Author: Stephen C
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Latter-day Saints are Really Fast Long-Distance Runners
When I teach my occasional sociology class every once in a while race and sports get brought up. It’s one of those things that people tiptoe around and have their own opinions about but don’t really take the time to investigate or discuss. To grab the bull by the horns, there’s a popular perception that…
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Are Latter-day Saints Happier? The Pew Religious Landscape Survey, Relationship with the Church, and Flourishing
The 2023-2024 PRLS had the rare combination of questions about 1) current religion, 2) religion in which raised, and 3) different measures of flourishing. This allows us to see whether, for example, former Latter-day Saints (at least those raised LDS who no longer identify as such) are happier than current Latter-day Saints, or current Latter-day…
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How Common are Large Latter-day Saint Families?
My favorite big family memes It’s difficult to study large families in the US because most surveys have what is called “right-censored data,” where they cap it at, say 4 and above, so we can’t look specifically at, say, eight or above families. However, I found one dataset, the Cooperative Election Study, that does actually…
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Joseph in Egypt and the Seductress Archetype
*Not* me in high school Anecdotally one of the comical side effects of the Joseph in Egypt story that hormone-driven deacons and teachers are raised with is the subtext that you have to have your commitment to the law of chastity dialed in (“remember who you are and what you stand for”) because you need…
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Did People Have More Children to Work the Farm?
I am going to take advantage of permablogger privilege to address a historical demography myth/pet peeve of mine which, while seemingly orthogonal, does connect to the gospel, just give me a second to get there. There is a widespread belief that in the past children were a net asset to your wealth, and people are…
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Selling Temples
It’s no secret that some are worried that the Church is overbuilding temples. While most make some sense in terms of the Church’s goal of having a temple close and accessible to members, anecdotes abound about temples being put very proximate to other temples that are already suffering from low attendance, and in the worst…
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Anti-Latter-day Saint Stigma in Academia
Anti-Latter-day Saint stigma in academia is one of those things for which there is no solid data, so all that anybody has to work off of are anecdotes. However, given that 1) we know that people in general don’t really like us, 2) we are associated with a conservative ideology, and 3) there is plenty…
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My Take on Masonry and the Temple
I generally consider myself pro-apologist. I think apologetics and apologists get a lot of undeserved grief in the Church (I see this as something of a pendulum swing from the 90s or so when Hugh Nibley types were rock stars that commanded huge fireside audiences). However, there have been a small handful of places where…
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Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, May 2025
Simon, Hemopereki. “Decolonizing Lamanite Studies—A Critical and Decolonial Indigenist Perspective.” Religions 16, no. 6 (2025): 667.
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Brigham Young was Right: Polygamy and Hypocrisy
It’s perhaps a little unpopular to argue that Brigham Young got anything right about polygamy, but one place where I think he was onto something was to point out the all-too-common hypocrisy of many vehement anti-polygamists (see full quotes below). Mark Twain authored that famous jab about how ugly Mormon plural wives were–but maybe that’s…
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A Lot More People are Leaving the Church Now
I finally got around to calculating the Church leaving rates from the latest Pew Religious Landscape Survey. The PRLS is one of the few surveys that has questions about both former and current religious affiliation with a large enough sample size that it can tell us something about Latter-day Saints. So what do we find?…
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Tidbits from Early Church Primary Sources: Mormonism Unvailed
A series I am going to occasionally come back to on my takes on early Church primary sources that I’m reading. We have a tendency to only read secondary takes, whether a talk, book, or commonly shared anecdote, but there are often insights buried in the primary sources that don’t make it into the collective…
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“Moral Luck” and Time of Death
A common theme in Latter-day Saint circles, admittedly with some scriptural support (Alma 34), is the idea that what matters at the end of the day is where we are with God at the moment of our death. That if somebody lives a sanctified life but throws it all out the last week of her…
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What Would an “Open Borders” American Church Look Like? Affirmative Action, Munch N Mingles, and Polyglot Patriarchs
I am for open borders (more or less, with some exceptions we needn’t go into here). I was even quoted in a conservative newspaper’s article headlined “Illegal immigrants have a friend in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” based on a Deseret News article I wrote (although it didn’t exactly help my thesis…