Year: 2025
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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.
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Differing from Church Leaders: A Personal Experience
In this post at the Juvenile Instructor, I shared some of the spiritual prompting I felt I had in grad school, but a really big one was the persistent prompting I felt to vote no on Proposition 8 in 2007. Throughout that year, 2007, I had this nagging spiritual feeling: “You need to understand the…
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CFM 8/4-8/10: Poetry for “Stand Ye in Holy Places”
What are ‘Holy Places’? What makes them holy? Are there different kinds of ‘Holy Places’? Has our understanding of ‘Holy Places’ changed over time? I suspect that most LDS Church members think of the Temple when we think of a holy place, but when pushed we might agree that the Sacred Grove is also a…
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William Clark and the Utah War
The Utah War was a dramatic episode in the history of the antebellum western United States. One of the most remarkable records to discuss the experience of traveling west with the Utah Expedition is the memoirs of William Clark. These were recently published anew, edited and annotated by William P. MacKinnon and Kenneth L. Alford.…
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Patriarchal Blessings, Accuracy, and Major Life Events
Patriarchal blessings are an up-close-and-personal example of exercising faith even in cases where there is a possibility of disconfirmation. Of generally trusting in something while reserving for some possibility that it might be wrong, or at least very different from your expectations. Of course, there are different “outs” for patriarchal blessing particulars that don’t pan…
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How Many Slaves Were in Utah Compared to Other States?
It’s a black mark on our history that early Utah allowed slavery. Other people more informed than I have more detail on the people involved and legal details (This Abominable Slavery is on my to-read list, but I haven’t gotten to it yet), but I was curious about where Utah stood relative to other states.…
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Other Impulses: Intuition, Imagination, Deception, Mental Illness, Who Knows?
“Ye are commanded in all things to ask of God, who giveth liberally … doing all things with prayer and thanksgiving, that ye may not be seduced by evil spirits, or doctrines of devils, or the commandments of men; for some are of men, and others of devils.” (DC 46:7).
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John Turner, Joseph Smith, and Plate Mythicism
Guest post by Stephen Smoot Did Joseph Smith actually possess gold plates? This question has intrigued historians, skeptics, and believers ever since Joseph first described the origins of the Book of Mormon. Richard L. Bushman’s recent book, a “cultural history” of the plates, traces how they have functioned as both historical artifact and sacred symbol…
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CFM 7/28-8/3: Poetry for “The Power of Godliness”
If the priesthood is “The Power of Godliness,” and if we are to learn how to use that power, we should probably think a lot about what the word “power” means in this context. Most of the time power is associated with the ability to control things, often including people and usually by force. But…
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What’s the Best Work in “Mormon Cinema”? The Rotten Tomatoes Verdict
For the most part the Rotten Tomatoes score for a movie is a reasonably good heuristic for quality. In terms of my own tastes, if it scores really high on both critic and user rating it’s typically a solid film. There are of some biases of course. IMHO movies in the older canon have inflated…
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What Spiritual Experiences Are We Allowed to Have?
“He treated my communication not only lightly, but with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil, that there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days; that all such things had ceased with the apostles, and that there would never be any more of them.” (1:21)
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Mental Illness and Agency
After last week I thought it might be worth the time to write a little more about the concept of agency. While it’s accepted we don’t always have agency over what happens to us (for obvious reasons), there is an idea that has become prevalent that we nevertheless have full agency over ourselves; that, no…
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From the Archives: Relatable Actions
I’m working hard on my Zerah Pulsipher biography and thought it would be fun to share a few items that I found interesting or fun. Today’s post focuses on a couple fun and relatable vignettes from early settlers in Utah and Idaho.
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Practical ways to cultivate resilience and gratitude
Guest post by Fotini Tzouveleki Life is not always sunshine and rainbows. Most of the times, things do not get your way. You might find out that your friends have been mean behind your back or that your boss is planning to fire you. However, there are ways to build resilience so strong, it can…
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My Ranked Tier List of Arguments for the Existence of God
For the uninitiated, tier lists have become a fashionable way to rank order items, running from F tier to S tier (“super,” above A tier). Sometimes going up to S plus. I watch a lot of weight lifting YouTube videos, and it seems like every fitness influencer has done one of these for best exercises,…
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Freedom like Bastille Day
Happy Bastille Day! You may not think Bastille Day is important for Americans, given that it is a celebration of an event early in the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille in 1789. But since the day is a kind of celebration of freedom and since the subsequent revolution has become a kind of…
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CFM 7/21-7/27: Poetry for “Where Much Is Given Much Is Required”
The idea behind “Where Much is Given, Much is Required” goes beyond just the idea of responsibility or accountability. There is also in the phrase a sense of equity and care for others that isn’t necessarily part of responsibility. The idea is clearly the opposite of the images we see of excessive displays of wealth,…
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How Many Latter-day Saints are in Federal Prison?
We have surprisingly fine-grained data on the religious affiliation of federal prisoners. I’m not sure why, but it might have something to do with the fact that a large portion of religious freedom cases in the US deal with prison accommodations (e.g. can a Sikh prisoner wear a beard? A Jewish prisoner have Kosher food?…
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Disillusionment: Spiritual Experiences Not Seeming to Work Out
“O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?… How long shall they suffer these wrongs and unlawful oppressions, before thine heart shall be softened toward them, and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them?” (DC 121:1, 3). This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out. They…
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![[Mental Illness] The Weight of Happiness](https://timesandseasons.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/sadness-and-happiness-in-the-air-giorgi-khatiashvili-1.jpg)
[Mental Illness] The Weight of Happiness
In America we are obsessed with individual happiness. Like, obsessed. From the Declaration of Independence to prosperity gospel to the multi-billion dollar self-care industry, personal happiness has become less of an experience and more of a measure. Happiness has become something that is deeply individualistic, and serves as a sign that you are doing something…
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From the Archive: Seventies Blessings
I’m working hard on my Zerah Pulsipher biography and thought it would be fun to share a few items that I found interesting or fun. Today’s post focuses on blessings given to members of the newly-formed quorums of the seventies during the 1830s.
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Wilford Woodruff’s Missions
Wilford Woodruff was a tremendously successful missionary in his early days as a member of the Church. Through doing so, he offered an example of many praiseworthy attributes, which were discussed by Kristy Wheelwright in her recently published book, Prepare Me for Thy Use: Lessons from Wilford Woodruff’s Mission Years. She also discussed some of…
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How Do We Know? Let’s Talk about Spiritual Experiences
“How can I tell if something I feel or goes through my mind is the Spirit telling me something, or my own thoughts?” is a question I’ve heard posed a number of times in church (often in elders quorum). So as I often think about posts in terms of series, I’m thinking about a series…
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CFM 7/14-7/20: Poetry for “I Will Lead You Along”
The introduction of the ‘United Firm’ in 1832 was, I think, an attempt to provide needed structure to the Church and its members. Any organization provides roles for individuals and ways that those roles interact with each other and the outside world. As a result, the scriptures covered by this week’s Come Follow Me lesson…
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AI Church Movies
As evidenced by the flood of AI movies hitting Twitter over the past couple of weeks, Google’s Veo 3 recently made another leap with AI video generation, adding sound and better consistency. It still has its issues (as can be seen below), but in the hands of a skilled prompter with some credits to burn…
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From the Archives: Muddy Iowa
I’m in the midst of pushing to finish a draft of my biography of Zerah Pulsipher and thought it would be fun to share a few items here and there that I found interesting or funny while I’m working on it. Today’s post is about the laborious journey across Iowa in the spring of 1846,…
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Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, June 2025
Nielsen, Chad. “Zera Pulsipher and the Regulation of Plural Marriage” Journal of Mormon History 51, no. 3 (2025): 115-148. Gemini-created abstract: This article examines the evolution of how plural marriage was regulated and controlled within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, using the 1862 disciplinary trial of Zerah Pulsipher as a key case…
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The good ending
The vulgarity and low character of Donald Trump are famously at odds with the values and teachings promoted by the Church, but another area of conflict has been less apparent despite its impact. For the Church, the Trump presidency is an apocalyptic catastrophe in the technical sense: at least a postponement and potentially a mortal…
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CFM 7/7-7/13: Poetry for “Great Shall Be Their Reward and Eternal Shall Be Their Glory”
We could argue that section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants has had more impact on Church members than any other section in the D&C. Prior to the vision described in the revelation, Church members, and Christianity in general, had one of two conceptions of the next life; either a dualistic heaven and hell, or…