Mark Ashurst-McGee asks about the uniformity of the Golden Plates in eyewitness accounts, even though they contain both Mormon’s abridgement and Nephi’s small plates, and this is in fact genuinely weird.
Unless someone gets lucky with a spade or a metal detector, the full extent of Mormon’s sources will remain unknown. To keep even tentative answers on the side of plausibility rather than fantasy, how we think about Mormon’s sources should be informed by any information we have about Nephite literacy and textual culture.
The logical place for a philological approach to the Book of Mormon to begin is with Mormon, its eponymous editor, and his sources. How much did Mormon know about the Nephites, and what kind of records did he have to work with?
When I look at recent studies of the Book of Mormon, the biggest deficit I see is the lack of instinct for philology.
Whereas disease, as now with COVID-19, causes death to many and harm to many more, and worsens poverty and hunger even among those it does not strike directly, and causes fear in those who await infection and its consequences, and inflicts sorrow and grief on those who lose family and beloved friends; while Jesus, in His atoning mercy
SWOT analysis seems to be something business majors learn their first semester. I’ve never been a business major, but it seems like a reasonable way to start thinking about what the church is facing in these virus-invested times of unknown duration.
I’m only a translator in the sense that people keep paying me to translate things for them.
They say novel Coronavirus disease is easier on kids, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
For all their differences, the essential and irreducible historical dilemma of the Old Testament, New Testament, and Book of Mormon is very much the same.
To update what Craig wrote in 2010: Times and Seasons is happy to welcome as a guest blogger Steve Smith, who teaches and writes mainly about religious freedom, constitutional law, and jurisprudence. His most recent book is Pagans and Christians in the City (Eerdmans, 2018). Steve graduated from BYU in 1976 before studying law at Yale, and he has taught at various law schools including Notre Dame, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan (as a visiting professor), Virginia (as a visitor), and the University of San Diego, where he is currently employed. Steve’s wife Merina also attended BYU, and they have five children. Somehow we have convinced Steve to share some more of his thoughts with us. Welcome, Steve.
Don’t bring immanent evidence to a transcendent argument.
Yes. Should historians write about current events? Maybe not. But when they do, they shouldn’t do it like this.
Do not ascribe to fear or compulsion what can be best explained by love.
When I teach Revelation 1-11 to my youth Sunday School class, I’ll probably start off by saying something about gasoline.
Steven Smith (who has occasionally favored us with comments here at T&S) is not the first to describe our current cultural moment as a new conflict between pagans and Christians. As Smith describes at length in Pagans and Christians in the City, others, on both sides of the divide, have done so using the same language. Smith does argue quite convincingly, however, that this new conflict of pagan vs. Christian is not merely an apt metaphor, but a sober description of the American religious landscape.
I don’t know if a complete break with Scouting was necessary. I would have been content if the church had only eliminated Cub Scouts and the Eagle Scout rank.
General Conference begins in two days. I’m looking forward to it, but not as much to the online responses.
Voir dire, from Norman French, is pronounced “jury selection” by normal people, but I had always stayed one step ahead of the law and never seen it first hand.
This hit my inbox this afternoon: In case you hadn’t heard, Clark Goble just passed away from a stroke.
Over at the Interpreter, Nate Oman asks an important question. How will the church explain its relevance to a new generation that is less interested in the narratives that have served the church well in the past? Or as he puts it, what will be the “new language in which to celebrate the Restoration”?
During this particularly awful political moment, I allow myself a sigh of relief when I read news articles about Evangelical leaders and institutions embracing the current president.
Adiaphora is a term that has played an important role in Lutheran history but not much in our own, although perhaps it should.
Hymns are useful evidence of religious practice. Hymns are a basic element of personal devotion, but at the same time the compilation of the hymnbook is carefully monitored by church leaders and the performance of hymns is modeled during the sessions of General Conference and other broadcasts, so hymns lie somewhere between high theology and lived religion. Our hymnbook provides an insight not quite like any other source on what Latter-day Saints believe.
If we wanted to hazard a guess at what the upcoming years and decades hold in store for the church in the United States, the decisive factors will likely be to what extent the country as a whole becomes more secular (or more religious), and how the church correspondingly arrives at a place of higher or lower tension with the rest of society.
The most paranoid fantasies your persecution complex can dream up will probably come true eventually, although not where you live, but somewhere else in the world. It’s an unavoidable risk of establishing local branches of the church in places that can go from welcoming to hostile within a few years or decades.
The current round of dissatisfaction with the BYU honor code will hopefully result in some tinkering around the edges and perhaps a few personnel changes, and then quickly be forgotten before it has a chance to undermine the university’s educational and religious missions, which might roughly be summarized as producing graduates who are educated, productive, and committed to the church.
For some time, I’ve been writing obituaries for a secular educational institution (which, for the sake of the failing hearts of its remaining alumni, will remain anonymous).
I don’t think the language usage patterns of the Book of Mormon require the participation of anyone besides Joseph Smith.
Earthly Parents is the pen name of the author of And It Was Very Good: A Latter-day Saint’s Guide to Lovemaking. He agreed to share some of the book’s background here. * * * On the top of my parent’s bookshelf, far above the white-spined World Book Encyclopedias I read as a child, sat a thick, black book. That book wasn’t the World Book Encyclopedia. That book was called Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.
