Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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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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CFM 9/1-9/7: Poetry for “For the Salvation of Zion” (D&C 94-97)
We focus on the temple, and we have from the beginning of the Church. The temple plays a crucial role in our theology, but also a role that demonstrates tensions between principles. While the ordinances of the temple are done individually, those ordinances are often performed in groups, and the purpose of these ordinances generally…
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Nazis and Latter-day Saints
I’ve seen that the Church sometimes gets a bad reputation for how it navigated Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. One thing that tends to get overlooked, however, was the amount of pressure the Church felt from the Nazi regime. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Stephen O. Smoot discussed…
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CFM 8/25-8/31: Poetry for “Receive of His Fulness”
What do we mean when we talk about ‘Fulness’? The Come Follow Me lesson for this week, covering D&C 93, suggests that it’s related to exaltation—but I’m not sure that we know exactly what exaltation is either. ‘Fulness’ suggests some kind of completeness or satiation—we will have everything we need, and maybe everything we should…
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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, a Review
The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, edited by R. Gordon Shepherd, A. Gary Shepherd, and Ryan T. Cragun, is a landmark anthology that shifts the center of gravity in Latter-day Saint scholarship from a nineteenth-century, Utah-centric narrative to a nuanced, data-rich exploration of Mormonism as a global religious tradition. With 31 chapters contributed by 42…
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A Differing View of Church Leadership: A “Caretaker” Model
I mentioned in some comments in previous posts about having a different view of church leadership that I called a “caretaker model,” or seeing the leaders more as caretakers of Joseph Smith’s program and revelations. There’s a lot to this, so I thought I’d give a little overview of bullet points, and perhaps I’ll blog…
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CFM 8/18-8/24: Poetry for “A Principle with Promise”
Most of the time when we hear the phrase “A Principle with Promise,” we think of D&C Section 89 and the promise that we can “run and not be weary.” However, some kind of promise is associated with every gospel principle—there is at least one consequence that accompanies every principle, and the accompanying consequences follow…
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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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Canonization, Part 3: Reasons to Avoid Canonization
Returning to the series I was working on earlier this year about canonization, I wanted to discuss why it sometimes isn’t the best idea to canonize documents. Part 1 of the series discussed the process by which canonization occurs in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while Part 2 discussed some documents that…
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CFM 8/11-8/17: Poetry for “Establish … a House of God”
Perhaps the most memorable verse in D&C 88 is 119, which establishes the ‘School of the Prophets’ and encourages our cultural orientation towards education: “Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory,…
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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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Trailer for the Movie ETERNITY
Has anyone else seen the trailer for this movie? Couple Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen die and go to the afterlife and then have a problem when Olsen ALSO meets the husband who died before she married Teller. Quite the Mormon sounding dilemma! Who would have thought this Mormon conundrum was good fodder for a…
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10 Thoughts on Dietrich Bonhöffer’s Discipleship
If you’re interested in quotable mid-century Protestant theologians, Dietrich Bonhöffer may be more directly relevant for us today than C.S. Lewis. Bonhöffer’s 1937 book, Nachfolge, is best known for its discussion of “cheap grace,” but there’s a lot more going on.
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Differing from Church Leaders: A Personal Experience
In this post at the Juvenile Instructor, I shared some of the spiritual prompting I felt I had in grad school, but a really big one was the persistent prompting I felt to vote no on Proposition 8 in 2007. Throughout that year, 2007, I had this nagging spiritual feeling: “You need to understand the…
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CFM 8/4-8/10: Poetry for “Stand Ye in Holy Places”
What are ‘Holy Places’? What makes them holy? Are there different kinds of ‘Holy Places’? Has our understanding of ‘Holy Places’ changed over time? I suspect that most LDS Church members think of the Temple when we think of a holy place, but when pushed we might agree that the Sacred Grove is also a…
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Other Impulses: Intuition, Imagination, Deception, Mental Illness, Who Knows?
“Ye are commanded in all things to ask of God, who giveth liberally … doing all things with prayer and thanksgiving, that ye may not be seduced by evil spirits, or doctrines of devils, or the commandments of men; for some are of men, and others of devils.” (DC 46:7).
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John Turner, Joseph Smith, and Plate Mythicism
Guest post by Stephen Smoot Did Joseph Smith actually possess gold plates? This question has intrigued historians, skeptics, and believers ever since Joseph first described the origins of the Book of Mormon. Richard L. Bushman’s recent book, a “cultural history” of the plates, traces how they have functioned as both historical artifact and sacred symbol…
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CFM 7/28-8/3: Poetry for “The Power of Godliness”
If the priesthood is “The Power of Godliness,” and if we are to learn how to use that power, we should probably think a lot about what the word “power” means in this context. Most of the time power is associated with the ability to control things, often including people and usually by force. But…
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What Spiritual Experiences Are We Allowed to Have?
“He treated my communication not only lightly, but with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil, that there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days; that all such things had ceased with the apostles, and that there would never be any more of them.” (1:21)
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Mental Illness and Agency
After last week I thought it might be worth the time to write a little more about the concept of agency. While it’s accepted we don’t always have agency over what happens to us (for obvious reasons), there is an idea that has become prevalent that we nevertheless have full agency over ourselves; that, no…
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From the Archives: Relatable Actions
I’m working hard on my Zerah Pulsipher biography and thought it would be fun to share a few items that I found interesting or fun. Today’s post focuses on a couple fun and relatable vignettes from early settlers in Utah and Idaho.
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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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Freedom like Bastille Day
Happy Bastille Day! You may not think Bastille Day is important for Americans, given that it is a celebration of an event early in the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille in 1789. But since the day is a kind of celebration of freedom and since the subsequent revolution has become a kind of…
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CFM 7/21-7/27: Poetry for “Where Much Is Given Much Is Required”
The idea behind “Where Much is Given, Much is Required” goes beyond just the idea of responsibility or accountability. There is also in the phrase a sense of equity and care for others that isn’t necessarily part of responsibility. The idea is clearly the opposite of the images we see of excessive displays of wealth,…
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Disillusionment: Spiritual Experiences Not Seeming to Work Out
“O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?… How long shall they suffer these wrongs and unlawful oppressions, before thine heart shall be softened toward them, and thy bowels be moved with compassion toward them?” (DC 121:1, 3). This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out. They…
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![[Mental Illness] The Weight of Happiness](https://timesandseasons.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/sadness-and-happiness-in-the-air-giorgi-khatiashvili-1.jpg)
[Mental Illness] The Weight of Happiness
In America we are obsessed with individual happiness. Like, obsessed. From the Declaration of Independence to prosperity gospel to the multi-billion dollar self-care industry, personal happiness has become less of an experience and more of a measure. Happiness has become something that is deeply individualistic, and serves as a sign that you are doing something…
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From the Archive: Seventies Blessings
I’m working hard on my Zerah Pulsipher biography and thought it would be fun to share a few items that I found interesting or fun. Today’s post focuses on blessings given to members of the newly-formed quorums of the seventies during the 1830s.
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How Do We Know? Let’s Talk about Spiritual Experiences
“How can I tell if something I feel or goes through my mind is the Spirit telling me something, or my own thoughts?” is a question I’ve heard posed a number of times in church (often in elders quorum). So as I often think about posts in terms of series, I’m thinking about a series…
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CFM 7/14-7/20: Poetry for “I Will Lead You Along”
The introduction of the ‘United Firm’ in 1832 was, I think, an attempt to provide needed structure to the Church and its members. Any organization provides roles for individuals and ways that those roles interact with each other and the outside world. As a result, the scriptures covered by this week’s Come Follow Me lesson…
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From the Archives: Muddy Iowa
I’m in the midst of pushing to finish a draft of my biography of Zerah Pulsipher and thought it would be fun to share a few items here and there that I found interesting or funny while I’m working on it. Today’s post is about the laborious journey across Iowa in the spring of 1846,…