Year: 2025
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The Priesthood Ban and Our Leadership Theology
By “Leadership Theology” I mean the common declaration that we make about our leaders, presidents in particular, as the mouthpiece of God, God not allowing them to lead the church astray, etc. For example, over the last few years, our leaders have made a number of structural changes and pointed to the changes as evidence…
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Bizarre Brain Conditions and What They Mean For the Gospel
When it comes to our sense of self some of the most, I won’t say problematizing, but let’s say nuancing phenomena are brain injuries and lesions that lead to bizarre neurological conditions (at least for us dualists who believe that there is a soul that is greater than the sum of our brain’s biomechanical parts). …
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CFM 10/13-10/19 (D&C 115-120): Poetry for “His Sacrifice Shall Be More Sacred unto Me Than His Increase”
Sacrifice is a key gospel concept, and as such is also a key concept for life. Whether the it involves one person giving up something to help others or simply the individual giving up something for his own benefit, sacrifice is always about making decisions that balance one benefit or good against another. So we…
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Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, September 2025
Gavin, Sherrie, and Jo Coghlan. “Mormon Barbie: A Critical Examination of the Male Gaze, Ideology, and Parallel Representations.” In The Barbie Phenomenon, Volume 1, pp. 131-141. Routledge, 2026.
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The Nauvoo Bell That Wasn’t
Several months ago, I put out a post on the disappearance of the bell that has been on Temple Square for decades during the recent renovations. I shared the story of the bell, which has been called the Nauvoo Bell, but which is actually the Hummer Bell from a Presbyterian church in Iowa City. At…
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Requiem for the Mormon Tribe
Of all the changes introduced during the prophetic ministry of Russell M. Nelson, one of the most consequential may be the determined and consistent rejection of the Mormon ethnonym. That decision was a turning point that enabled some future paths and closed off others, just as ending polygamy opened a path into the American mainstream…
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The Fifth Family
Like many I’ve been constantly refreshing news and Twitter feeds over the past couple of days, going back and forth between the deadening horror of it all. I don’t know if I have a lot to add to the other moving and profound takes that I’ve already seen, but one dimension to this that I…
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Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 9/28
A few days ago I posted about how we can take 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. I’m convinced that even if the speaker or teacher is poorly prepared, we can still find elements in what is said…
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CFM 10/06-10/12 (D&C 111-114): Poetry for “I Will Order All Things for Your Good”
If things have been ordered for our good, do the things look like they have been ordered or arranged? This week’s Come Follow Me lesson title implies that what happens in our lives is meant to help us both now and in the hereafter. The statement “I will order all things for your good” is…
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Jonathan Stapley on Temple Worship
For those of us who have long been fascinated by the historical development of Latter-day Saint temple worship, Jonathan Stapley’s recent work, Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship, and his insightful interview on the subject at the Latter-day Saint history site From the Desk offer a significant contribution to the conversation. The interview offers…
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Conservative pain
An intrinsic problem in liberal and progressive-dominated professions such as academia and journalism is systematically overlooking or diminishing conservative pain. I’m not asking for sympathy for myself here, as I’m not a conservative. Each day I watch in horror as much of what has made my life pleasant or possible is destroyed and generation-spanning work…
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Churchmen and Administrators: An Attempted “Coup” against President Woodruff, 1887-89
Though Mormonism after Joseph Smith isn’t my expertise, I do think that a story that demonstrates conflict in church leaders’ tendency to appoint the church’s best administrators into the first presidency is the attempted “coup” against Wilford Woodruff in 1887. I put coup in quotes since some may object to that term, but it seems…
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The Ethics of Talks and Lessons at Church
When was the last time someone told you how much they liked Church on Sunday? Or what made a Sacrament Meeting really great? Or what in a lesson touched them, made them cry or gave them a new way of thinking? I often hear complaints about Church these days. If it isn’t that the Sacrament…
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Will Immigration Save Religion in the US?
As some of you know, I occasionally write a column for the Deseret News. My recent one dropped right around the time of the Charlie Kirk shooting, so I doubt hardly anybody read it, but it actually has some interesting insights in regards to immigration and religiosity in the US. Among other things, I point…
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Book Review: Elias—An Epic of the Ages: A Critical Edition, by Orson F. Whitney, edited by Reid L. Neilson
Elias—An Epic of the Ages: A Critical Edition, edited by Reid L. Neilson and published by Greg Kofford Books, is an important effort to preserve and present a landmark text in the literary history of Latter-day Saints. Orson F. Whitney, a Church leader and gifted writer at the turn of the twentieth century, sought to…
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CFM 9/29-10/05 (D&C 109-110): Poetry for “It Is Thy House, a Place of Thy Holiness”
I like this photo of the Bangkok Thailand Temple. I know many people will see in it an island of good among a sea of chaos and evil. I can’t disagree more with that view—most of humanity doesn’t live in the stereotypical suburban pastoral nowhere favored by the world, and where they do live is…
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Mental Illness at Church
I had so many plans for this post series, so it is heavy heart and not a little irony that I have had to cut it short due to two mental health crises in our family which have left me depleted. I’ve tried to think of what I should say as a final post on…
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Book Review: Ports to Posts: Latter-day Saint Gathering in the Nineteenth Century
Fred E. Woods’s Ports to Posts: Latter-day Saint Gathering in the Nineteenth Century offers a richly detailed and engaging exploration of the emigration process that carried thousands of Latter-day Saint converts from their homelands to the American frontier. Rather than focusing narrowly on one facet of the story, Woods takes a broad and careful approach,…
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Missionary Numbers are Peaking and Will Start to Decline
There’s something comfortable and fun about the kind armchair predictions about the future that are either too vague to be falsifiable or too far in the future for anybody to hold you to account. It’s a little nervy to make a concrete, falsifiable prediction in the near future, so I do so with some trepidation,…
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Richard Bushman Reflects on Rough Stone Rolling
Twenty years ago, Richard Lyman Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith the Prophet was published. The book has had a huge impact on English-speaking Latter-day Saints. He recently reflected on Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling in an interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
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Childless Church Members and the LDS Fertility Advantage
I kind of like the speculative theology that people who do not have the ability to raise children in this life, whether through death, accident, or lack of opportunity, will be able to in the next. The TLDR: Latter-day Saint women are less likely to be childless than non-Latter-day Saint women. Specifically, we’ve gone from…
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CFM 9/22-9/28 (D&C 106-108): Poetry for “The Order of the Son of God”
Like it or not, our lives are built of structures. We organize our days according to everything from natural events, like the rising and setting of the sun and our own biological rhythms, to the hours of the clock that our society has assigned to the day, to the needs we have to coordinate with…
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Book Review: The D&C and Church History ARTbook, volume one
The D&C and Church History ARTbook, volume one, curated by Esther Hi’ilani Candari and published by By Common Consent Press, is a fantastic resource for gospel artwork. It is chock-full of beautiful and thought-provoking pieces on gospel themes that complement the Doctrine and Covenants “Come, Follow Me” curriculum. One of the strengths of the book…
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A Global Mormonism Collection
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…
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Promotion to High Priest by Age
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…
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The First Three: Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor
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.
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Manufacturing Mormon Types from Noise: A Statistical Reality Check on Clustering Claims in Religious Survey Data
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…
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CFM 9/15-9/21 (D&C 102-105): Poetry for “After Much Tribulation … Cometh the Blessing”
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…
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My Experience Fasting For a Week
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…
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Do you forsake Mormon celebrities?
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.