Category: Cornucopia

The September Ensign has an article about the Mountain Meadows Massacre (HT: M*).

“What e’er thou art, act well thy part.” David O. McKay’s famous line motivated him during his mission and during his presidency. It’s not a bad philosophy, either. If I’m a Mormon, I should be a good one. However, for many of us, the question isn’t acting well a part. It’s discovering what we are…

I’ve always been happy to be a Mormon without insisting on being a Christian.

If you are looking for a morally, philosophically, and theologically fascinating place, I can think of few locations in contemporary life that can compare to the supermarket.

Technically, we weren’t supposed to go on splits with Chepe at all. Not by a longshot.

On my mission in Guatemala, we didn’t use the King James version of the bible. Instead, we used a popular Protestant translation called the Reyna Valera. This raises all sorts of fun questions.

Richard Bushman’s recent appearance at a Pew Forum conference on Mormonism and Democratic Politics has got me thinking about the role of scholars of Mormonism in shaping the religious news coverage swirling around Mitt Romney’s candidacy. I decided to do a little bit of informal content analysis of recent news stories, seeing which scholars are…

In the Reuters interview with Elder Christofferson, the interviewer asks, “There is historical evidence that suggests Joseph Smith took a 14-year-old bride, Helen Mar Kimball, when he was 38 years old. In today’s terms, that would make him a pedophile. Does this bother you or other LDS church members?” Elder Christofferson replies, “It would depend…

Everything changed when Tyko came to church.

Read it here. (HT: BCC) Lots of hot topics: polygamy, women and the priesthood, evolution, Romney, etc. Discuss.

What I dislike most about discussing Mormon literature is the all but inevitable moment when someone disparages the low artistic taste and congenital stinginess of Mormon readers. So let me set out the foundation for any discussion of Mormon literature and its readers: Readers owe authors nothing. Not a single copper-plated cent. Not a second…

This is the paper I read at the recent Mormon History Association meeting. I post it now in connection with T&S’s Mormon Writers Series commemoration of the 30th anniversary of President Spencer W. Kimball’s call for a renaissance in Mormon cultural arts

Earlier today, Elizabeth Rose Oman was born in Richmond, Virginia. Both Heather and the baby are doing well. Elizabeth is 8 lbs 2 oz and 21 inches long. Labor lasted for 18 hours, and we are very glad that she is here. God has been very good to us.

To celebrate, I’m enlisting you all to assist me in this groundbreaking literary endeavor.

Sometime this morning–perhaps even by the time I put up this post–Times and Seasons’ visitor counter will pass the two million mark. Two million readers in a little over three and a half years. Not bad for a blog that doesn’t feature kittens or porn.

Is it really such a bad place to be?

For the last six months of so, I have been doing a lot of research on nineteenth-century Mormon courts. Earlier today I presented some of my preliminary research to the law school faculty at William & Mary. For those who are interested, you can take a look at my paper online. In doing my research…

I’m gonna steal BCC’s idea going to contribute to the fine discussions of the lifting of the priesthood ban with a few thoughts on what we might learn from some responses to the ban.

Over at Pilgrim Girl, Jana discusses how she was told as a teen that her life would be a movie that everyone would watch in the hereafter. She writes:

Does source study make us better readers? I, Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, [attest that] we now have in our city of Ferrara several nuns miraculously redolent of holiness, and above all the worthy sister Lucy of Narnia

J. Nelson Seawright put up a post last week that is clearly a Trojan horse designed to undermine liberal Mormons. Sure, it disguises itself as a discussion of how to conceivably be more correct than the General Authorities; but this is obviously just a front. So let me warn all the liberals away from this…

Writing for a Mormon audience may be wasting the potential influence of Mormon readers.

I’ve been thinking of late about apologetics.

Some recent blog comments have discussed how the church’s history on race compares to other religions. Now, national politicians and pundits are discussing the same thing. There seems to be a general perception that the LDS church has not had a strong record as to race. The underlying facts, however, are quite a bit more…

They weren’t like us. “Watch out for les Arabes,” I learned as a missionary in the south of France.

You should.

Part of medieval Christianity’s reworking of its inheritance from Classical Antiquity included turning the Greek Sibyls from local oracles into foretellers of Christ’s birth. After the christianized Sibyls’ prophecies had spent a thousand years or so on the medieval equivalent of the bestseller list, meddling philologists started asking just how the pre-Christian Sibyls came to…