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If I felt the spirit telling me that there was a Loch Ness Monster, I probably still wouldn’t believe, simply because I’d a priori expect some hard evidence to have shown up by now if a plesiosaur was surviving in the Scottish Highlands. Reason and science provide epistemological boundary markers for religious claims, and I’m skeptical of any religious premise that expects us to throw out all reason, or treats belief in the face of reason as a virtue. (Real reason, not the “Reason!” that is used as a conversation stopper by militant atheist types). Of course, I can hear… Read More
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When we think of the 19th-century gathering to Zion, our minds usually go straight to handcarts and covered wagons struggling across the plains. Yet, for the tens of thousands of European converts who heeded the call to gather, the “trail” was only the final leg of a much longer, more complex journey by rail and sail. In a fascinating new interview over at the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, historian Fred E. Woods (author of Ports to Posts: Latter-day Saint Gathering in the Nineteenth Century) dives into the massive logistical machine that moved a people across oceans and… Read More
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8 responses
![Dieter F. Uchtdorf, [Probable Future] President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints](https://timesandseasons.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/unnamed-1.jpg)
I wanted to wait an appropriate span after the death of President Holland to start speculating about the downstream implications of his passing for the future leadership of the Church, so here it is. Obviously the image is AI generated and I don’t claim any special insight into who would constitute the First Presidency in the event of an Uchtdorf Presidency, but if I had to parlay a guess a Christofferson/Bednar would make the most sense logically for continuity (Christofferson) and training for the presidency (Bednar), but who knows who he’d be inspired to call. While they have the worst… Read More
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Recently I explored the writings of a Mormon literary thinker little-known among Church members today, Wayne Booth. In The Company We Keep, Booth proposes that human beings not only learn by induction and deduction, but by what he calls “coduction” — the discovery of knowledge in conversation with others. This is a cornerstone of how we are supposed to learn at Church, in our Sunday School, Priesthood and Relief Society classes. It is also a key element to how we are supposed to learn in counsels. It requires that each person in a class, or in a counsels, both listen… Read More
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Few stories in human history have the impact of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. In the traditions of most of the world, the story suggests answers to issues like the existence of evil, the role of men and women, the purpose of life and the nature of God. Of course, the answers are interpreted in many different ways in different traditions. The LDS tradition departs from the traditions of mainstream Christianity, of course, and those differences, based at least in part on the additional scripture we use beyond what other have, give us significantly different interpretations,… Read More
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For many Latter-day Saints, the opening chapters of Genesis, with their creation accounts, are a battleground. We try to map the “days” of creation onto geological eras, reconcile a localized flood with global stratigraphy, or fit evolution into the rib of Adam. But what if we are asking the text to do something it was never designed to do? In a refreshing and technically grounded new interview over at the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, BYU ancient scripture professor Avram R. Shannon suggests that the key to understanding Genesis isn’t to force it into harmony with 21st-century science,… Read More
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28 responses
I am typically hesitant to speak critically of my experiences within the Church. To me, it is patently obvious that the Church is a force for good; in almost all cases, I have felt the Spirit working through its leadership and organizational structures. Furthermore, there is a certain Internet cottage industry that traffics exclusively in negative experiences, and in my observations that path rarely leads one toward more of the shiny fruit. And yet, less savory things do happen. While these instances are often blown out of proportion by critics, pretending they don’t exist creates its own set of problems.… Read More
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5 responses
Building on the collection of links about Latter-day Saint books for last year (Mormon Studies Books in 2025), here is the collection of books I’ve been able to find out about for 2026. I will continue to update this page throughout the year, as reviews, interviews, and podcasts become available for the books and other books come to my attention. Read More
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8 responses
Stats 101 covers how, when comparing two different groups or people, it’s not enough to simply state what the average differences are. We see this in those interminable discussions about who is the GOAT of this or that sport. We can simply compare their average numbers of points, but the NBA now might be scoring more points than the NBA in the 1990s, so while Lebron James may be scoring more points than Michael Jordan, some of that might simply because the NBA is different now (I am fabricating the details out of thin air, much to the horror of… Read More
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2 responses
Recently I explored the writings of a Mormon literary thinker little-known among Church members today, Wayne Booth. In The Company We Keep, Booth proposes that human beings not only learn by induction and deduction, but by what he calls “coduction” — the discovery of knowledge in conversation with others. This is a cornerstone of how we are supposed to learn at Church, in our Sunday School, Priesthood and Relief Society classes. It is also a key element to how we are supposed to learn in counsels. It requires that each person in a class, or in a counsels, both listen… Read More
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Creation is a crucial idea in LDS thought — we have shifted its meaning to suit a different cosmology, and its meaning remains in flux between the implications of our theology and what the rest of humanity understands. In LDS thought, not only is creation about using pre-existing materials (including us!) to create something new and something better, it is also something that each of us is learning. In this sense, we should cultivate the basic attitude needed to become creators — that of being creative. Read More
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30 responses
So I’m thinking about this issue after having watched Netflix’s documentary on Jodi Hildebrandt, “Evil Influencer”: what’s up with Mormons doing criminal and immoral things under the belief they are inspired by God? Such acts, of course, are pretty rare, but at this point it’s feeling a little disconcerting for it to appear that a seeming high percentage of such concerning cases happen among the Mormons. Read More
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6 responses
There are a handful of general authorities whose way with words guaranteed them a certain this-world immortality that goes beyond Wikipedia lists or early childhood memories of General Conference. Elder Maxwell was one, and I think President Holland is another. I’ve been seeing various people post some of their favorite or most impactful President Holland talks, so I’ve collated them together to produce a listing of the classic Holland talks. Feel free to add any I may have missed in the comments. Missionary Work and the Atonement However Long and Hard the Road The Bitter Cup and the Bloody Baptism… Read More
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There’s been lots of talk about the church granting more allowance additional biblical translations beyond the KJV, but I’m arguing in this post that I don’t think that’s what Joseph Smith meant by the eighth article of faith “as far as it is translated correctly.” JS of course did a revision of the Bible, but it contained very little of the fuller truth he taught in Nauvoo. The Articles of Faith also contained very little of JS’s fuller doctrine: no preexistence, plan of salvation, deification, eternal marriage, etc. Read More
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If you look strictly at our server logs, you might think Times & Seasons is a resource blog for Christmas scripts and demographic statistics. But if you look deeper, 2025 was a year of “The Anxious Debate”—anchored, thankfully, by a massive amount of reading. We spent the last twelve months wrestling with political dread, debating the nature of Church leadership, and doing our homework. Here is a look at the conversations (and the reading lists) that defined T&S in 2025. Read More
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Springer, Ryan M. “Heretic and the Inversion of the Mormon Endowment.” Dialogue A Journal of Mormon Thought 58, no. 4 (2025): 5-46. No abstract provided, this is a Gemini-created abstract. The psychological thriller Heretic functions as a veiled metaphor for spiritual descent, utilizing the symbolic language of Western esotericism to provide a modern iteration of the Gnostic Sophia myth. By analyzing the film’s narrative through the lenses of alchemy, Kabbalah, and sacred geometry, the journey of protagonists Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes is revealed as a deliberate inversion of traditional spiritual ascent. The film’s antagonist, Mr. Reed, operates as a… Read More
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How did you react to Church yesterday? What did you notice? Did you end up thinking differently? [In case you missed this last week, I was ill and didn’t post.] Do you think your reactions were what they should be? Were they ethical? This is the latest invitation for reactions to local meetings, continuing the spirit of my post on September 25th about how we receive what happens in Church meetings—sermons, lessons and anything else—and enter a conversation with them, magnifying what was said or adding what we think. In these posts I’m asking us all to think about how… Read More
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Come Follow Me Currculum, Latter-day Saint Thought, Old Testament, Poetry, SS Lesson – Old Testament
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I’ve left off any image to represent Gods “work and glory”; since we teach that His work is “to bring to pass the Immortality and Eternal Life of Man,” I am not at all sure how to represent that. Images of what ‘heaven’ looks like all seem to me to be either unlikely or based on earthly misconceptions. I guess I’m saying that I don’t have any idea what “Immortality and Eternal Life” looks like, and I doubt anyone else does either. Read More
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In his landmark 1993 work The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, Grant Underwood established himself as a scholar of high caliber, capable of articulating the complex historical and theological developments of the Restoration with remarkable clarity. His newest offering, Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies (published by Eerdmans), represents the culmination of decades of ecumenical dialogue and serious historical inquiry. In this impressive volume, Underwood seeks to move beyond the polemics that have often characterized interfaith comparisons, providing instead a clear-eyed and gracious analysis of how Latter-day Saint thought occupies a legitimate place within the broader Christian landscape. Read More
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13 responses
Now that I’m trying to avoid creating AI depictions of deity I feel like a Muslim. The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” is a scholarly endeavor to try to suss out details about Jesus’ life from a naturalistic worldview without any religious priors. Given the extreme scarcity of hard data you have to think deep and hard about what evidence to accept if you’re going to be exclusively relying on standard historical methods, and even then your confidence intervals are going to be huge. It’s kind of interesting and they make some good points, but it all kind of feels… Read More
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This Christmas Day marks exactly 100 years since the continent of South America was dedicated for the preaching of the gospel. Today, with millions of members and dozens of temples from Colombia to Tierra del Fuego, it is easy to view this growth as inevitable. But in 1925, when three General Authorities arrived in Buenos Aires to open the mission, success was anything but guaranteed. In fact, their efforts were shadowed by a spectacular failure 70 years prior and initially hampered by a theological assumption that they were looking for the “wrong” kind of people. In a fascinating new interview… Read More
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As we settle into the Christmas season, our thoughts often turn to the gifts we can offer our community. In the spirit of the season—and as a small token of appreciation for the vibrant intellectual and spiritual discussions that take place here at Times and Seasons—I want to share a project I’ve been working on: a free online book titled A Beginner’s Guide to B. H. Roberts: Excerpts from the Writings of B. H. Roberts. Read More
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19 responses
Years before we moved into my high school ward the bishop there–the classic 1990s Utah conservative curmudgeon type–announced from the stand (I imagine as parents were quickly trying to shield their children’s ears) that Santa Claus was not real and that parents should not lie to their kids. The man has since passed away, but he is an absolute legend to this day. While I find acting as some kind of mythbuster holiday edition without parental permission problematic, we do not in fact do Santa Claus in our house. This is in no way to cast judgment on those who… Read More
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Seven Songs: Signs of Christ in the Old Testament, by Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch, is a significant and rewarding addition to their thematic series. Having appreciated previous contributions like Seven Gospels and Seven Visions, this volume immediately captured attention for its focused engagement at the intersection of theology and ancient song. Structured as an epistolary dialogue between two accomplished disciple-scholars, the book models a deeply engaged approach to scripture, fulfilling the expressed intent to move beyond a simplistic devotional reading into sustained theological work while remaining accessible to general readers. It successfully positions the Old Testament’s poetic… Read More
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About a year ago I read and wrote a post on 1st Clement, arguably the earliest Christian document outside of the New Testament. I finally got around to reading the Didache, a Christian treatise that is also in the running for oldest authentic Christian document after the apostles (the confidence intervals for the documents coming from the “Apostolic Fathers” tend to overlap), which makes it relevant to our understanding of the Great Apostasy. While 1st Clement is a document by a named author who was very clearly trying to make things work out in the aftermath of the apostles,… Read More
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Earlier this week, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints updated its General Handbook, most notably in the section regarding Bible translations. For those of us following the conversation at From the Desk—including the interview and copost with Joshua Sears last week—the timing feels serendipitous. For the better part of a century, the cultural assumption in the Church has been that the King James Version (KJV) is the only “safe” translation, a sentiment largely inspired by J. Reuben Clark’s mid-20th-century defense of the text. However, the new Handbook update marks a monumental shift, officially validating what faithful LDS scholars… Read More
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Sacred Canopy Coined by sociologist of religion Peter Berger, a Sacred Canopy is a religiously-driven common worldview in a community. Where the very literal protective interdiction of St. Christopher on your daily drive, the daily calls to prayer, or a testimony of the Book of Mormon, are all part of a taken-for-granted worldview that seems as natural as the social norm of queuing for a line at the grocery store. With very few exceptions like the Amish or Haredim, I don’t think Sacred Canopies really exist anymore in the US. I’ve developed my thoughts on the puncturing of the Sacred… Read More
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How did you react to Church yesterday? What did you notice? Did you end up thinking differently? [In case you missed this last week, I was ill and didn’t post.] Do you think your reactions were what they should be? Were they ethical? This is the latest invitation for reactions to local meetings, continuing the spirit of my post on September 25th about how we receive what happens in Church meetings—sermons, lessons and anything else—and enter a conversation with them, magnifying what was said or adding what we think. In these posts I’m asking us all to think about how… Read More
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Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Latter-day Saint Thought, Poetry, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
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One advantage to providing the poetry for these lessons early is that it allows teachers and others a little time to adjust the timing of lessons. For example, this coming week’s lesson in Sunday School should be on the Family (see last week’s post), but given that the coming lesson is on the Sunday before Christmas, teachers might want to substitute this lesson instead, a lesson on Christ the Sunday before Christmas seems like a much better fit, in my opinion. And, I think this week I will even limit my comments—I’m not sure I can add much to the… Read More
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23 responses
So lately I’ve been noticing some rhetoric on the right that seems at odds with what had been more standard claims to a great devotion to the constitution. I’m probably not as linked into these networks as many others, so I’m curious what additional information T&S readers may know. Read More