Year: 2025
-
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…
-
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.
-
Prophets and Administrators
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…
-
Are Latter-day Saint Women Happy, Healthy, and Thriving?
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…
-
Book Review: Imagining and Reimagining the Restoration, by Robert A. Rees
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…
-
Monogamy is the Rule, Part 6: Clarifications and Recap
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.
-
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2025
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.…
-
Book Review: The Blood in Their Veins: The Kimballs, Polygamy, and the Shaping of Mormonism, by Andrew Kimball (Signature Books)
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…
-
The Institute and Religion
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!)
-
Was Joseph Smith an Ephebophile? No.
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…
-
CFM 9/1-9/7: Poetry for “For the Salvation of Zion” (D&C 94-97)
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…
-
Nazis and Latter-day Saints
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…
-
A Faith of Immigrants: How Many Migrants Were in Early Utah?
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…
-
Book Review: The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution
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…
-
Do Women Actually Have the Priesthood?
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…
-
CFM 8/25-8/31: Poetry for “Receive of His Fulness”
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…
-
Eduardo Balderas
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.
-
Prayer at the Beginning of Class: My Experience at a Non-LDS University
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…
-
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, a Review
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…
-
A Differing View of Church Leadership: A “Caretaker” Model
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…
-
CFM 8/18-8/24: Poetry for “A Principle with Promise”
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…
-
Gold-Star Converts and the Parable of the Wedding Feast
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…
-
The Civil War Prophecy
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…
-
AI Agents and Family Relations Among the 12
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…
-
Canonization, Part 3: Reasons to Avoid Canonization
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…
-
CFM 8/11-8/17: Poetry for “Establish … a House of God”
Perhaps the most memorable verse in D&C 88 is 119, which establishes the ‘School of the Prophets’ and encourages our cultural orientation towards education: “Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory,…
-
Plausibility Structures, Intellectuals, and the Church’s Truth Claims
Since I was young an impromptu thought experiment has intermittently popped up in the back of my head that’s made me think deeply about the nature of (my) modern faith. Assume that the Church was not restored in 1830, we don’t know anything about the Book of Mormon, and in 2025 somebody knocks on your…
-
Trailer for the Movie ETERNITY
Has anyone else seen the trailer for this movie? Couple Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen die and go to the afterlife and then have a problem when Olsen ALSO meets the husband who died before she married Teller. Quite the Mormon sounding dilemma! Who would have thought this Mormon conundrum was good fodder for a…
-
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, July 2025
Davis, Ryan A. “Rockin’the Regime: Mormon Missionaries, American Popular Music, and the Fading of Spanish Fascism.” Popular Music and Society 47, no. 4 (2024): 422-441. In 1972 a group of Mormon missionaries in Spain formed a band known as Los Salt Lake City. Playing primarily folk and rock music, they toured the country, gave radio…
-
10 Thoughts on Dietrich Bonhöffer’s Discipleship
If you’re interested in quotable mid-century Protestant theologians, Dietrich Bonhöffer may be more directly relevant for us today than C.S. Lewis. Bonhöffer’s 1937 book, Nachfolge, is best known for its discussion of “cheap grace,” but there’s a lot more going on.