-
•
•
I was very excited that earlier this week, we were able to publish a page on From the Desk about Global Mormonism: Latter-day Saints Around the World. This is the culmination of years of effort to identify published histories about communities in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints outside of the historically prevalent Anglo-Americans in the Church, and to conduct interviews with the experts who wrote these histories. The page brings together key information from and links to those interviews while also sharing some additional information and links to many more resources on the global Church. We plan… Read More
-
•
•
20 responses
Note: I tried to delay this post because of the Charlie Kirk shooting, but it’s somehow not shifting it for mobile devices and I don’t know how to fix that, so I’m leaving it up. On the shooting, I really don’t have anything to say that isn’t already being said all over the Internet. As I’ve noted before, I try to keep the “I think this is what the Church should do” genre of post to a minimum, because I think the gospel is so much grander than this or that policy from North Temple Street, that song gets overplayed… Read More
-
•
•
4 responses
I want to continue discussing the issue of prophets and administrators by giving a quick overview of some observations of the church’s first three presidents, and will talk about later presidents in future posts. Read More
-
•
•
8 responses
Guest post by Josh Coates. Josh studied Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is the Executive Director of the B. H. Roberts Foundation. A recent report boldly declares that the “Devout No Longer Define Mormonism. Devout Traditionalists, once two-thirds of the LDS population, are now a minority” based on the Pew Religious Landscape Survey data. However, replicating the analysis on the public RLS data reveals that these claims fail statistical validity tests. The phenomenon known as pareidolia is when we see patterns in things that aren’t really there. We see what looks like a face on the surface… Read More
-
Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Latter-day Saint Thought, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
•
•
I noticed this time through the Doctrine and Covenants how the idea of trials is a major theme of this book of scripture. And the sections in this week’s lesson are during one of the most challenging periods of trials in early church history, the first round of persecution in Missouri and the subsequent travel to help the members there known as Zion’ Camp. Inherent in the trials described in the D&C is that they came in the attempt to build a Zion society. So the context for the trials is not just how to get along in the church… Read More
-
•
•
5 responses
A few weeks ago I finished a weeklong fast where I lived on water and a homemade electrolyte mixture (pinch of magnesium, salt, and potassium chloride) for a week (with the occasional diet sports drink). I had done a 48-hour fast before, but this was my first longer one. To address the obvious “why would anybody do that”? First, it was kind of an experiential bucket list thing. It’s a life experience I’ve never had despite it being all-too-common across time and space. Second, I was curious what a longer-term fast would feel like in terms of the spiritual high.… Read More
-
•
•
12 responses
Do you forsake Mormon celebrities? Yea, I forsake. Do you forsake vicarious satisfaction in their professional success? Yea, I forsake. Do you forsake their works and fandom that you served in former times? Yea, I forsake. Read More
-
•
•
18 responses
So I want to continue to put up some posts on some thoughts I have on church leadership. In my last post, I proposed my idea of a caretaker model of our church leadership. I see our hierarchy as an inspired bureaucracy, a very good thing, but different that all or most policies being dictated by God as we tend to talk in the church. So in my next few posts, I want to talk about some observations I’ve had on what I see as some sort of tension between prophets and great administrators. In my observation, those tend to… Read More
-
•
•
7 responses
Originally published in SquareTwo, Vol. 18 No. 2 (Summer 2025) Note: After working on this piece I realized that Janet Erickson, Justin Dyer, and Barbara Morgan Gardner, all at BYU, did a similar piece for the the Deseret News using the PRLS to look at the happiness of LDS women here. Recently I posted a piece that analyzed the recently released Pew Religious Landscape Data to measure whether former, lifelong, and convert Latter-day Saints reported being happier, healthier, and having better family lives, finding that that was indeed the case. However, another piece asked the interesting question as to whether… Read More
-
•
•
7 responses
Imagining and Reimagining the Restoration, by Robert A. Rees, offers a moving and thoughtful vision of what a progressive-yet-faithful Latter-day Saint discipleship can look like. Rees—a poet, scholar, and former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought—draws on a lifetime of devotion and intellectual engagement to explore themes such as Heavenly Mother, the recovery of Christ-centered worship during Holy Week, environmental stewardship, and the creation of midrashic literature about women in scripture and Church history. His prose is interwoven with poetry and literary reflection, making the book as much an artistic meditation as a theological one. Collectively, it serves… Read More
-
•
•
15 responses
From the comments to this series, Monogamy is the Rule, I have noticed a few points that need clarification. I welcome discussion, and feel like it’s worthwhile to respond to some of those comments in a full post form. Doing so also sets the stage for future posts in the series. Read More
-
•
•
3 responses
Coltri, Marzia A. “Modest Fashion: Global Perspectives on Identity and Culture.” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review (2025). This article examines modest fashion as a dynamic cultural phenomenon spanning diverse religious traditions, including Islam, Judaism (with a specific focus on Hasidic women’s dress), Christianity, Mormonism, New Buddhist dress practices, New Religious Movements (NRMs), and Rastafari culture. The study explores how these varied religious communities negotiate clothing as a form of spiritual identity, cultural resistance, and personal expression. By analysing the intersections of fashion, religious belief, and global market trends, the research demonstrates how modest dress transcends simple religious prescription, instead of… Read More
-
•
•
Andrew Kimball’s The Blood in Their Veins offers a compelling and deeply textured exploration of the Kimball family, one of the most prominent lineages in Latter-day Saint history. Centering on the children and descendants of Heber C. Kimball—who himself had forty-three wives and sixty-five children—the book navigates a vast narrative landscape. In doing so, it illuminates not only the intimate lives of the Kimballs but also broader currents in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Mormonism, including polygamy, priesthood adoption, colonization, mental health, family politics, visions, missionary service, and church leadership. Read More
-
•
•
4 responses
In the television production of Stephen King’s The Institute, Avery Dixon is a ten-year-old telepath who has been snatched from his home in Salt Lake City and taken to a facility for psychically gifted children. In the book, however, Avery is specifically a “Mormon from Orem.” (Spoilers follow!) Read More
-
•
•
7 responses
One of those occasional words thrown about in Joseph Smith-critical discourse is that Joseph Smith was a pedophile or, if they are trying to be fancy, a ephebophile or hebephile, so I thought it was worth going into detail about the literature on these terms and what they actually are. Pedophilia is an attraction to prepubescent children. Joseph Smith married several women in the late-14 to 17-year old range. He was not having sexual relations with prepubescent children; by any standard he is not a pedophile. (At the outset, I should note that my read of the evidence is that… Read More
-
•
•
We focus on the temple, and we have from the beginning of the Church. The temple plays a crucial role in our theology, but also a role that demonstrates tensions between principles. While the ordinances of the temple are done individually, those ordinances are often performed in groups, and the purpose of these ordinances generally looks toward sealing families and genealogies together. Where the ordinances provide us with steps and goals in a path, they also point to the behaviors and principles we should learn and a certain relationship with God, one that seems to be based on more than… Read More
-
•
•
9 responses
I’ve seen that the Church sometimes gets a bad reputation for how it navigated Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. One thing that tends to get overlooked, however, was the amount of pressure the Church felt from the Nazi regime. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Stephen O. Smoot discussed some new research based on a 500-page dossier from the Nazi Party’s intelligence agency, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), preserved in the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Berlin, on how Nazis spied on Latter-day Saints. What follows here is a copost to the full interview. Read More
-
•
•
9 responses
Many of us Latter-day Saints have an immigrant ancestor story. That, combined with the fact that when we entered the valley we were technically in Mexican territory, has helped foment the idea that we are a faith of immigrants. But how true is it? Was early Utah more naturally immigrant heavy than other places in America at the time? Thankfully one of the most earliest and most consistent questions in the early US census was birthplace, so we can directly compare how immigrant heavy Utah was relative to other states. I used the IPUMS data I’ve used before and created… Read More
-
•
•
9 responses
The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution represents one of the most ambitious and carefully framed efforts to date to navigate the intersections of evolutionary science and the doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Edited by Jamie L. Jensen, Steven L. Peck, Ugo A. Perego, and T. Benjamin Spackman, BYU’s Evolution Book combines perspectives from scientists, religious educators, and historians to model how faithful Latter-day Saints might approach the complexities of science and revelation without resorting to false dichotomies. Read More
-
•
•
25 responses
There’s a new exegetical school of thought that women do in fact have the priesthood. Most prominently Dr. Morgan Gardner in the BYU Religion Department wrote a book developing the idea, and there is some First Presidency commentary (specifically, President Oaks and President Nelson I believe) supporting the notion. First, as an aside, I adjuncted a religion class at BYU way back when I was a loud, opinionated, boisterous postgrad, where I was in several meetings with Dr. Morgan Gardner. I like her, appreciate her work (she produces good content, check out her site), and nothing in the below should… Read More
-
Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Latter-day Saint Thought, Poetry, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
•
•
What do we mean when we talk about ‘Fulness’? The Come Follow Me lesson for this week, covering D&C 93, suggests that it’s related to exaltation—but I’m not sure that we know exactly what exaltation is either. ‘Fulness’ suggests some kind of completeness or satiation—we will have everything we need, and maybe everything we should want. But again this is kind of vague. I suspect that the problem with understanding these terms lies in their eternal nature. Our understanding of these hereafter itself is at best very incomplete. Perhaps the principal thing we can say is that it’s the life… Read More
-
•
•
3 responses
Eduardo Balderas is an often-overlooked figure who made tremendous contributions to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, biographer Ignacio Garcia shared some insights into who Balderas was. Read More
-
•
•
11 responses
Religiously speaking I have a weird CV. I may be one of the few people who has taught a class at all three of the major religious plus universities: BYU, Catholic University of America, and Baylor University (although you could include Yeshiva University in this list, and while I’ve done research with a Yeshiva U professor I haven’t taught a class there). I’ve been at conferences when people have badmouthed Baptists only to see my Baylor affiliation, putting me in the strange position of feeling defensive and offended for a religion I don’t subscribe to, and I have done so… Read More
-
•
•
6 responses
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, edited by R. Gordon Shepherd, A. Gary Shepherd, and Ryan T. Cragun, is a landmark anthology that shifts the center of gravity in Latter-day Saint scholarship from a nineteenth-century, Utah-centric narrative to a nuanced, data-rich exploration of Mormonism as a global religious tradition. With 31 chapters contributed by 42 scholars, the volume offers a comprehensive portrait of a faith that now claims nearly 17 million members in close to 190 countries. Read More
-
•
•
36 responses
I mentioned in some comments in previous posts about having a different view of church leadership that I called a “caretaker model,” or seeing the leaders more as caretakers of Joseph Smith’s program and revelations. There’s a lot to this, so I thought I’d give a little overview of bullet points, and perhaps I’ll blog more about some of these if the conversation heads in any of these directions. Read More
-
Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Latter-day Saint Thought, Poetry, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
•
•
Most of the time when we hear the phrase “A Principle with Promise,” we think of D&C Section 89 and the promise that we can “run and not be weary.” However, some kind of promise is associated with every gospel principle—there is at least one consequence that accompanies every principle, and the accompanying consequences follow obeying the principle. Does anyone doubt that maintaining good health can allow us to ‘run and not be weary?’ Read More
-
•
•
6 responses
On our missions a lot of us gave lessons to some professor or such and were excited at the prospect of a well-thought out, high powered intellectual convert. And we’re not the only ones, I suspect Catholics love to talk about John Henry Newman for this reason. The idea, especially for them, is that you can logically demonstrate the truthfulness of one’s faith from first principles, so an intellectual convert provides evidence for that, or at least scores extra “plausibility structure” points. We see a version of this with other virtues as well. We like it when cool or accomplished… Read More
-
•
•
6 responses
Section 87 of the Doctrine and Covenants is a curious document. It is a revelation Joseph Smith received on December 25, 1832 that foretold a war beginning with the rebellion of South Carolina, spreading to conflict between the Southern and Northern U.S. states, drawing in foreign powers, sparking slave uprisings, and culminating in global calamities including famine, disease, and widespread suffering. Early Latter-day Saints viewed this as proof of Smith’s prophetic authority. Today, however, the prophecy is mostly used by church leaders to encourage members to “stand in holy places” amid trials. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint… Read More
-
•
•
9 responses
The latest big AI breakthrough is AI agents, or AI bots that can do the kind of mundane Googling-and-fill-out-spreadsheet work that interns typically do. Like all AI you have to check it but still, this is in the category of possibly reducing mundanities so that people can focus on more creative work. I switched back to GPT after apostatizing to Google Gemini for a few months, so I have access to a certain number of these agent requests every month. To test it out, I had it do something I’ve had my list for a while. My prompt: I want… Read More
-
•
•
8 responses
Returning to the series I was working on earlier this year about canonization, I wanted to discuss why it sometimes isn’t the best idea to canonize documents. Part 1 of the series discussed the process by which canonization occurs in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while Part 2 discussed some documents that could possibly be canonized in the future. While I generally feel like more documents could and should be canonized, I also recognize that there are legitimate reasons to be hesitant about expanding the scriptural canon. Read More