Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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Saints 3: Thoughts from Scott Hales and Jed Woodworth
I hope by now it’s apparent that I am a fan of the Saints history series and that I’ve been really looking forward to Volume 3, which comes out on the 22nd. I will say, it’s fantastic, but you’ll get to read more of my thoughts next week. Today, however, Kurt Manwaring published an interview with Scott…
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A Mother There: The Quotes Behind the Essay
I mentioned in my post last week that the BYU Studies article “A Mother There” by David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido had more quotes than I could put into that post. Here is the follow-up with as many of the quotes cited in that article as I could find (excluding the ones presented last week). It’s…
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[Spiritual Languages] On Coyotes and White Stones
Thus far I have played it safe. I have kept to spiritual languages that make sense to me and that, at least to some extent, I understand. This week we are continuing on a theme begun last week, but off the beaten track, at least off the beaten track of WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich…
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Mother in Heaven: The Quotes Behind the Essay
On the Saturday evening session of General conference, Elder Renlund stated that: “Very little has been revealed about mother in heaven but what we do know is summarized in a Gospel Topic found in our Gospel Library application. Once you have read what is there, you will know everything that I know about the subject.”…
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On Winter Quarters
Sometimes called the “Valley Forge of Mormondom”, Winter Quarters was the primary (thought not exclusive) location that Latter-day Saints in the United States of America lived between their forced exodus from Nauvoo and their efforts to move westward to the Great Basin region. In a recent interview with Richard Bennett, Kurt Manwaring discussed the history…
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The Book of Abraham Book
I once had a teacher who loved to say that: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” To some degree, this is not infrequently the case when it comes to studying issues in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Let’s Talk About the Book of Abraham…
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What If …. Chad Updated the Doctrine and Covenants? Part 3
Joseph Fielding McConkie recalled that when the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve were discussing adding the documents that are now Sections 137 and 138 that Elder Bruce R. McConkie had a few other suggestions. One was to add two Articles of Faith about the restoration of the Gospel and the Plan of Salvation…
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Of Brigham and Bridger
Jim Bridger and Brigham Young are two very important people in the Euro-American colonization of the American west. Their relationship with each other, however, was complicated. Kurt Manwaring recently discussed that relationship with Jerry Enzler in connection with Enzler’s biography, Jim Bridger: Trailblazer of the American West. What follows here is a copost to the…
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[Languages of the Spirit] Messiness is Next to Godliness
Last week we learned how everything is made of spirit; that it is the substance of creation. This is critical to different spiritual languages because there are so many different manifestations of spirit. In fact, if the Book of Abraham is to be believed, everything we see is a manifestation of spirit, and they each…
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What If …. Chad Updated the Doctrine and Covenants? Part 2
Continuing my hypothetical series about what I would do if I were asked to update the Doctrine and Covenants (and still keeping in mind that I have no plans to actually do so and I’m 110% sure the Church doesn’t have any plans for me to do so either), we come to looking at editing…
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Margarito Bautista – A Forgotten Revolutionary in Latter-day Saint History
Elisa Eastwood Pulido’s biography, The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista (Oxford University Press, 2020), provides a fascinating glimpse into one of the more significant but controversial figures in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico. An important founding figure among Mexican Latter-day Saints, Bautista was a successful missionary who helped to…
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What If … Chad Updated the Doctrine and Covenants? Part 1
I told you I wasn’t done with the Doctrine and Covenants yet. Follow me, and ponder the question: What if? It’s the year 2023 and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has decided to produce a new edition of their scriptures. For reasons that are unclear, the project was picked up by…
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Through two doors at once…
I recently finished an excellent book providing a pop-science level understanding of the experiments surrounding the bizarre fact that very small objects are neither particles nor waves, or they’re both, or, you know, something.
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Better to Use No Rationales Than Faulty Ones
You would think that at some point we would learn from past experiences with priesthood bans. Concerning the priesthood and temple ban against people with black African ancestry, President Dallin H. Oaks noted that: Some people put reasons to the one we’re talking about here, and they turned out to be spectacularly wrong. There is…
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On the Priesthood and Temple Ban
With the recent hullabaloo about Brad Wilcox’s firesides, I have had a few things on my mind, perhaps most intensely around the priesthood and temple ban against individuals of black African ancestry. The short version is this: After studying the evidence, I believe that the ban was not instituted and sustained by God’s will. Now,…
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Studying the Words of The Relief Society Presidency
If the 5-year cycle for Relief Society General Presidencies that has been followed for 20 years holds true, the current Relief Society Presidency is likely to be released at this upcoming general conference. With that in mind, I recently decided to go through and read all of the general conference talks given by members of…
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Important Documents from Latter-day Saint History
I’ve always had the idea running in the back of my mind to compile a list of the most important documents across the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that are not in the scriptures nor book-length publications. Documents in the list include important summaries of doctrine that capture the thought…
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Let’s Talk about the Book of Abraham–a Review
Kerry Muhlstein’s Let’s Talk about the Book of Abraham Is the latest entry in a series that Deseret Book has been publishing to address controversial or touchy topics in the Church. Based on my experience with Brittany Chapman Nash’s Let’s Talk About Polygamy (the previous volume in this series of books), I had expected something…
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Sextuple Endowment Rooms: What Does it Mean?
“In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures,” stated Frank Gehry—an important contemporary architect. One of the more interesting episodes in the treatment of historic Utah structures has been the decision to tear both the Ogden and Provo temples down to their frames and rebuild them with completely new façades.…
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Does This Design Offend You?
It has been our privilege, as guided by the whisperings of thy Spirit, to build unto thee this temple, which we now present unto thee as another of thy holy houses. … We humbly pray that thou wilt accept this edifice and pour out thy blessings upon it as a house to which thou wilt…
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The Contradictory Commands, Part 3: A Tale of Two Records
In part 1 of this series discussing the contradictory commands given to Adam and Eve to not partake of the forbidden fruit but to also have children, I discussed the possibility that they would have been resolved in time, but they jumped the gun and listened to Satan rather than God, which is why they…
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The Contradictory Commands, Part 2: The Higher Law
Part 1 of this series discussed the contradictory commands given to Adam and Eve to not partake of the forbidden fruit but to also have children, I discussed the possibility that they would have been resolved in time, but they jumped the gun and listened to Satan rather than God, which is why they were…
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The Contradictory Commands, Part 1: Isn’t It About … Time?
One Sunday while I was on my mission, I was asked to teach the Gospel Principles class. The class was very small (just the missionaries and one part member family we’d been teaching), and the subject was the Fall of Adam and Eve. I remember this lesson, because I was explaining conditions in the Garden…
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“As we commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ”
Of all the Christmas carols in the English hymnbook, the one with the longest association with the Church’s hymnals is “Joy to the World.”[1] It’s probably fitting, then, that the “Come, Follow Me” materials for this week reference it. The reading material for the week is the document “The Living Christ,” published by the First…
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Peace and Zion
For me, one of the most beautiful concepts in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the idea of Zion. Yet, to achieve that ideal, we are going to have to think and act radically differently than we are accustomed to thinking and acting. In a recent interview with Kurt Manwaring, Patrick Mason…
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“The long-promised day has come”
Official Declaration 1 has some supplementary materials included in the Doctrine and Covenants in the form of three excerpts from different addresses where he explained the reasoning for the change. I’ve often mused on the idea of what would an analogous set of supplementary quotes look like for Official Declaration 2. At one point, I…
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“All that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and … that he will yet reveal”
A few years ago, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf shared the following thoughts in general priesthood session: Sometimes we think of the Restoration of the gospel as something that is complete, already behind us—Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, he received priesthood keys, the Church was organized. In reality, the Restoration is an ongoing process;…
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Making Sense of Prophecies (6): Concluding Thoughts
The question “Did Samuel Lutz really write this” is ultimately not as useful as the question of how the prophecy of “Lutius Gratiano” came about, and what function it served for those who kept it in circulation.
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John Sillito’s B. H. Roberts: A Life in the Public Arena (book review)
In traditional Christianity, there are significant figures known as the Early Church Fathers who are noted as influential Christian theologians and writers who established the intellectual and doctrinal foundations of Christianity as we know it today. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is still a form of Christianity and is indebted to…
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Brian and Laura Hales on Polygamy
‘Tis the season … to talk about polygamy, apparently. Kurt Manwaring recently sat down with Brian and Laura Hales for a question and answer session about polygamy. They have spent decades researching and writing about plural marriage (past and present), approaching the subject as faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. …