Early last year, I wrote about symbols I had observed in Wilford Woodruff’s journals. It turns out that I wasn’t the only person who had that on the mind – Joshua Matson had done some earlier and more intensive research on the same topic that he shared in a presentation at the Building Latter-day Faith Conference on March 4, 2023. From there, he worked on and published an article in BYU Studies and then discussed symbols in Wilford Woodruff’s journals in an interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
Doctrine – Theology – Philosophy
Why Plato? Part One
So in continuing this series on my thoughts on belief and history (I may pick that as a title), I wanted to give some background on why I ended up linking Mormonism and Plato. I did an interview with Gabriel Proulx a few months ago, and he assumed I’d been interested in philosophy for a long time. Not so. I had NO interest in philosophy as an academic discipline as an undergrad and focused on history then and throughout my academic training. I came across my interest in Plato from that angle. The only philosophy class I ever took was part of a four-course overview UC Santa Barbara had all the religious studies PhDs take, the second one on religion and philosophy. That particular course was generally considered the most difficult course of the entire program as the professor had us start with Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which is really hard especially if you have no philosophy background. Perhaps the most discouraging moment of the whole process was when I showed up to discuss Hegel having no ideas what I’d read, and another student saying, “This is nothing compared to Heidegger.” Being and Time was later in the course and was indeed much harder than Hegel. Rough course (though Hegel was a good crash course in Christian Platonism after the professor explained what he was talking about). I came to Plato (as I’ll discuss in my next…
Some Admissions of Ignorance
One of the markers of being the cool intellectual member is that you know where all the bodies are buried. I remember as a middle schooler cross-checking The Godmaker’s Journal of Discourses references and feeling like I was the recipient of arcane, secret knowledge. Of course, now the Internet has shouted everything from the rooftops and most people knows about the big tough issues (e.g. pretty much all Latter-day Saints know about Joseph Smith’s polygamy now). But still, there are some more niche issues that are still primarily the purview of the more well-read class. And with the Internet it is becoming easier to become part of said class. While in the past you essentially had to have access to a university library to be well-read in Church issues, now primary sources abound on the Internet–if you can filter out all the noise, at this point organization is the primary hindrance. To this end, I have found the BH Roberts Foundation’s Mormonr pages very useful both in summarizing these issues and presenting scans of the actual primary sources involved so that I can read them for myself and make up my own mind. [Full disclosure, I very occasionally do some work for the BH Roberts Foundation with their surveys, but they don’t know that I’m writing this]. As I’ve schlogged through these primary sources there are a number of “tough issues” that I realized I had misperceptions about since I…
Baseball Baptisms and the British Mission
Missionary service is a time of growth and an opportunity to serve, but it can also be a source of extreme pressures and stress for missionaries that manifests in different ways. One of the more famous examples came in the 1950s in the British Isles, where pressure from a mission president led to people taking advantage of the appeal of baseball to increase the number of baptisms they reported, regardless of whether it led to actual, long-term conversion. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Greg Prince discussed baseball baptisms. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
Rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity II: A historicist reading and reconstruction of 1 Nephi-Enos
Approaching the Book of Mormon as a historical text helps make sense of aspects of the book that an exclusive focus on the text as a work of fiction or on its nineteenth-century context overlooks. Several of these aspects relate to the opening books, from 1 Nephi to Enos. One aim of these books is to explain how several objects symbolizing political and religious authority came to be the rightful possessions of the Nephite king, while another important goal is to explain how the Nephite people came to exist in their current form. As that form changed, so did the text.
An Honorary White Horse Prophecy Award: Or, Romney Wasn’t the Only Republican “Latter-day Saint” Politician to Stand up to Trump
The quotes around Latter-day Saint are not for Romney, but Brooks, as explained below. Also, none of this should suggest that I’m on Team Democrat, and I don’t want this to devolve into some brute-force democrat versus republican fight in the comments, but on the issue of, you know, not overthrowing the republic I think reasonable people can come together. Like many I have been often disappointed by the paucity of republicans willing to stand-up to Trump, and I’m saddened that the one Senate republican who has a track record of putting his power where his mouth is will be retiring. However, in his recently published book, Bob Woodward reports that Trump wanted Mo Brooks, the Congressman from Alabama, to call for a special election to reinstate him as President 6 months into President Biden’s term. Evidently at this point Congressman Brooks (who admittedly had supported Trump’s earlier shenanigans with the 2020 election) had reached his limits, and he refused to do so. Predictably, President Trump’s feelings got a boo boo, he withdrew his support from Brooks, and Brooks lost his primary. Congressman Brooks is rather unique in that he was a Latter-day Saint convert in the deep, deep South who still won political office. In contrast to some Utah politicians whose Mormonism is an asset to play up in time for an election, one can’t help but see Brooks’ Mormonism as sincere given that it was undoubtedly a liability…
Rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity I: a limited chronology model
Over the next few posts, I’m going to sketch out an argument that believing in the historicity of the Book of Mormon is a rational choice. To put it briefly: the Book of Mormon does not need to strain historical plausibility nearly as much as it might seem; treating the Book of Mormon as a document that existed in history offers insights on the text that a focus only on its 19th-century context would overlook; and the historicity of the Book of Mormon offers a compelling explanation for a number of things that are otherwise difficult to explain.
Believing History
In this next post in something of a series (I’m holding off numbering these or giving them all the same title, since the concept is a bit amorphous) I wanted to lay out my approach to belief in topics that are historical. This title is something of a play on words, as I don’t mean so much as believing a believer’s narrative about historical things pertaining to Mormonism. Instead, what I mean is that I “believe” what the historical documentation and scholarly evidence indicates. I “believe” history. Yes, I’m well aware that there’s a lot of debate about a lot of issues, but in my personal beliefs about God and theology, I’m on board with what scholars are able to demonstrate as the historical evidence. That is, I’m good with saying what the scholarly evidence demonstrates, as opposed to holding to scriptural claims of historical events without evidence.
This Abominable Slavery: A Review
This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah by W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth is a fascinating and detailed glimpse into the debates about slavery and race in Utah Territory in the 1850s. Incorporating never-before transcribed accounts of the 1852 legislative session that saw Utah Territory leadership pass a series of laws intended to regulate unfree labor, this volume provides a thorough analysis of those laws, the debates that surrounded them and how they fit into the national context of the United States at the time. In doing so, the book also offers insights into the early development of the priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A Shrinking Church in a Shrinking World
Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment. Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over–all while membership could be increasing or even exploding in terms of percent population. How can this happen? In many countries the background population will be cratering. Throughout the history of Church growth we have largely taken the growth or stasis of the denominator of background population more or less for granted. While Church growth ebbs and flows depending on historical contingency, the populations the Church has been ensconced in have been either growing, or in a few cases, in a state of stasis such as modern day Western Europe. This is about to change. The implosion of fertility rates has not received nearly the attention it merits. We’re talking zombie apocalypse here, with overgrown, abandoned towns and villages and a permanent state of economic recession from the aging population (and that’s in the developed world, in developing countries with low fertility without government resources to care for their aged old people without living children to care for them will literally be dying in the streets). When I was going to graduate school the five-alarm fire, “lowest low” fertility was around 1.3 children per woman. For a…
Rethinking the Biblical Narrative: Introduction
Having done a few posts on being a practicing Mormonism while disbelieving in Book of Mormon historicity, I wanted to shift gears a little bit to explain a few more aspects of my believing framework. I’ve talked about my views on what I see as the good that our religion (others too) does for the lives of its members here in life, and I want to start a series a posts on what I see as a historical framework to Mormon belief that I find compelling. I’ll go over this in more detail in upcoming posts, but the gist is that what I see as the combination of two themes. The first is what I’ve found in the research on my book, that JS believed that a central calling of his was to restore was what was known in his day as the “ancient theology” (sometimes called other names like the ancient religion, the universal religion, or simply, ancient philosophy.)
Pharisees and Publicans, Thespians and Jocks
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: even like this jock. I watch my language, am always worthy to pass the sacrament, am on the honor roll, and I give a tenth of all my income.” As a note, I put this post in the queue for the 5th a long time ago, not realizing that it was General Conference weekend, I’ll keep it up, but in posting on General Conference Saturday I’m in no way trying to draw attention from what should be drawing your attention today. With high school almost 20 years in the rearview mirror for me now it’s interesting to see individual trajectories and how they surprise or do not surprise me. There are myriad topics that could stem from this theme (for example, who would have thought the X-Box junkie became the most objectively accomplished person in our graduating class?) However, given the subject of this blog, and the fact that my high school was nearly all Latter-day Saint, an obvious variable of interest here is later-life relationship to the Church. And on this I noticed a seemingly paradoxical theme that I’ve also picked up elsewhere. Many (though not all) of the “goodie good” kids have left. These were the ones who were into seminary council (when that was a thing), drama, and The Beatles (in kind of a faux rebelliousness borrowed from their parents), and who actually read the book…
On Overreliance on Specific Bible Translations
One aspect of Islam that I appreciate is their approach to translation of scriptures. You see, the Quran is considered a sacred text that was originally revealed in Arabic, and translations into other languages are often called “interpretations”. This is because Muslims believe that the Quran’s sacred character is unique to the Arabic language, and that translating it into another language changes its meaning. While I don’t know that the original language of a volume of scripture is sacred per se, any translation of that text can be viewed as an interpretation that changes its meaning to one degree or another and should be approached with a degree of caution as a result. The Renaissance has an excellent example of why this is important to keep in mind while reading scripture. In Western Europe, the Vulgate (a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible prepared by Jerome) was the main form of the Bible used throughout the middle ages. As humanism began to gain traction, however, there was an increased emphasis on going back to original sources. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (Erasmus of Rotterdam) was a key figure in this movement’s impact on Christianity due to his work on scholarly Greek and Latin editions of the New Testament. During his work in comparing the Bible text with earlier Greek manuscripts, Erasmus discovered that some Catholic doctrines were problematic because they relied specifically on the Vulgate in ways that the Greek did not…
Book Review: To Stop a Slaughter: Just War and the Book of Mormon by Morgan Deane
Among “amateur” LDS scholars (however you want to define that), Morgan Deane is, in my estimation, unfairly overlooked. While his specialty – military history – is something of a niche (though it shouldn’t be), it readily works with the Book of Mormon, especially with the accounts of wars. Part of the issue, methinks, is that “war” and “violence” are not particularly palatable topics amongst academics, and so we get occasionally forced eisegesis like the kind in the book Proclaim Peace (which, I think, has a decent premise taken way too far; we really should eschew violence as often as possible and proclaim peace, but given that one of the authors of that book has backed away somewhat from his absolutist stance, perhaps more nuance will appear in the discussion soon). In To Stop a Slaughter: Just War and the Book of Mormon, Morgan Deane (who is probably our #1 expert on Ancient war and the Book of Mormon) explores the ideas of Just War theory (something Proclaim Peace bafflingly ignores) in both Western and Eastern (mostly Chinese) history and applies it to the Book of Mormon (with applicability to modern times as well, though the focus is mostly on the text of the Book of Mormon). He covers ideas like when self-defense is justified, and even argues for a limited justification of preemptive strikes in certain extreme instances. All in all, this is a very comprehensive investigation of historical and…
On Marion D. Hanks
Marion D. Hanks is one of the most influential general authorities who never served in the Quorum of the Twelve or First Presidency. Today he is best known for his hymn, “That Easter Morn”, his advocating for Christlike service, and the support he lent to Black members of the Church in the years leading up to the Priesthood Revelation. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Hanks’s son and biographer, Richard D. Hanks, discussed Marion D. Hanks’s life and legacy.
My AI Generated Podcasts on the Bear Lake Monster and the Great Apostasy, And Other AI News
Apologies for doing another one of these so soon after the other one, but when it rains it pours. Since I last posted OpenAI released “advanced voice mode” to all plus subscribers. What this means is that the lag we’re used to when talking to AI is now gone, and now it is indiscernible from speaking to a real human being, up to and including detecting sarcasm, humor, and the like. I have been using it to brush up on my very rusty mission Spanish, and now any pre-missionary who wants to go above and beyond and practice, say, giving a first discussion in French with a personalized tutor that will correct their grammar doesn’t have to wait until they enter the MTC. They have put some safeguards in place so that it can’t just clone your voice, but the day when anybody can clone anybody’s voice and automate a thousand bots to call everybody in your phone is coming, so once again please be aware and discuss with your old and sometimes not so old-relatives that a phone call from somebody that sounds just like you asking for money isn’t necessarily you. Google is still very much playing catch up in the AI wars (and no matter how good they get, their AI will probably always invoke images of Black Nazis). Notebook LM has a fun new functionality that automatically generates a podcast-type back and forth based off…
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, September 2024
I don’t usually respond to articles that I dislike, generally just letting them talk for themselves, but the Miller and Dunn chapter promotes the myth of “soaking,” which is supposedly a chastity loophole that I discuss here. They reference a college newspaper which cites TikTok, so still no real evidence that soaking is a thing.
Latter-day Saint Book Discussion, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast
A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (“enjoy” isn’t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can’t get out of it, it is hard to know anything about the internal sense experience of those events. I recall reading one account where the writer who had been subjected to torture dismissed the phrase “burn like a red hot iron.” Unless you have been burned by an iron you have no idea what that phrase means, and at some point words just aren’t useful for describing a sensory experience that you haven’t actually gone through because there is no shared reference point. Still, a very good writer can kind of get us there. (For depression for example, William Styron’s Darkness Visible or Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon.) In Latter-day Saint epistemology, we rely heavily on the spirit, but for some people it’s harder to clear out the detritus to be able to hear it, or for some people their internal dialogue with God just isn’t very reliable for reasons outside their control. I still think God speaks to them, but it’s trickier to suss out the still small voice from all the other voices in the case of some mental health disorders One facet of Latter-day Saint soteriology…
Historical Narratives and the Pharisees
Growing up in the Church, I repeatedly heard stories where missionaries encountered people who had been reading anti-Mormon literature and told them that “you wouldn’t decide on which car to buy by reading only the stuff put out by a company’s competitors – you would also read what the company that produced the car has to say to get a balanced view. The same should be true for religions.” When looking at historical sources, unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to do the same, because the religion’s own sources are no longer extant. Such was the case with the early Pharisees – a topic explored by Thomas Wayment in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
Why the King James Version is the Best Bible Translation
As a TBM there are a surprising number of issues dealing with religion where I have some agreement with Richard Dawkins, and one of them is that the King James Version is the best version of the Bible. When I say “best,” I don’t mean “most accurately conveys the oldest documents.” I know there are older arguments that try to argue something along these lines (J. Reuben Clark wrote a booklet about it, but when I was in Stephen Robinson’s class at BYU he didn’t seem to think his arguments held much water), but I have no reason to doubt the idea that newer translations rely on older texts and have less mistranslations. Still, when choosing a translation that is not the only criteria. The creation of the King James Version really was lightning in a bottle that will probably never be repeated. The most learned people in the land coming together as the English language was coming into its own and at its most lyrical. (It’s been a while, but the book Fire in the Bones: William Tyndale, Martyr, Father of the English Bible by BYU Religion Professor Michael Wilcox does an excellent job describing all of this). The English language predecessors they relied on such as Tyndale had enough of a handle on the cadence of the English language to really make it sing, while having enough authority in their own right that they could simply create their…
J.R.R. Tolkien and the Resurrection
J.R.R. Tolkien had an enormous impact on my teenage years. I read Lord of the Rings by the time I was eleven and loved it enough to reread it each year for the next few years. By the time I was thirteen, the Silmarillion was my favorite book and my mom was bringing home the History of Middle Earth series from the library for me to read. As a result, Tolkien had some impact on my religious thoughts during this formative period.
Recent AI Developments and Their Implications
A few days ago OpenAI released its much-rumored “Strawberry” system titled Chat-GPT4o1. While previous LLMs can provide an impressive writing at, say, the undergraduate level (especially if prompted well), the new system can “think” and plan better for technical concepts, and it can now answer scientific, technical questions more accurately than a PhD in that field. If Chat-GPT4 is undergraduate level, Chat-GPT4o1 is graduate level. Of particular utility is explaining difficult concepts. For example, I’ve never had anybody explain to me, at a very high level, Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; it’s the kind of thing where people who are smart enough to understand don’t have the kind of smarts necessary to dumb it down for us mortals, but I asked the new system to explain it in a way that a high schooler can understand and it led me by the hand, step-by-step, until I kind of understood it, again at a high level. So everybody has a really good graduate school-level tutor now. So, how this is related to the Church? Its ability to tie concepts together and *think* in less formulaic ways means that every Mormon Studies person has a graduate student-level research assistant–that you still need to check, since hallucination is still kind of a problem, but this will especially take off when you can, say, feed thousands of pages of primary source materials and have it produce rather sophisticated, less boiler-plate essays. (Also, anybody…
CNN Doesn’t Even Have to Dog Whistle With Us
This morning this headline was prominently displayed at the top of the page of CNN (on the mobile version, the Internet version was much more tame to their credit). The version I snapshotted above is newer, the original version had “Mormon” prominently displayed in both the title and the subheading. (It originally said something like “Small town Mormon doctor is accused of abuse…More than 100 former patients say Mormon doctor abused them.”) Of course, if the doctor was a stake president and systematically used his position to abuse most of his victims, then such a headline would have been completely appropriate. However, it is clear when reading the article that he was a sexual abuser that happened to be Mormon. Yes, some of the abuse leveraged Church connections, but I somehow doubt that if there was a Jewish doctor, among whom some of his 100+ victims were some that he knew from his synagogue, that they would prominently display the word “Jewish” two times in the heading and subheading. Of course it would have been appropriate to discuss the synagogue connection to his victims in the body of the article, but prominently displaying it as the main identifier twice is clearly the editor either trying to get clicks by piling onto a not-cool religious groups, or outright malice. To be clear, I don’t have much to complain about with the body of the article. Out of 128 victims it’s…
Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist, a Review
Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist by Christine Talbot is a provocative and insightful entry in University of Illinois Press’s Introductions to Mormon Thought series.
Is the Church Replacing Itself? Part II
Years ago I wrote a very high-level, abstract post where I analyzed whether the Church was replacing itself, arguing that a lot of the “growth” we’re seeing is an artifact of population momentum, and that we shouldn’t pat ourselves on our back too much (although we should some, since we’re doing a lot better than most/almost all). Now that I’ve run some numbers on Latter-day Saint fertility I am going to be more specific with my numbers to make a related point, although here I am putting conversion baptisms to the side and simply asking whether, without missionary activity, we are treading water in terms of membership in the United States. Of course, this is still very much back-of-the-envelope, but I think I’m in the ballpark. For any group in the developed world to replace itself they need to have 2.1 children. According to the last solid estimate, we retain about 64% of our children in the faith. Therefore, in order to have enough children to offset the children lost to religious switching, we would need to have an average of 3.28 children. Latter-day Saints in the US have about three children on average. Therefore, we appear to be slowly declining from generation to generation without taking into account conversions. At that rate each generation is 91% of the size of the previous one. It is worth noting that this is probably conservative,…
Russell M. Nelson: 100 Years Old
Today marks the 100th anniversary of President Russel M. Nelson’s birth. Celebrations in Utah are abounding to mark this milestone—the first time The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had a Centenarian at its helm. For example, Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox declared the day as “President Russell M. Nelson Day” in the state, honoring Nelson for his service in the military, as a surgeon, as an ecclesiastical leader, and as a family man. The Church, meanwhile, is planning a special broadcast this afternoon to celebrate the occasion as well. Here at Times and Seasons, I’m not aware of any new posts celebrating, however, we do have a Russell M. Nelson page sharing posts discussing his life, teachings, and longevity that I wanted to point out as one collection to explore as we honor his birthday.
Top Mormon Studies Amateurs
Mormon Studies is relatively open-minded when it comes to accepting the contributions of amateurs. Here I am defining amateurs as people who are not employed by academia as their main gig, whether or not they have a graduate degree–some do, some don’t; also, here I am defining “Mormon Studies” broadly, as any original research endeavor that touches on Mormonism in some way. In this post I am making a list of amateurs who have in my eye have made significant contributions to the Mormon Studies world, including many that some people may not be aware of. Of course, I am not as deep into the world as some are, so no offense intended if I miss somebody big, which I probably will. Unsullied by careerism, there’s a certain added creativity to amateur work since they can simply do what they love without worrying about whether it’s what the cool kids are doing. Sometimes we have a hard time looking past the title, but it’s clear that amateurs have a lot to contribute. (Bike repair guys Orville and Wilbur Wright’s main competitor was a prestigious professor that enjoyed federal funding, and Albert Einstein was famously a patent clerk that could not get an academic job to save his life when he discovered relativity). So without further ado… Ardis Parshall: I would not be surprised if Ardis Parshall knows more about Latter-day Saint primary sources than anyone alive. Her blog is a…
Secret Covenants: A Review
It seems that there is always more to discover and discuss about Joseph Smith’s introduction of plural marriage into the church. Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy, edited by Cheryl L. Bruno is going to be a landmark in those discussions moving forward.
Data Visualization of New Testament Books by Size, Time Since Christ, and Authenticity
A part of the graph, the link below has the whole thing. Of the big AI players, Anthropic’s Claude is quite good at making diagrams, so I used it to generate an infographic I’ve always wanted to see, something that conveys in one visual how far away from Christ a book in the NT was written, the size of the work, and whether it’s considered “authentic” by scholars, either in the sense that it was written by whoever it claims to be written by (the undisputed Pauline epistles), or whether it has authentic first-hand reports from the time of Christ not found elsewhere (The Synoptic Gospels and Acts). In other words, I want to see which sources are closest to the “historical Jesus.” On one hand I think most historical Jesus research and thought processes get a little carried away about their narrow false negative confidence intervals, but at the same time the premise that the manuscripts closer to Christ could tell us more about Him is valid for most purposes. In order to show the data in year-by-year and to scale the size of the block proportional to the size of the book I created a graph that could not fit onto one page (and I don’t know how to embed it into WordPress), but you can see the a version that you can scroll through here. (Claude now has an “artifacts” feature where you can share the results…
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2024
Latter-day Saint missionaries helped bring basketball to Scotland, who’d have thought? (Actually, there’s probably a paper waiting to be written on all the ways that missionaries helped disseminate basketball, including famously helping coach the German basketball team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics). Also, the latest (maybe last? He’s getting old) publication by Richard Bushman. And James Faulconer, despite being retired, is still producing scholarship. Finally, Mormon diet books!