Author: Jonathan Green

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).

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?”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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…

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.

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

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.

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.