Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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Presidents of the Church: Inspirational Excerpts from The Journal of President Spencer W. Kimball
Compiled by Dennis B. Horne Editorial note: the below excerpts from President Kimball’s journal were selected because I find them to be extra uplifting and edifying, or otherwise special in some way. I did not include a date with them because when I encountered and chose them I was interested in precious spiritual experience and…
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Inspirational Excerpts from The Journal of President Spencer W. Kimball, Part 1: Leadership
Compiled by Dennis B. Horne Editorial note: the below excerpts from President Kimball’s journal were selected because I find them to be extra uplifting and edifying, or otherwise special in some way. I did not include a date with them because when I encountered and chose them I was interested in precious spiritual experience and…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 18: The First Two Conventions
Despite dealing with isolation and neglect, Latter-day Saints in Mexico continued to function and serve well. But eventually, things reached a breaking point.
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Latter-day Saints in Micronesia and Guam
At the last general conference, I was impressed by something briefly mentioned by Quentin L. Cook. He talked about a seventh-generation member from Tahiti, with her ancestors joining the Church in 1845 (2 years before the Latter-day Saints in the U.S. migrated to Utah/Deseret or Brigham Young organized the First Presidency).[1] It was a brief…
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Was it the Angel Moroni?
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the day Joseph Smith said that he saw the golden plates, with last night being the anniversary of the evening that he recalled the Angel Moroni appearing to him. Yet, from time to time, there have been questions raised about whether Joseph Smith consistently said that it was Moroni…
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The ancient owner of the Book of Abraham papyri
Joseph Smith claimed that the Book of Abraham was a translation of some of the papyri he purchased along with some mummies in Kirtland. It is difficult to ascertain the full nature of those papyri since a lot of them burned. But we can learn some about the history of those papyri from the fragments…
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OUR, Tim Ballard, and the Church
Like many I’ve been recently drawn to the hard-to-look-away car crash that is the Tim Ballard/OUR saga. I am very disconnected from the conservative Utah zeitgeist that’s given rise to this debacle, and I haven’t done a deep dive into the particulars, but in a sense that makes my perspective not worthless on a meta-level…
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Harold B. Lee: Life and Thought: A Review
Harold B. Lee: Life and Thought by Newell G. Bringhurst (Signature Books, 2021) is a highly affordable and readable biography of one of the most influential figures in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although his tenure as president of the Church was short, Harold B. Lee had already reshaped…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 17: Sans Anglo-American Leadership
While Mexico had stabilized from the Revolution, the 1920s saw continuing strains for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico.
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Discussion on Scripture with the Community of Christ
The Community of Christ and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are sibling churches, both descending from the early Latter Day Saint movement. Since each group went their own way after the death of Joseph Smith in the 1840s, however, they have spent the last 170+ years growing and developing in different ways.…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 16: Colonial Decimation
The Latter-day Saint colonies in Mexico were becoming successful after years of effort. But the Mexican Revolution changed them forever.
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Meditation and the Gospel
The Listener, by James Christensen Meditation is one of those practices with religious roots that has managed to become popular even in very secular, non-believing spaces, but I haven’t really caught the meditation bug. I’ve done a few guided meditations and have enjoyed them, but in terms of stress release I’d rather just get a massage…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 15: War
The Mexican Revolution impacted every Mexican, and that included the Mexican Latter-day Saints, some of whom did their best to stay out of the conflict, some of whom became casualties of war, and some of whom joined in the revolution.
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The Law of the Gospel
A couple years ago, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints included a list of the covenants made during the endowment session in their general handbook. It was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. Yet, I missed a part of the significance of the text presented until reading a recent interview…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 14: Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a decade of terrible destruction that brought a wave of changes to the Church in Mexico.
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Jesus’s Female Ancestors
Jesus the Messiah was the son of a righteous and godly woman named Mary, through whom he had many ancestors discussed in the Hebrew Bible. Among those were several remarkable women. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Camille Fronk Olson discussed some of the women in the genealogy of Jesus. What…
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George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy: A Review
George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy by Kenneth L. Cannon II is an entry in the Signature Books brief biographies series focused on one of the most influential and best-known Latter-day Saints in the 19th century. As a missionary, publisher, representative for Utah Territory to the United States Congress, businessman, apostle, and long-term…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 13: A Mission Revived
The closure of the mission in Mexico in 1889 led to an 12-year gap in the presence of missionaries and official church leadership in central Mexico. Ammon Tenney worked to restart the mission, connecting with the Latter-day Saints who were effectively abandoned and beginning new efforts at proselytizing.
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Remember the “F.” And seniority.
I know I’ve talked a bit about Joseph F. Smith (JFS) lately, but the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk recently shared another interview about him. This time around, Dennis Horne spoke about Joseph F. Smith’s succession to the presidency of the Church, but it also covers other info about this pivotal president of…
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Redefining Apostasy: Building Bridges, Not Barriers, in the Face of a Faith Transition
The following is a guest post by Randall Davis. Amidst the tapestry of human experience, religious freedom–the right to worship in accordance with one’s own conscience–is a deeply-valued principle that forms the bedrock of much goodness in our world today. Having associated with people of various faith traditions over the years, I have seen the…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 12: Bautista’s Lamanites
While efforts to gather converts from central Mexico failed and the mission in central Mexico closed, there would still be future successes. Among the earliest converts in the 20th century in Mexico, the Bautista family would go on to have an impact on the Church for years to come, including the development of an indigenous-affirming…
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Carthage and the Nauvoo Expositor
The Joseph Smith Papers recently released a final podcast series, the Road to Carthage podcast, focusing on the final days and immediate aftermath of Joseph Smith’s life. It was an explosive time, filled with tension both within and outside of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In a recent interview at the…
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Early Utah Was Relatively Egalitarian
In partnership with the Church, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) has recently made the entire 1850-1890 set of census data available in tabular (spreadsheet) form for analysis. While individual records have been available for some time, as has a 1% sample of the quantitative data, this new development allows us to download all of…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 11: The Gathering
An attempt to found a colony of Mexican converts in the north didn’t end up going as well as anyone had hoped, to disastrous results.
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Idiosyncratic ranking of the “Let’s Talk About” series from Deseret Book
This is, I think, the best thing to come out of Deseret Book in a long while. I somewhat wish these books had existed when I was much, much younger, but the expertise (and, frankly, spiritual maturity of many members) likely didn’t really exist in the right forms until recently. What follows is my totally…
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The Active Afterlife of the Restored Gospel
Vietnamese depiction of the Pure Land, the Mahayana Buddhist paradisiacal afterlife Egyptian depiction of the Field of Reeds, the ancient Egyptian paradisiacal afterlife While I’m open to the idea of “sacred envy,” where we see things in other faith traditions and communities that we wish we had, that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing places where…
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The Bible and the Latter-day Saint Tradition: A Review
The Bible and the Latter-day Saint Tradition, published by University of Utah Press, is an impressive collection of information about Bible studies and how Latter-day Saints interact with the Bible.
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The Fiery Meteor
Joseph F. Smith “(remember the F)” is one of the most important and influential presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even though he isn’t frequently discussed in church settings. It was during his administration that the Church really started to take on its current form – rejection of polygamy, modern monetary…
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“Like a wise man who built his house on rock”: A Pioneer Day Homily on Matthew 7:21-27
A sacrament meeting talk given 23 July 2023 At the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew recorded that the Lord, Jesus Christ stated: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that…
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Weaponizing Church Titles Against the Church, and Passive Aggressive Clichés
Recently I’ve done a series of posts explicitly identifying different rhetorical strategies used in social media spaces around Church topics (One on apologizing for others, and one on disingenuously citing prophets and invoking one’s church heritage). I didn’t mean for it to be an ongoing series, but I’ve just been noticing these more and more,…