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Book of Mormon in Elvish per Scripture Central In terms of translating sacred scripture, we have nothing on the Protestants. One of the go-to sources for describing and cataloging languages, the publication Ethnologue, was originally started (and is still used, I believe) as a tool to help Evangelical Christians record which languages still needed Bible translations. A question I’ve had in the back in my mind for a while is if we’ll ever get to a point of saturation with scriptural translations, where we’ll basically have translations for all major languages outside of some uncontacted Papua New Guinean tribe and… Read More
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The reading associated with this week in “Come, Follow Me” includes section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the revelation addressed to Emma Hale Smith. Luckily, the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk published an interview with Robin Jensen on that very subject, including a great discussion about how the revelations were a collaborative process. What follows here is a copost to that interview. Read More
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What does it mean to abstain from food polluted by idols? It’s one of the more pressing questions that we face today. Read More
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I don’t consider myself a terribly spiritual person. This isn’t as self-deprecating as it sounds, in part because although we tend to conflate “spiritual” with “righteous” or “good” they’re technically distinct concepts. I do the right things for the most part and my heart is in the right place, but I don’t have that kind of intense, interpersonal day-to-day interaction with God that some people have. Some of this is a function of effort, but I’m convinced that some people were simply just born with that particular gift. So on that note I was going to make my way through… Read More
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The Utah War is a subject of ongoing interest in the history of Utah and the years leading up to the American Civil War in the United States. As a Latter-day Saint who was raised in Utah, I’ve generally been introduced to the perspective of the Latter-day Saints rather than the rest of the nation. In University of Nebraska Press’s publication of On the Overland Trails with William Clark: A Teamster’s Utah War, 1857-1858, ed. William P. MacKinnon and Kenneth L. Alford, however, I gained a deeper understanding of the experiences and views of the other side of the conflict. The… Read More
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It’s hard to argue with the phrase “all things must be done in order.” For most rational people, doing things in order is important. But, what exactly do we mean by ‘order’? Whose order? Does the order need to be torn up sometimes? Order suggests the arrangements and procedures that support society and our institutions. In a church, where these structures are believed to have been established by God, doing things in order is in a sense following the commandments. And in a church that purports to be a restoration of the church established by Christ, we assume that the… Read More
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The Church recently announced that “The southwest corner of Temple Square has reopened to the public. Landscaping is still underway, but visitors can enjoy seeing three newly restored monuments.” As I have walked into the Tabernacle for rehearsals of the Bells at Temple Square each week, I have been a bit sad to see that those monuments do not include my favorite one (and a companion as a bell at Temple Square), the Relief Society Memorial Campanile. Often referred to as the Nauvoo Bell, the bell in the Campanile has a fascinating history that doesn’t actually include Nauvoo. Read More
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During those infrequent occasions when I’ve been able to teach pre-modern history and literature, one of the surprisingly consistent elements of the material we look at is hunger. Read More
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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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70 responses
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