Category: Church History
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 4: Look out for places where our brethren could go
It seems that in times of trouble, the early Latter-day Saints looked towards Mexico for refuge.
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 3: A few things that needed to happen
Elder Parley P. Pratt’s mission to Chile highlighted a few things that needed to happen in order to successfully establish missions in Spanish-speaking countries.
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Wilford Woodruff and Adoption Sealings
Wilford Woodruff was hugely important in the development of temple work as we understand it today. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint blog From the Desk, Jennifer Mackley (the executive director and CEO of the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation) discussed some of the influence that Presisent Woodruff had on temple work. The interview…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 2: To the Islands or to Chile
The first attempt to proselyte to Spanish-speaking peoples was not directed at Mexico, but was aimed at Chile instead.
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 1: Westward to Mexico
It’s time to return to the Mexican Mission Hymns project, with a slight change. Instead of running hymn translations and the brief history discussions together, they will be separate posts moving forward. To do this properly, the previous history segments are going to be rerun as their own posts, starting with this one.
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Vengeance Is Mine
The story goes that J. Golden Kimball was once preaching to a crowd in the South and became concerned when he noticed that only men were present. As he opened his mouth to talk, however, All at once something came over me and I opened my mouth and said, . . . ‘Gentlemen, you have not come…
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The Mountain Meadows Massacre Aftermath
One of the most significant books in Mormon studies being published this year is Rick Turley and Barbara Jones Brown’s Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath. It’s been years coming, but is worth the wait. I’ll probably publish my own review next week, but wanted to highlight that Turley and Brown…
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Rebaptism in the Church
One of the interesting aspects of how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints approaches the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is that it is seen as a renewal of covenants. What may not be as widely known is that the idea of renewing covenants may have originally emerged in the Church…
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Voice of the Saints in Mongolia
Voice of the Saints in Mongolia by Po Nien (Felipe) Chou and Petra Chou is an informative account of the establishment and growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mongolia. As the first comprehensive history of the Church in Mongolia, the book breaks historical ground and provides valuable insights into the…
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W. Paul Reeve on Race and the Priesthood
The race-based priesthood and temple ban that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had in place from the 1850s until 1978 is a heavy, but important subject to study. I’ve shared a review about W. Paul Reeve’s recently-released Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood where I stated that it was one of “the…
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Sink Me, the Prophet’s a Poet
Joseph Smith rarely wrote poetry, but there are a couple notable exceptions.
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What Joseph Smith Looked Like According to AI
I recently took the plunge and dropped the $30 for the monthly subscription to MidJourney v5, the text-to-image generator that is currently leading the pack (by far). I uploaded a picture of Joseph Smith’s death mask, merged it with additional prompts about age and details about Joseph Smith’s eye and hair color, and asked it…
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Ken Adkins and Belle Harris
Belle Harris‘s experience in prison is an interesting story from late nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint history. Part of why it’s fascinating is that she kept a record of her time while she was in prison. Recently, Church historian Ken Adkins talked about the Belle Harris prison journal at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk,…
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The Spencer W. Kimball Journals
President Spencer W. Kimball is well-known for encouraging members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to keep journals. He set an example of doing this, and produced a large journal that was recently made available through the Church History Library digital collections. Recently, Latter-day Saint archivists Jeffrey Anderson and Brandon Metcalf discuss…
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“In the celestial glory there was three heavens”
Doctrine and Covenants, Section 131 has had a huge impact on how we understand the afterlife. There is, however, some debate about a few key aspects of the text mean that also have implications for our fate in the afterlife, especially when it comes to marital status. Given the debates, it is probably best to…
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Zerah Pulsipher and the Angel
The other day, I came across an interesting talk from Glen L. Rudd about Moroni and his postmortal adventures. While interesting, however, it is unfortunately inaccurate on a few points. In particular, listing Zerah Pulsipher as someone who saw the Angel Moroni is inaccurate to the statements that Pulsipher recorded about his conversion.
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Carol Madsen on Emmeline B. Wells
Emmeline B. Wells is a powerful figure in Latter-day Saint history. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Carol Cornwall Madsen discussed some of why that is so. What follows here is a copost to the interview (a shorter post with some excerpts and discussion). To set the stage,…
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The Prison Journal of Belle Harris
I remember a somewhat funny story about the anti-polygamy raid in Utah that I was told once. In the story, a marshall responds to an anonymous tip that a man is a polygamist and goes to his home. When the marshall knocks on the door, no one answers, but he catches a child in the…
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Sketches in the Wilford Woodruff Journals
One of the fun things about reading journals and other handwritten documents from the past is that there are sometimes nuances that are missed when reading a cleaned-up typescript of the same document. I’ve been reminded of this a couple times recently as part of my work on revamping a site about Zerah Pulsipher. Perhaps…
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JWHA 2023 Conference Call for Papers and Scholarship Announcement
JWHA 2023 Conference Call for Papers September 21-24 Fredericksburg, Texas “Restoration Tales from Texas Dust” Led by independent Apostle Lyman Wight, a number of early Latter Day Saints departed from their homes with the letters “GTT” (Gone to Texas). They were headed to the independent Republic of Texas on a colonizing mission and searching…
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Linguistic notes on the 1843 letter to the Green Mountain Boys
Joseph Smith’s 1843 appeal to the Green Mountain Boys, ghostwritten by W. W. Phelps and published in (the original) Times and Seasons contains a series of foreign language quotations that are interesting not only because they include using the GAEL as a source for Egyptian.
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VIII. Catalyst theories of revelation
The previous posts have put us in the vicinity of catalyst theories of revelation, but none of the formulations that I’ve seen are adequate for describing the Book of Abraham translation, and I think “catalyst” is the wrong chemical metaphor.
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The Ordeal of Dr. John Milton Bernhisel
I’ve talked before about how if we knew and experienced the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for ourselves, we might be surprised by who were the most influential members in shaping the developing Church. Dr. John Milton Bernhisel is another of those individuals who had a surprisingly large impact…
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VII. The GAEL and Linguistic Typology
The GAEL provides for a mode of interpretation that finds expansive (but not unlimited) meaning in seemingly simple characters. Zakioan-hiash, as we have seen, is both a name, a word with a specific phonetic realization, and the equivalent of at least one sentence.
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A Female Journal of Discourses
“Some called her the poetess, the presidentess, and the priestess.” This description of Eliza R. Snow and her titles was shared by Jenny Reeder in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk about the Eliza R. Snow discourses that have been published by the Church Historian’s Press. What follows here…
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VI. Non-Egyptian Linguistic Influences on the GAEL
Champollion – and Egyptian – aren’t the only influences on the GAEL.
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V. The GAEL’s Degrees and the Structure of Abraham 1:2b-3
Two related features of the GAEL that have been the focus of the most controversy and puzzlement are how one character might represent much longer English texts, and the GAEL’s use of a five-fold system of degrees to expand a character’s potential meaning.
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II. What Joseph Smith Would Have Known About Champollion
Before we get to the heart of my argument – which is coming up next in a long post with a detailed look at what’s in the GAEL – we need to look at what Joseph Smith and his associates would have known about Champollion and the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by 1835.
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Voices of the Wives of Joseph Smith
Plural marriage in Nauvoo continues to be one of the thorniest issues when discussing the life and legacy of Joseph Smith. One of the major works that helped shed greater light on the roots of plural marriage and the women who practice it with the Prophet is Todd Compton’s book, In Sacred Loneliness, published in…
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Zion and 19th Century Cross-cultural Missionary Work
How does a faith that claims global reach while being rooted in a specific Anglo-American context in the 19th century interact with cultures that are different from the Anglo-American culture of their time? Further, how did they approach that issue while also being a pariah among the general Anglo-American culture? These are some of the…