants with a Christological focus. The book is structured as a series of letters back and forth between the two authors, discussing the seven sections in question (19, 45, 76, 88, 110, 130, and 138). It was a delightful blend of heartfelt discussion, analysis of text, and conclusions that could sometimes be a surprising take… Read More
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It might seem strange that the title of a lesson based on D&C 19, apparently written as Martin Harris struggled with wether to mortgage his farm to pay for the publication of the Book of Mormon, should be titled “Learn of Me.” But D&C 19 doesn’t talk about mortgages or farms, and the more I think about it, I realize that answers to many of our questions and struggles can be found in understanding better the nature of God. And when we take seriously the idea that we are His children, its not hard to realize that knowing God and… Read More
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What happens when a leader of a faith does not actually believe in its founding precepts? Presumably this kind of situation would be rare, but I recently finished reading a history of the Nation of Islam, and was struck by the parallels and sometimes contrasts between its recent history and that of the Community of Christ. In both cases you had a faith that was an eclectic variation on a mainstream tradition–for the Community of Christ Christianity, and for the Nation of Islam Islam. In both cases you have a top leader who more or less inherited his position through… Read More
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Continuing my series of annotated and formatted text of the Doctrine and Covenants, here are D&C 10 – D&C 19. As noted before, be aware that this is still a very rough draft based on the 1921 edition (for copyright reasons). I have a lot of work to go before I plan to look into publishing the full thing for real (e.g., further analysis of intertextuality, more literature review for the Doctrine and Covenants, etc.). Also, for more notes on section 13 about the “keys of the ministering of angels,” check out my interview at the Latter-day Saint history… Read More
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Om, the vocal essence of the universe according to various South Asian religions Even if one does not accept the Church’s truth claims, it clearly has a knack for tapping into deep, primordial religious themes and principles that pop up across time and space. One of these is what I’m going to call capital-S and lowercase-s sacred objects and symbolism. (There may be a more formal term in the anthropology of religion for this distinction that I’m not aware of, but these terms should suffice for our purposes). The lower-case s sacred symbols and objects are ones that we would… Read More
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In polite society we treat elections as an opportunity to advance our self-interest or express policy preferences, about which reasonable people can disagree. And most of the time that may be true and we’re left to choose between various imperfect options, but in this era I think the dwindling tribe of values voters has it right: Voting is a choice with moral implications, with clear right and wrong answers, for which we will one day face judgment. Of course I’m going to judge you for how you voted in November – I’m a very judgy person. But it’s not my… Read More
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The seventh and final book out of the Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series that I read is the one by Mason Kamana Allred on Seeing. This one and Philip Barlow’s entry on Time seemed like the most strange or esoteric topics in the series, but like Barlow’s book, Allred’s offers interesting insight and ideas that can help individuals live the gospel. Throughout the book, Allred is focused on discussing what the Doctrine and Covenants teaches about seeing things as they truly are. Within our faith, there is a lot of material aspect both to that seeing and what… Read More
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We often hear the phrase “the worth of souls,” but I’m not sure that we focus much on the values behind the idea of ‘worth.’ Much of our modern culture is concerned with how we value each individual — and especially with how the culture values us. Are we getting a fair shake? Are we recognized? How does the culture treat people of my gender, my skin color, my class, and my beliefs? Unfortunately, the culture still usually measures values in dollars and in power, which the gospel has always disputed and dismissed in phrases like “The worth of souls… Read More
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In some sectors of the orthodox world there is a tendency for people to effusively exclaim how great a Church leader or Church leaders are. Of course I’m not opposed in principle to making such statements, but I’ve wondered who the audience or what the purpose is of such acclamations. If the purpose is to demonstrate solidarity and support for the Church or some particular aspect thereof it would be more effective to direct one’s rhetoric towards the Church itself or the specific characteristic or thing the Church is doing since, as the leaders would agree, the Church is the… Read More
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What if the Book of Mormon was translated from an ancient language into modern English, but it wasn’t God or Joseph Smith who did the translation? If so, did Moroni translate the Book of Mormon? That’s the very theory that Roger Terry has suggested, based on Royal Skousen’s research into the Book of Mormon. He recently was part of an interview over at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, in which he discussed the theory. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview. Read More
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Every year the FBI publishes statistics on hate crimes against different racial/ethnic, sexual orientation, religious, and disability groups, including us. (As an aside, you know the FBI is peak woke [in the original, un-ironic sense] when they actually refer to us by the term requested by the Church [“Church of Jesus Christ”].) So how do we shake out? Over the past 5 years there have been 77 incidents of anti-Latter-day Saint bias-driven criminality according to the FBI. 41 of them have been destruction of property. In terms of location it also notes that 41 of them happened at churches, so… Read More
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The sixth out of the seven books in the Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series that I read is the one by Justin Collings on Divine Law. I admit that this one left me pleasantly surprised. I was expecting some sort of lawyerly analysis of how the commandments in the Doctrine and Covenants create a system of laws and how those hold up under the scrutiny of legal experts, akin to some of the chapters in Embracing the Law: Reading Doctrine and Covenants 42. Instead, I found an insightful and well-written exposition of the idea that divine law is… Read More
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I sometimes think that when we consider the visit of John the Baptist to Joseph and Oliver (the main event discussed in this lesson), we focus on the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood, but leave out the restoration of the ordinance of baptism. Yes, the ordinance can’t be performed without the priesthood, but then I think that in some ways the priesthood is defined by the ordinances that it can perform. Without baptism, wouldn’t the Aaronic Priesthood be different? Fortunately, the lesson does address both the priesthood and ordinances, putting both in the context of the restoration, the ‘great and… Read More
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A series I am going to occasionally come back to on my takes on early Church primary sources that I’m reading. We have a tendency to only read secondary takes, whether a talk, book, or commonly shared anecdote, but there are often insights buried in the primary sources that don’t make it into the collective consciousness. John Corrill’s A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints (Commonly Called Mormons) Text here. John Corrill’s History is considered one of the most valuable first hand accounts of the Church in the Missouri era. An early convert who left… Read More
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A key moment in the Church’s establishment in different locations and cultures—including among countries like Brazil, where the Church officially has over one million members—is the translation of the Book of Mormon. Especially in earlier years, the effort was performed by missionaries with rudimentary knowledge of the language working with locals to create the translation, which meant that revisions and retranslations would later be necessary, once the Church had access to a higher level of expertise in translation. The story of the translation and retranslations of the Book of Mormon in Portuguese to aid missionary efforts in Brazil and how… Read More
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I mentioned previously that my big project for the year associated with Come, Follow Me is working on an annotated Doctrine and Covenants and closely related content. For this part of the project, I am going through the assigned reading each week and comparing every major edition of the text that I can find (including those available through the Joseph Smith Papers Project) to note differences, reading several notable commentaries, and making remarks about scholarship that I’ve read or intertextuality with other scriptures. I’m going to share some of it here and there as I go, though be aware that this… Read More
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So I’ve posted related to this topic, but I was thinking of putting up a few posts on this larger theme of Greek philosophy corrupting early Christianity. Like I said in this video, that was a common Protestant idea going back to the 1600s, very prominent in Smith’s day, and was even in a book he owned. Such an idea seemed to have gotten picked up by Mormon intellectuals around the turn of the 19th century and seems to still be fairly popular among a lot of Mormons. Read More
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The adage that change happens “one funeral at a time” actually has a bit of sociological research to back it up. To get technical for a brief moment, there is a question as to whether cultural change happens by “settled disposition” or “active updating.” In other words whether: After an initial period of young people figuring things out, our attitudes settle down and are relatively stable from adulthood on, which means that change happens as older people die off and are replaced by younger people. People significantly change across the lifecourse, so societal cultural shifts happen because people are convinced… Read More
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Family. Isn’t it about … time? Yes, and so is the Gospel in general, according to Philip L. Barlow. Read More