Category: Features
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Worst General Conference posts, ranked
General Conference begins in two days. I’m looking forward to it, but not as much to the online responses.
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The Neglected Louie B. Felt
RoseAnn Benson’s book Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith: 19th-Century Restorationists compares the two best known and successful figures in the broad restorationist movement of the 19th century. While those familiar with Latter-day Saint history know the relationship between the two movements, oddly in broader religious history only Campbell and his Disciples of Christ are considered…
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Ethics and Mormon missionary work: what memoirs tell us
They are still teenagers, 18 or 19, and are sent out to change the lives of adults. The boys dress up like CIA-agents, the girls like old-school women. They typically have no clue about the national, regional, social, cultural, religious, or familial identities of the people they try to interest in their alien sect. They…
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Grace and Cooperative Salvation
Since at least the time of Augustine of Hippo and Pelagius, western Christianity has been embroiled in a debate about salvation and grace. The two extremes have been represented as salvation by grace alone and earning salvation by our own works. Theologians and Church leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have…
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“Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” Throughout the Restoration
I remember seeing a survey several years ago that claimed that the two most popular hymns among Latter-day Saints were “I Stand All Amazed” and “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”. I have not been able to find that survey online in recent years, but the latter hymn would be an interesting case, since it…
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A Restored Gospel Christian Calendar
We sometimes speak of the idea of a holy envy—meaning something that we admire in another a religion. For years, while remaining active in my ward, I spent a considerable amount of time at a Presbyterian Church ringing English handbells. Over time, one feature of their worship that I developed a bit of a holy…
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5 lessons from Schmidt and Taylor’s book Carried: How One Mother’s Trust in God Helped Her through the Unthinkable
In late 2016, Annie Schmidt went hiking in the mountains of Oregon. When she didn’t reappear, a mix of professionals and amateurs, friends and relatives and strangers, searched for weeks to find her. Annie’s mother, Michelle Schmidt, teamed up with her sister, Angie Taylor, to write the story of Annie’s disappearance, the search, and the…
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The Expanded Canon: A Review
Several months ago, my wife Lissette gave a talk in sacrament meeting on the topic of modern prophets and continuing revelation. She wanted to provide something different, something the congregation could really chew on (no “theological Twinkies“). She ended up discussing how modern-day prophets model the process of revelation for us. Drawing on Elder Bednar’s analogy…
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Book Review — Where We Must Stand: Ten Years of Feminist Mormon Housewives
reading and reviewing this book was a weighty experience for me, just as participating in FMH has been a weighty experience for its authors and many of its participants; and some of that weight shows up here
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Times & Seasons Re-Welcomes Bryan Hickman
Times & Seasons hopes you will join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger, Bryan Hickman, for his guest-blogging stint with us (see here for his prior posts). Bryan is a semi-reformed Utah Mormon (whatever that means) doing his best to rein in the knee-jerkedness of his worldview (whatever that means). He went to school…
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What Can Church Youth Leaders Learn from Baltimore?
For ten years, a Baltimore non-profit called Thread has been working with the youth of that city. Thread’s goal is to “foster students’ academic advancement and personal growth into self-motivated, resilient, and responsible citizens.” It does this by seeking out underperforming high school students and providing each one with a “family of committed volunteers” who…
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Times & Seasons Welcomes Levi Jones
Times and Seasons hopes you will join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger, Levi Jones. Levi is an attorney with the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he handles general litigation matters. Prior to joining Commerce, Levi worked for several years as a corporate lawyer for a D.C. area firm. Levi earned his law degree…
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Saints, Volume 1: A Review
About a week ago, the first volume of the new official history of the Church was published. I finished reading through it this weekend, and I have to say that it is fantastic. The style of prose reads like a novel (many creative authors were employed as the writers or consultants for the book), but…
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“Saints, Slaves, & Blacks”: A Review
This past May, I went to see Jana Riess present her recent research on Mormon Millennials at the Miller Eccles Study Group here in Texas. One of the most interesting (and disturbing) bits of information was her finding regarding Mormons’ opinions about the priesthood/temple ban. As she summarizes online, The 2016 NMS asked whether respondents…
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Future Mormon 6: A Radical Mormon Materialism
Welcome to the oft delayed sixth chapter of the once weekly reading club for Adam Miller’s Future Mormon. Hopefully we’ll get back to weekly again. For general links related to the book along with links for all the chapter discussions please go to our overview page. Please don’t hesitate to give your thoughts on the chapter. We’re…
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Review Essay: “The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology”: Materiality and Performance
Like a paring knife to a grapefruit, Jonathan Stapley’s new book on the history of Mormon cosmology is slim, sharp, and swift to carve through pith, serving up elegant wedges of history. The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology (Oxford, 2018) traces the evolution of ritual practice in Mormonism, including priesthood ordination, sealing rites,…
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The Bread of Life, with Chocolate Chips
Today I am pleased to present a guest post from a good friend of the blog, Samuel Morris Brown. I learned to cook when my wife was recovering from cancer surgery. There’s a hollowness, kindred to cancer, hungry to swallow you up when a beloved’s life is threatened. I still remember, with a soul-deep ache,…
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Review: William V. Smith’s ‘Textual Studies of the Doctrine & Covenants’
In October 2007, I returned home to Texas from my mission in Nevada. In April of the following year, the raid on the YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, TX, occurred. I didn’t think much about it at the time because, you know, they weren’t real Mormons (as many LDS are wont to say). However, a good…
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Defiantly Turning the Other Cheek
On Twitter last week in the aftermath of the whole Porter situation someone mentioned the issue of turning the other cheek. Now first off I don’t think in any legitimate interpretation of turning the cheek it means submitting to abuse particularly spousal abuse. I know there is sadly a strong thread in the Jewish, Christian,…
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Unwavering Commitment to God and the Dark Night of the Soul
A few years ago, President Rosemary Wixom of the Primary shared a story from the life of Mother Teresa in General Conference: In a 1953 letter, Mother Teresa wrote: “Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me,…
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Hurlbut’s Story of the Bibles
Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, a Methodist minister, first published the Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible in 1904. In the book, he retells 168 Bible stories in simplified modern English prose. The author’s purpose was to provide a version of key scripture passages that young readers would find accessible. The numerous republished editions that have appeared throughout…
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A Credible Case for Universalism — A Review of Givens and Givens’s The Christ Who Heals
In their new book, The Christ Who Heals: How God Restored the Truth that Saves Us, Fiona and Terryl Givens make the case for how “the doctrines and scriptures of the Restoration have enriched our knowledge of the rock and foundation of our faith — Jesus Christ.” The book is a delight: The Givenses draw on…
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Reeder and Holbrook’s At the Pulpit: The book I hope becomes a fixture in Latter-day Saint homes
The first account we have of a woman speaking in General Conference is Lucy Mack Smith, speaking in Nauvoo, Illinois, in October 1845. But women were teaching in the Church long before that, and the continued long after that — not just in General Conference. In their collection At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses…
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Inside the mind of the Book of Mormon’s first antagonist — A review of Mette Harrison’s The Book of Laman
In the Book of Mormon, Laman and Lemuel often come across more as comic book villains more than fully fleshed out characters. As Grant Hardy put it, “In the Book of Mormon, Laman and Lemuel are stock characters, even caricatures.” In her new novel, The Book of Laman (with its cover art a stroke of brilliance),…
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Perspectives on Mormon Theology Review
Dave managed to finish his review of Perspectives on Mormon Theology before I did. To cut to the chase let me just summarize my judgment of the book first. If you’re at all interested in the implications of scholarly considerations of Mormon history, exegesis, or theology then this is a must read book. Blair Van Dyke and…
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Fiction and Culture: Mette Ivie Harrison’s The Bishop’s Wife
A good Mormon mystery Novels — particularly good ones — convey a sense of place. This is absolutely true of mystery novels, from Kwei Quartey’s police detective in Ghana to Alexander McCall Smith’s private detective in Botswana. But how much do we really about a place or a culture from a work of fiction? I…
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A Mormon Image: Communing With the Saints
My loved ones are embarrassed by public breastfeeding, so I retire to the mothers’ room to fulfill the measure of my creation. ~ Bethany West If you have a photograph you would like to submit for consideration in our A Mormon Image series, please see here for our submission requirements.
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A Mormon Image: Izyek Steps into the Waters
On a cold day in January, Eldon Umphrey helps his son, Izyek, into Mission Creek in western Montana. The creek runs through the family property, and it has become a family tradition to perform baptisms there, even when there’s snow and ice. ~ Michael Umphrey (http://umphrey.net/) If you have a photograph you would like…
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Mormon Doctrine for Grown-ups: A Review of Terryl Givens’s Wrestling the Angel
When I was young, I discovered C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and enjoyed every volume. Then one day, at my neighborhood library, I discovered Paul Ford’s Companion to Narnia, essentially an encyclopedia of Narnia, and I fell in love. The entries were arranged alphabetically, and there were more topics than I had ever imagined. It…