Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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Zion will have data centers
Since you ask: Yes, of course Jesus would build data centers for AI workloads.
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Female Veiling in Mormonism
Funeral and temple veiling for women is one of those practices that would sound familiar to other religious traditions (and yes, I’m aware things have changed). For example, during my Traditional Latin Mass research you quickly come into contact with the Catholic version of this–the wearing of the Mantilla that traditional Catholics will often (but…
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CFM 11/16-11/22: Thoughts and Poetry for “I Will Love Them Freely”
The phrase “love them freely” strikes me as unusual, but important. The key is the word “freely”, which suggests without restraint or impediment. Loving freely means we don’t let anything else get in the way of loving. But in most of our lives, that kind of restraint-less love isn’t common. Whether we look at the…
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CFM 11/9-11/15: Thoughts and Poetry for “There Is No Other God That Can Deliver”
We believe in an active God, a heavenly parent who takes an active interest in our lives, and who acts for the good of His children. While miracles do happen, often God’s help is invisible, arriving through inspiration and less-obvious interventions. Even God’s intervention in the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den is not…
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A Review of Seven Crossings: Encounters with Christ in the New Testament
Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch. Seven Crossings: Encounters with Christ in the New Testament. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2026. Seven Crossings is the fourth volume in a series that began with Seven Gospels and continued through Seven Visions and Seven Songs. It keeps the earlier format. Miller, a philosopher, and Welch, a…
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A Standard Polygamy Narrative?
What I mean by the title of this post is what I see as the most common church narrative for polygamy that I’ve heard over the years. Polygamy is something church leaders and members generally want to downplay, and yet it takes up a good chunk of our history and is hard to make go…
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Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List
Tier lists are a fashionable/fun way to rank order things, ranging from F to S (super, above A). I already did one for arguments for the existence of God, so I thought I’d be a little more Latter-day Saint specific and do one for apologetics arguments for LDS truth claims. There are two kinds of…
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CFM 11/2-11/8: Thoughts and Poetry for “A New Spirit Will I Put within You”
What do we mean by a new spirit? Or maybe a new heart? If we are embodied spirits, doesn’t giving us a new spirit mean that someone else gets our body? Of course that’s wrong — and we mean something different by “spirit” in this case — more like the attitude or outlook we use…
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Reading the New Testament on Its Own Terms: A Review of Alex Douglas’s The New Testament for Latter-day Saints
A review of Alex Douglas. The New Testament for Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2026. For many Latter-day Saints, reading the New Testament often defaults to a harmonizing exercise. It is not uncommon to move through the Gospels during a Come, Follow Me year looking to blend Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into…
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A Recap of the Book of Mormon Studies Association Conference
Two weeks ago, I attended the Book of Mormon Studies Association conference in Logan, Utah. Across two days, a few threads kept resurfacing: how earlier generations of Latter-day Saints visualized and wrote about the Book of Mormon, how the book came to be translated (and how it is translated now), and how its readers have…
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The Framework of My Historical Argument about Polygamy
So before I delve more into these issues related to our polygamy problems, I thought first I’d lay out the context of claims I’m making relative to my argument that Smith was thinking of the idea of “shared marriage,” or men and women being able to have multiple spouses prior to a shift in 1843…
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Creative and Cultural Self-Reliance
A speaker in our ward this past Sunday talked about self-reliance, reading the Church’s definition of this term as “The ability, commitment, and effort to provide the spiritual and temporal necessities of life for self and family.” The best part of this definition is that it includes both “spiritual” and “temporal” necessities. These two ideas,…
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CFM 10/26-11/1: Thoughts and Poetry for “I Will Turn Their Mourning into Joy”
In the past few years, when thinking about suffering and mourning, I have pondered the idea (from Buddhism, as I understand it), that suffering and mourning are rooted in our thoughts—we wouldn’t be disappointed, for example, if we hadn’t expected something different; and we wouldn’t mourn if we weren’t afraid of loosing what we mourn…
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Thoughts on Our Polygamy Problems
So I’m thinking about doing a series of posts on the thorny topic of the problems polygamy causes for the church. I know that’s pretty obvious and has been discussed at length, but I wanted to highlight the challenge the church has of making the problem go away. It seems clear that the leaders would…
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CFM 10/19-10/25: Thoughts and Poetry for “Before I Formed Thee in the Belly I Knew Thee”
When we realize that God has known us, literally forever, does that change our relationship with Him? Do we see His actions in our lives, as well as the things that happen to us that may not be His will—do we see our lives differently? Our belief in a pre-existence is somewhat unusual among the…
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When Peace Is More Than Personal
This week, peace has become something more than personal for me. For many of us in the United States today, and in most western countries for that matter, peace is thought of as part of the background of our lives. We don’t see violence in person, and its often not close enough. We’re privileged to…
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Attention Spans and Spiritual Diets in the 21st Century
I ran across the below photo of the multilingual story hours that public libraries used to put on for immigrant communities (the below is of Italian children listening to Pinocchio). As a father of fashionably attention-deficit sons, I was immediately struck by how rapt the young children’s attention was to the teacher. With kids these…
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CFM 10/12-10/18: Thoughts and Poetry for “The Redeemer Shall Come to Zion”
In Isaiah’s poetic language, we see references to our Savior and Redeemer frequently, yielding important insight into His role and into how we benefit from that role. Indeed, reading scriptures like those of Isaiah helps us build testimonies of Him. Since Isaiah lived hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, these teachings foresee His…
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What Do People Know About Latter-day Saints?
What do People Know About the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Members sometimes have this image of what the normie gentiles think about us (one that often that neatly fits into our view of how the Church should change), when in fact hardly anybody knows anything about us beyond the basics, and sometimes…
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CFM 10/5-10/11: Thoughts and Poetry for “He Hath Borne Our Griefs, and Carried Our Sorrows”
[This post for the Come Follow Me lesson that covers Isaiah 50-57, to be read October 5-11, and discussed on October 11th] A fascinating aspect of Isaiah is how much this book of scriptural poetry can be read as about the Messiah — and has been read as messianic for so long that its sometimes…
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How I taught Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (annotated edition)
[When I was asked to fill in as the Gospel Doctrine teacher for the first week of the new schedule with 25-minute lessons, I realized from the start that the lesson would go more or less like this.]
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Joseph Smith as a 19th Century L. Ron Hubbard
Internet discourse often compares Joseph Smith to L. Ron Hubbard, and there are some superficial similarities: they both engaged in magic practices, they were both charismatic, they both enjoyed military uniforms and titles, and for non-believers in either they both (depending on your view) came up with fantastical new worlds. L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings are…
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Judging in our Meetings (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 9/20
How often do we decide that a talk given in Sacrament Meeting, or a lesson given at church just wasn’t very good? If you have done this, can I ask “What were your criteria for judging? How did you know it was good or not?” I think the issue of criteria is an important one.…
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CFM 9/28-10/4: Thoughts and Poetry for “Comfort Ye My People”
Does anyone not need comfort? Over the course of this year’s scripture study, I have noticed how frequently we talk about suffering, and the need for suffering. If nothing else, the lesson on Job focuses on the fact that everyone goes through suffering in this life — and recently I pointed out that our beliefs…
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The Rest of the Story of a Poem
One of the most frequently published and regarded most highly LDS poets of the 19th century was Emily Hill Woodmansee, who is best remembered for the poem “As Sisters in Zion,” currently #309 in the hymnal. For us today, like almost all 19th century poetry, her work might seem rather conventional—it’s almost all written in…
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Baptisms for the Dead Among the Early Christians: What Does the Literature Say?
Baptisms for the Dead at Corinth Baptisms for the Dead among early Christians is occasionally touched on in apologetics works, but like my earlier piece on female ordination and early Church structure I wanted to do a deeper dive on what the research literature had to say about the subject. I read/perused the articles below…
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Others in our Meetings (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 9/13
Regardless of what we think the ideal Church meeting is like, others are there. While our purpose in going to Church is to worship, we seem to believe that others need to be there. I am not aware of anything that says that we can’t worship by ourselves (and many of our worship practices—prayer, scripture…
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CFM 9/21-9/27: Thoughts and Poetry for “A Marvellous Work and a Wonder”
“A Marvelous Work and a Wonder” is one of the handful of biblical phrases that our religious tradition has given different meaning from what others understand. Where the phrase in Isaiah is often thought by non-LDS scholars to refer to the confounding of those who think they are wise, the similar language found in the…
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The Glasses of Twenty Five Years
Today can be painful. It has been painful for me. How it is painful depends on how you see it. Recently I have been taking classes in graduate school. Many of our discussions in class have focused on various ways of looking at the texts we have studied. During most of the past 50 years,…