It seems that there is always more to discover and discuss about Joseph Smith’s introduction of plural marriage into the church. Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy, edited by Cheryl L. Bruno is going to be a landmark in those discussions moving forward.
Year: 2024
Data Visualization of New Testament Books by Size, Time Since Christ, and Authenticity
A part of the graph, the link below has the whole thing. Of the big AI players, Anthropic’s Claude is quite good at making diagrams, so I used it to generate an infographic I’ve always wanted to see, something that conveys in one visual how far away from Christ a book in the NT was written, the size of the work, and whether it’s considered “authentic” by scholars, either in the sense that it was written by whoever it claims to be written by (the undisputed Pauline epistles), or whether it has authentic first-hand reports from the time of Christ not found elsewhere (The Synoptic Gospels and Acts). In other words, I want to see which sources are closest to the “historical Jesus.” On one hand I think most historical Jesus research and thought processes get a little carried away about their narrow false negative confidence intervals, but at the same time the premise that the manuscripts closer to Christ could tell us more about Him is valid for most purposes. In order to show the data in year-by-year and to scale the size of the block proportional to the size of the book I created a graph that could not fit onto one page (and I don’t know how to embed it into WordPress), but you can see the a version that you can scroll through here. (Claude now has an “artifacts” feature where you can share the results…
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2024
Latter-day Saint missionaries helped bring basketball to Scotland, who’d have thought? (Actually, there’s probably a paper waiting to be written on all the ways that missionaries helped disseminate basketball, including famously helping coach the German basketball team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics). Also, the latest (maybe last? He’s getting old) publication by Richard Bushman. And James Faulconer, despite being retired, is still producing scholarship. Finally, Mormon diet books!
On Premortality and the Priesthood and Temple Ban
When I was a priest, the adult advisor was excited to teach us a lesson about the premortal existence. He bounded up, grinning from ear to ear as usual, and said “I’ve been doing lots of reading, and I have some great stuff to share,” and he did. For the most part, it was an excellent lesson. Then, suddenly, he pulled out a quote from some obscure seventy back in the 1950s that said that we were blessed according to how we had lived in the premortal existence, and we must have been pretty awesome to have been born into the One True Church, as opposed to the Blacks who were denied the priesthood because they were all less-faithful prior to being born. I was disturbed to hear someone classifying who had been good and who had been evil in a prior life based on their skin color and ancestry. I said, “That doesn’t seem right. I don’t think that’s what we believe any more.” The advisor shrugged and said, “Hey, I’m just quoting the Brethren.” At that time I still believed everything a General Authority said must be the Gospel truth, so I grudgingly backed off and slumped down in my seat for the rest of the lesson.
Latter-day Saint Book Discussion: “A Light in the Darkness: Janusz Korczak, His Orphans, and the Holocaust”
Monument in Warsaw to Janusz Korczak’s “Last Walk” as he accompanied his orphans to the Treblinka trains. Janusz Korczak is a remarkable figure that is surprisingly almost unknown in the United States despite being quite famous in Europe. A children’s author and pedagogue, his books, particularly King Matt the First about a child who becomes a king and rules like a child was as well known among Poles and Germans as Peter Pan was among British children. (while a lot of classic works of children’s literature don’t hold up anymore, this charming work still does, and is highly recommended). Raised in a formal, upper-class home, he came to envy the street children who were able to play outside, and the rest of his life was spent trying to free children from the unreasonable strictures of adults and to grant them some measure of respect and dignity as individuals. But it was not his writing or child-raising theories that granted him immortality. He was the headmaster of an orphanage of Jewish children during the time that the Jews were being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, an open-aired, barbed-wire prison. As the Nazis squeezed them tighter and tighter the streets became cluttered with the bodies of frozen and starved refugees and children. While dead adults are obviously tragic, there is.a particular twisted horror and injustice that accompanies the corpses of innocent children (or as Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov, “[adults] ate…
The Kirtland Temple Endowment
In modern Latter-day Saint terminology, the Endowment is a specific ordinance performed in temples around the world. In the first temple to be constructed by church members (the House of the Lord in Kirtland), however, the term has a somewhat different meaning. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Scott Woodward discussed what the Kirtland endowment was thought to be. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
Five stories about the time God told me to run a marathon
1. …and all I got was a finisher’s medal Saying that God told me to run a marathon is a provocative formulation, but not inaccurate.
Apologetics and the Sheep Stealing Model
A few days ago Latter-day Saint apologist Jacob Hansen of A Thoughtful Faith had a debate with noted Catholic apologist of Pints with Aquinas fame Trent Horn that has been garnering some attention. At the outset, I love these sorts of things. A respectful but straightforward debate about contrasting religious views can help both sides articulate their beliefs and responses better. When a faith does not face explicit doubts and pressures their scalpels become dull. Another example of this in our tradition is Stephen Robinson’s excellent back and forth How Wide the Divide? With Craig Bloomberg. Eminently respectful but not holding anything back. There’s a long, venerable tradition of structured interfaith debates; even in the Middle Ages Christian kings would sponsor religious debates between Jews and Christians in the great “disputations” (which, given the power imbalance weren’t exactly “anything goes” debates on the part of the Jewish rabbis), and prominent, structured debates between Proto-Protestants and Catholics played a vital role in the early religious fermentation of the Reformation. However, anybody with proselytizing experience knows that the following literally never happens: two people get into a debate about this or that theological point, one person marshals their argument and convinces the other by sheer reasoning, the other person concedes, loses their faith, and converts to the other faith. When somebody has a strong faith to begin with, some people see the conversion as a two-step process: 1) destroy their initial…
Review: Bruce R. McConkie: Apostle and Polemicist, 1915–1985
Bruce R. McConkie: Apostle and Polemicist, 1915–1985 by Devery S. Anderson is the latest entry in Signature Books’ Brief Mormon Lives project. As has been the case with other books in the series, this one is a short biography of an individual of note in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is very well done.
AI Censorship and Sacred Cows
In the AI world there is a debate swirling about how much AI providers should censor their image generation. Of course there are plenty of things to mock in past attempts to censor or otherwise put a thumb on the scale of AI to be more socially appropriate. Exhibit A of course were the racially diverse, Black SS stormtroopers created by Google Gemini, but anybody who’s spent a decent amount of time using AI has run into these guardrails, and sometimes they can be annoying. I had a tragicomical experience myself in the early days of Midjourney when they didn’t have the fingers right, and when I tried to create a picture of Adam and Eve it gave Adam multiple genitalia. I tried to regenerate the image specifying “no nudity,” and got a warning that I was using a forbidden term and would be banned if I continued to try to create nude images. The guardrails around religious topics in particular are so strict that it becomes difficult to do anything religious per se, one has to describe a religious scene without invoking religious vocabulary. (I assume the skittishness about depicting religious imagery is really just about depicting Mohammad, but they’re trying to be consistent). However, in the past week or so the world was exposed to an almost completely uncensored AI tool with the release of Elon Musk’s Grok 2 (because of course it’s Elon). All of the sudden…
An Abbreviated Journal of Discourses
While Bruce R. McConkie’s controversial Mormon Doctrine is famous in Latter-day Saint circles, it wasn’t his first controversial project. Prior to that time, he worked on preparing a “best-of” collection from the Journal of Discourses that was known as Sound Doctrine. The project was close to publication when the First Presidency intervened and shut it down. Devery S. Anderson shared some information about the volume in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
Is Anybody Excommunicated Anymore?
I assume they aren’t actually this dour, but what some people envision a disciplinary council looks like. Here I’m not addressing the normative question of whether we should excommunicate, I have already said my piece about that here. A while ago I was speaking to my stake president and made some humorous quip about him excommunicating people, and he had responded that he had actually never excommunicated anybody before. I was kind of surprised at this, as my father who has served in bishoprics in the 1990s and 2000s referred to disciplinary councils and excommunications during his time. (And yes, I know it’s not technically called “excommunication” anymore, but here I’m using the term to be more pithy). I have no hard data on this, but I would not be surprised if excommunications are less of a thing nowadays for several reasons. To some extent the excommunication process requires the consent of the person being disciplined. They could just not show up and/or request their records be removed. Whereas before the Church may have had enough sociocultural heft in some geographic areas to get people to show up, even if there was a call to a disciplinary council I suspect many people just wouldn’t bother (unless, of course, they want to invite a bunch of media and make some point of it). Of course, they can have one without the person, but generally speaking completely inactive, members-on-records-only are…