Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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The Restored Gospel, the Great Apostasy, and St. Clement
I finally got around to reading the Epistle of 1st Clement. Written by Clement of Rome (or, as bishop of Rome, Pope Clement I if you’re Catholic), 1st Clement represents one of the earliest if not the earliest authentic Christian document after the apostles. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about the nature of…
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Monogamy is the Rule, Part 2: Celestial Marriage and Plural Marriage
The process of coming to understand how sealing created kinship networks was complicated, however, and became intertwined with the development of plural marriage in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle sealings (and their promised blessings) from plural marriage, even though monogamous marriages are the…
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Book Update – Fragments of Revelation
Back in February, I announced that I have a book about the Doctrine and Covenants that is scheduled to be published by By Common Consent Press this December. After a lot of hard work by a lot of different people, I am happy to say that is still the case! Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine…
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Rowdy Children, Judgment, and the Foyer
I try to avoid having too many “pet peeve” posts that focus on the negative, but it’s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact,…
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The Cinematic Sexualization and Romanticization of Missionaries
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of the bajillion media depictions of gay missionaries No, I have not seen the movie Heretic yet. Based on what I have read, however, [spoiler alert] apparently it begins with a sexually explicit discussion between sister missionaries, and there are possibly sexual overtones near the end when one of the sister…
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The war hymns bring me solace and comfort
Periodically someone or another will issue a call to remove hymns with militaristic themes or martial music from the hymnbook, or at least rewrite them to make them overtly pacifistic. The sentiment is noble and understandable, but mistaken. The new hymnbook may reduce the number of martial hymns or soften their edges, but I hope…
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Don’t Mess With The Amish: Demography, Religion, and Block Voting
Sorry for all the election posts, but I would be remiss if in closing I didn’t say a word about one of the weirder/more entertaining aspects of the 2024 election that dovetails neatly with my own eccentric interest in religious demography and politics: the rise of the Amish as political kingmakers. In general this election…
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Monogamy is the Rule, Part 1: Revelation Adapted to the Circumstances
“Someday my prince will come, / in the Millennium, / and he will say to me, / ‘Will you be number three? / I will be true to you, / and you, and you, and you…’”
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Are Most Members Really Unmarried? Part II With Newer Data
A few years ago I wrote a post questioning the now-common soundbite that a majority of Church members in the US are single. I cobbled together a variety of sources showing that, for people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints, that’s not the case, and I now suspect that the “majority single” position comes from looking…
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President Oaks Now Speaks Tamil, and Elder Bednar Now Speaks Spanish
I had heard that this was on the horizon, but now it’s free for everybody (well, 3 videos a month). You can upload a YouTube video and not only have it create a translation, but it is more or less in the voice of the individual, and the lips are synced so that it actually…
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A Review: Come Up Hither to Zion: William Marks and the Mormon Concept of Gathering
Come Up Hither to Zion: William Marks and the Mormon Concept of Gathering by Cheryl L. Bruno and John S. Dinger is an enlightening biography that brings attention to a significant yet often overlooked figure in the early Latter Day Saint movement.
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The Black Menaces, The Election, and Demographic Morality Plays
A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes. I don’t know if they’re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the “Black Menaces” group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and…
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The Paris Art Mission
I love that Latter-day Saint temples tend to be well-decorated with artwork, including the temple murals. I still find it a bit painful that the murals were not preserved as part of the Salt Lake City Temple renovation, but still find the history of the original murals in the Salt Lake City Temple to be…
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When is it Okay to Participate in Other Faiths’ Practices?
A few months ago I participated in a Traditional Latin Mass. More traditional-minded Catholics will genuflect when walking by or across the Host. As a non-Catholic I hadn’t considered what I should do until I found myself walking next to it and had to make a snap decision. On one hand as somebody who doesn’t…
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Slavery vs Unfree Labor in Utah
Slavery is one of the darkest subjects in the history of the United States. It was an issue that impacted so many lives (in ways that echo through to the present day) and arguments over it tore the nation apart. Utah Territory was no different in that they were caught in intense debates over the…
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Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, October 2024
Williams, Peter. “Detecting Semantic Differences between LDS and Christian Speech.” Schwa (2024).
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Saints, Volume 4: A Review
The fourth and final volume of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days was published today. This newest book, Sounded in Every Ear, tells the story of the Latter-day Saints from 1955 to 2020, bringing the history up nearly to the present day. It discusses an era in which…
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Rational belief in Book of Mormon historicity III: Why I believe
In the last two posts, I’ve argued that a limited chronology model primarily focused on Mosiah-3 Nephi 7 doesn’t excessively strain historical plausibility, and then turned around and argued that 1 Nephi-Enos was a living text that was adapted to reflect the state of the Nephite coalition around the time of Benjamin and later. But…
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Advancing Technology And A Young Earth
I previously argued in Public Square Magazine that advancements in AI may be making a compelling secular case for the existence of God. Following on from that article, I’d like to explore another related topic.
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Moroni and Temple Sites
Moroni is an important figure in Latter-day Saint lore. For example, I’ve written previously about how some authors have taken any mention of angels and the Book of Mormon in the same story as a reference to Moroni, whether that conclusion is warranted or not. But another area in which Moroni plays a role is…
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A Review: A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Mexico, 1875-1946
A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Mexico, 1875-1946 by Fernando R. Gomez (founder of The Museum of Mormon Mexican History) provides a streamlined and updated look into the history of the Church in Mexico.
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The Church’s Messages to the Supreme Court
An amicus brief is a document submitted to courts by groups or people who have some interest in the outcome of the case. For landmark Supreme Court cases a lot of professional organizations, for example, will take a position and outline their reasons. My understanding is that the justices and their clerks don’t actually…
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Symbols in the Wilford Woodruff Journals
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…
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…