Author: Jonathan Green

  • Notes from the ApostaCon

    Following “Exploring Mormon Conceptions of the Apostasy,” a conference organized by Miranda Wilcox and held this last Thursday and Friday at BYU, I heard several people say that it was the best conference of any kind they had ever participated in. I don’t think that was merely a polite exaggeration.

  • The Lost Books of the Bible (1609 Catholic edition)

    The Lost Books of the Bible (1609 Catholic edition)

    In 1609, Johannes Uber published the first part of his Very Useful and Necessary Disputation Concerning the Holy Bible (Von der heiligen Bibel sehr nützliche und nötige Disputation, VD17 1:050537Y) in which he argued for two points. First, that the Bible was no longer whole “because of the many lost holy books that the holy…

  • Ars moriendi

    Ars moriendi

    Yesterday I dedicated the grave of my grandfather, Verl Bagley, who by one measure spent his life at the end of the earth.

  • History of a book

    So I wrote a book. Not a Mormon book, but one in my academic field. I’ve been working on the book since just before my youngest daughter was born. She started first grade in September, and the book was published last week. The idea for the book came to me in 2005,

  • In Praise of Thanktimonies

    Not all targets of our reflexive contempt are well chosen. Expressions of mere gratitude in our monthly testimony meetings are dismissed as ‘thanktimonies’ because they don’t quite cover any of the things a public expression of religious conviction is supposed to be about. But I think this disdain is misplaced, like scoffing at children for…

  • Where do BYU students come from?

    Where do BYU students come from?

    The Chronicle of Higher Education has given us a new statistical toy to play with.

  • A Mother There? Notes on Paulsen and Pulido

    David Paulsen and Martin Pulido’s survey of statements concerning Heavenly Mother in Mormon thought, recently published in BYU Studies, has earned a good amount of attention. It’s a thorough survey, and I only have two relatively minor criticisms. In addition, the article restricts itself to surveying statements rather than analyzing them, and I see a…

  • Scent of a Mormon

    Scent of a Mormon

    The program for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association regularly includes the following request: The Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession reminds attendees that refraining from using perfume, cologne, and other scented products will help ensure the comfort of everyone at the convention.

  • Where are the Mormon Middle Ages?

    Where are the Mormon Middle Ages?

    Even though most Americans are thousands of miles from the nearest palace, fortress, or castle ruin, the European Middle Ages continue to play an outsized role in our imaginations (see: Disneyland, Hogwarts, Helm’s Deep).

  • Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht

    Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht

    Now that I’ve moved to BYU-Idaho, I occasionally (read: yesterday) get asked interesting questions when I’m at professional conferences, like: “How are you adjusting to life without caffeine?”

  • Are Mormons Cessationists?

    Over at FPR, BiV asks, Are Mormons cessationists? The short answer is no.

  • What if they held an election, and no one blogged about it?

    What if they held an election, and no one blogged about it?

    Actually, that’s exactly what just happened. Sixty-three House seats changed hands in November, governors got voted in and out of office, statewide propositions got passed and defeated—without a single post, let alone an old-fashioned righteous flamewar, on the Mormon blogs I read regularly.

  • Gateway drugs for middle schoolers: Mormon Studies edition

    I have a Christmas list, for a not-quite-teenager, with a gap that needs to be filled.

  • Castles made for sandboxes

    Castles made for sandboxes

    A few years ago, I walked half the circuit of a massive town wall. After hauling three kids and pushing a fourth in a stroller for a few hours through the forest, we recognized the wall by the close-packed rubble that stuck out from the crest of the long dirt mound.

  • Performance and Worship

    Performance and Worship

    I once almost joined the ward choir. What’s surprising about this is that I don’t actually sing.

  • Brother, can you spare a symposium?

    Brother, can you spare a symposium?

    Mormon Studies could be headed for a rough patch, because the career paths that make professional study of Mormon topics at least occasionally possible are disappearing.

  • Just because they can’t see you doesn’t mean you’re not there

    The call for papers for the Third Biannual Faith and Knowledge Conference for LDS Graduate Students in Religion contains a sentence that is, I think, wrong in three different ways.

  • A post-Columbian setting for the Book of Mormon

    A post-Columbian setting for the Book of Mormon

    The result of writing Book of Mormon history from back to front, I think, resembles a cross between The Mission and Last of the Mohicans.

  • Looking for historicity in all the wrong places

    Looking for historicity in all the wrong places

    If you think that the textual history of the Book of Mormon includes historical records, then you can’t avoid the possibility that a lot of Book of Mormon scholarship has been looking for the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time, and reading the wrong verses. The problem is that Book of…

  • The blotted page of the book of nature

    The blotted page of the book of nature

    Despite a unique cosmology that has at times inspired artistic creation for a wider American audience, there is no Mormon astrology. Someone who knew Mormonism only through its scriptural texts might be forgiven for finding this omission curious.

  • Nibley vindicatus; or Göbekli Tepe: a personal view

    Nibley vindicatus; or Göbekli Tepe: a personal view

    I fell in love almost simultaneously, as a junior in high school, with historical linguistics and Hugh Nibley.

  • How to make Mormon literature great

    How to make Mormon literature great

    Glenn Beck, the soapbox orator of cable television, has done more, save Sheri Dew only, for the greatness of Mormon literature, than any other person that ever lived.

  • Dispensations

    Dispensations

    While the occurrence of a general apostasy is a matter of belief and not observable by historical inquiry, dispensations are born with a burst of documentary evidence.

  • November 9, 1989

    Each anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is a bit embarrassing for me.

  • The Songs of Lehi

    If we accept, at least for the moment, that 1 Nephi has a textual history, that it drew on older sources or underwent expansion at various times, then we might wonder what could be considered the oldest layer of the text

  • The textual tectonics of 1 Nephi

    My basic problem with Blake Ostler’s expansion theory is that it approaches via intellectual history what is at heart a problem in textual history

  • The formula for Nephi

    In How to Kill a Dragon, the Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins defines formulas as “set phrases which are the vehicles of themes.”

  • Nourish and Strengthen

    If you’re interested in an oral-formulaic theory of Mormon prayer, or if you want to observe a formula in its natural habitat, a good place to start would be Sunday dinner

  • Pardon my French

    A brotherly reader writes: I recently had a chance to watch the new French film Banlieue 13: Ultimatum, which as far as these things go is a pretty good action flick

  • Mormon prayer and Mormon art

    If you want to find a unique Mormon tradition of verbal art, you should listen to Mormons pray