Year: 2025

  • Christ and Community, 4: Let Your Light So Shine

    Stephen Fleming

    Doing good works for proselytizing purposes is fine. I’ve heard complaints that doing so is somehow selfish (Helping Hands shirts, etc), and people point to Matthew 6:1-4. But there’s also Matthew 5:14-16 “let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” I’d…

  • Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II

    Are Latter-day Saints Disproportionately Gay? Part II

    Stephen C

    Years ago I discussed the highly plausible possibility that Latter-day Saints are disproportionately gay (at least for males), because our large family sizes mean we have a higher chance of having older brothers, and older brothers, or the “fraternal birth order effect” has been shown to have a significant influence on male homosexuality.  At the…

  • CFM 4/28-5/4: Poetry for “My Law to Govern My Church”

    CFM 4/28-5/4: Poetry for “My Law to Govern My Church”

    Kent Larsen

    Organizations require structure. And the larger that an organization gets, the more structure it needs. That might seem pretty obvious in today’s world, but I suspect it was less obvious in the 1830s among the Saints who had joined the church, many because of the way other churches operated. After the ‘constitution’ of the Church…

  • A New Look at the 1832 Account of the First Vision

    A New Look at the 1832 Account of the First Vision

    Chad Nielsen

    The 1832 account of the First Vision has always been treated as the black sheep of the family when it comes to contemporary accounts of that event. It is the most unique out of the accounts in several ways. Kyle Beshears recently published a chapter, giving an important explanation of some of those differences. He…

  • Abinidi or Limhi?

    Abinidi or Limhi?

    Kent Larsen

    While I don’t know if Abinidi and Limhi knew of each other, I think it’s likely that they did. Abinidi is, of course, known for his parrhesia before King Noah, and Limhi is Noah’s son, who succeeded him and whose later comments indicated that he knew his father was doing evil. Today, most of the…

  • A Review: Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader

    A Review: Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader

    Chad Nielsen

    Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader is an excellent resource and insightful journey. The book aspires to be “the first expert critical treatment of Mormon visual art”, and it offers a breadth and depth that live up to that ideal. The volume includes twenty-two essays by scholars from various disciplines, perspectives, and backgrounds who offer…

  • The Amish and Radical, Decisional Forgiveness

    The Amish and Radical, Decisional Forgiveness

    Stephen C

    A controversial image, but I think it makes the radical love point quite well.  The infamous Nickel Mines massacre of Amish schoolchildren–and the community’s supernal forgiveness towards the killer and his family–is familiar to Latter-day Saints through President Faust’s 2007 address “The Healing Power of Forgiveness.”  For those of you who do not remember the…

  • Christ and Community, 3: “Sell Whatever Thou Hast”

    Stephen Fleming

    So here I present an idea about Christ’s injunction to the rich young man that I read in a book I really like. We all know the story and know it’s often used to as bludgeon to declare that Christians are coming up short of their charitable obligations.

  • CFM 4/21-4/27: Poetry for “If Ye Are Not One Ye Are Not Mine”

    Kent Larsen

    I feel like I could just repeat the introduction I made three weeks ago, to the lesson for the week ending April 6th, which also spoke about the gathering. However, this week’s lesson is a little different, since it focuses on why we are gathered instead of simply that there is a commandment to gather.…

  • “Something That’s Unholy and Evil”

    Stephen C

    Spoiler alert. One of the most powerful scenes dealing with abortion in cinema is in the Godfather Part II (much more nuanced than, say, Cider House Rules, which is basically the pro-choice version of a preachy 1980s seminary movie.) In it Mafia don Michael Corleone’s wife admits that the child he was looking forward to…

  • Christ and Community, 2: Striving for the Ideal

    Stephen Fleming

    It was a Jehovah’s Witness many years ago that pointed out to me the connection between “these my brethren” in Matthew 25:40 and Jesus calling those who “do the will of God … my brother, and my sister, and mother.” (Mark 3:31-35, Matt 12:46-50, Luke 8:19-21. See the comments in my last post). I’m interested…

  • Obeying, honoring and sustain the law

    Jonathan Green

    Now more than ever, we need the 12th Article of Faith.

  • A History of Young Women’s Organizations in the Church

    Chad Nielsen

    The Church Historian’s Press recently published a history of the Young Women’s organization in the Church entitled Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024. In connection with the release of this landmark study, Lisa Olsen Tait discussed the book in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows…

  • Are Humans More Important than Animals? Speciesism and the Gospel

    Are Humans More Important than Animals? Speciesism and the Gospel

    Stephen C

    One of the most counter-intuitive and abhorrent, yet strangely logically airtight arguments in modern-day ethics is Peter Singer’s argument for why, if we are okay with killing and experimenting with animals, we should then be okay with experimenting on mentally handicapped humans and killing babies. Of course killing and experimenting on infants and the disabled…

  • Christ and Community: Introduction

    Stephen Fleming

    I want to share a few thoughts on Christianity and community building. I know this is a big topic discussed for thousands of years, but I want to give my two cents anyway despite not being a trained theologian. In my amateur opinion, I do think that Jesus said that community building was important and…

  • CFM 4/14-4/20: Poetry for “I Am He Who Liveth, I Am He Who Was Slain”

    Kent Larsen

    The Come Follow Me lesson for the week ending on April 20th, Easter, takes a break from the section order in the Doctrine and Covenants to focus on how Christ is portrayed in the scripture. The lesson focuses on three attributes of Christ’s role: His living nature, his gift of the resurrection to all of…

  • Religions on Trial, Then and Now

    Religions on Trial, Then and Now

    Stephen C

    Note: This was in the queue before I realized that it was falling on General Conference weekend, so it’s not in response to anything said over the pulpit.  I recently read an account of the three great medieval Jewish-Catholic disputations (Judaism on Trial, McCoby). These were debates arranged by the Christian authorities where the top…

  • Samuel Weber on Adam-God Doctrine

    Chad Nielsen

    One observation about Brigham Young—particularly when it comes to his most controversial ideas, like the Adam-God teachings—is that he tended to take ideas from Joseph Smith and then amplify them. The priesthood and temple ban on individuals with black African ancestry, for example, can be seen as an expansion of things Joseph Smith accepted and…

  • The Next Generation of AI Lit: 5-7K Word AI Mormon Horror Short Stories

    The Next Generation of AI Lit: 5-7K Word AI Mormon Horror Short Stories

    Stephen C

    First off, apologies for all the AI posts, but the big AI players do this thing where they drop their latest products right next to each other to try to steal the news cycles from each other, so AI alternates between droughts and floods.  So on that note, the other big news besides the resolution…

  • The Voice of the Lord: A Review

    Chad Nielsen

    BYU published a few books late last year in connection with the Doctrine and Covenants. Among these is The Voice of the Lord: Exploring the Doctrine and Covenants, edited by Alexander L. Baugh. The book is a collection of essays previously published by BYU in a variety of forums (Sydney Sperry symposium publications, Religious Educator…

  • Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, March 2025

    Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, March 2025

    Stephen C

    Hahne, Madeleine Ary. “Factors Influencing Climate Change Beliefs among American Latter-Day Saints.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 29, no. 1 (2025): 19-48.

  • Making Sense of Prophecies: An Update

    Jonathan Green

    A while ago, I published a series of posts, “Making Sense of Prophecies,” that connected my academic research to the prophecy of “Lutius Gratiano.” (You know the one: “The old true gospel and the powers thereof are lost….”) Then the editor of the Journal of Mormon History suggested the topic might work as an article.

  • CFM 4/7-4/13: Poetry for “ Lift Up Your Voices … to Declare My Gospel”

    CFM 4/7-4/13: Poetry for “ Lift Up Your Voices … to Declare My Gospel”

    Kent Larsen

    For a lesson titled “Declare My Gospel”, the individual sections don’t seem to focus as much on missionary work as you would think. Instead, the missions discussed are more like the statement often attributed to St. Francis, “Preach the gospel. If necessary use words.” Of course, the problem with preaching through actions, even though they…

  • Joseph Smith and the Ancient Theology: Conclusion

    Stephen Fleming

    So I wanted to wrap up a few more thoughts I mentioned in my last post, but at the request of the TS bloggers, I put them over at the Juvenile Instructor. So you can check them out over there. One on BH Roberts’s problematic claims of Platonism corrupting Christianity, another noting problems with Stephen…

  • My Problem with the Trinity

    My Problem with the Trinity

    Stephen C

    The New Testament is basically contradictory about the divine nature of Christ. On one hand Christ clearly talks to God as a separate being and identifies his will as being separate from God’s (Luke 22:42), but elsewhere he refers to himself as the Father in a very literal, I-am-physically-the-same sense (John 14:8-14). And then we…

  • The Confessing Church

    Jonathan Green

    People are probably going to bring up the Confessing Church frequently, so it’s best to get some things straight at the outset.

  • On a New Edition of Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith

    Chad Nielsen

    When I was on my mission, there were a few hot commodities on the book market that most of the missionaries wanted to get their hands on. Foremost among them were Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith and Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, with bookstores in Nauvoo, Illinois being the location in my mission where missionaries could…

  • AI Art and Gospel Stories: Or, Children’s Book Illustrators are Now Unemployed

    AI Art and Gospel Stories: Or, Children’s Book Illustrators are Now Unemployed

    Stephen C

    For what seemed like forever the moat protecting the jobs of illustrators from AI was the fact that it was hard to nail down consistent characters. You could maybe, with clever prompting, get one frame to kind of look like the other, but it didn’t really work, which is why a lot of early AI-storyboard…

  • A Review: Eduardo Balderas: Father of Church Translation, 1907–1989

    Chad Nielsen

    I love finding out about key people in the history of the Church of whom I was previously unaware. Signature Books’s latest entry in its Brief Mormon Lives project, Eduardo Balderas: Father of Church Translation, 1907–1989, by Ignacio M. Garcia, is a great example of this.

  • CFM 3/31-4/6: Poetry for “Jesus Christ Will Gather His People”

    CFM 3/31-4/6: Poetry for “Jesus Christ Will Gather His People”

    Kent Larsen

    The concept of gathering maybe one of the most-changed concepts in LDS belief. In D&C 29 the call to be “gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land” clearly refers to a physical gathering, where members of the church lived near each other. Later the number of places of gathering increased, and…