Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
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CFM 2/17-2/23: Poetry for “Upon You My Fellow Servants”
I sometimes think that when we consider the visit of John the Baptist to Joseph and Oliver (the main event discussed in this lesson), we focus on the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood, but leave out the restoration of the ordinance of baptism. Yes, the ordinance can’t be performed without the priesthood, but then I…
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Tidbits from Early Church Primary Sources: John Corrill’s A Brief History of the Church of Christ and John Whitmer’s History
A series I am going to occasionally come back to on my takes on early Church primary sources that I’m reading. We have a tendency to only read secondary takes, whether a talk, book, or commonly shared anecdote, but there are often insights buried in the primary sources that don’t make it into the collective…
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Annotated Doctrine and Covenants, 1 – 9
I mentioned previously that my big project for the year associated with Come, Follow Me is working on an annotated Doctrine and Covenants and closely related content. For this part of the project, I am going through the assigned reading each week and comparing every major edition of the text that I can find (including those…
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The Apostasy and Greek Philosophy: Introduction
So I’ve posted related to this topic, but I was thinking of putting up a few posts on this larger theme of Greek philosophy corrupting early Christianity. Like I said in this video, that was a common Protestant idea going back to the 1600s, very prominent in Smith’s day, and was even in a book…
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The Church, Cohort Turnover, and “Change Happening One Funeral at a Time”
The adage that change happens “one funeral at a time” actually has a bit of sociological research to back it up. To get technical for a brief moment, there is a question as to whether cultural change happens by “settled disposition” or “active updating.” In other words whether: After an initial period of young people…
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CFM 2/10-2/16: Poetry for “That You May Come Off Conqueror”
While the sections in this lesson address what to do after the loss of the 116 pages and what Hyrum Smith should do, elements of these sections and the lesson have a triumphalist element, pointing out that the Lord’s plans will not be thwarted because of opposition. However, this should not be read as some…
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“We are willing to receive all truth, from whatever source it may come”
“We believe in all truth, no matter to what subject it may refer…. We are willing to receive all truth, from whatever source it may come.” Joseph F. Smith, April Conference 1909. [1] As I see it, whatever was influencing JS was “true” if we believe Joseph Smith’s revelations were true.
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Amish and Haredi Family Sizes
I’ve written about the implications of highly fertile, highly religious groups such as the Amish and Haredi Jewish community before. While Latter-day Saint fertility is higher than average, it’s not even close to those levels, and probably won’t ever be unless we revert back to Haredi-levels of communal insularity (or reinstate polygamy), which is a…
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Joseph Smith, Plato, and the Apostasy
At a conference and later book that Jonathan and I both contributed to, Terryl Givens noted the Mormon notion of restoration was quite different than Protestants. Givens quoted Parley Pratt, “We can never understand precisely what is meant by restoration, unless we understand what is lost or taken away.” “The problems seen by other restorationists,”…
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Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, January 2025
Bialecki, Jon. “The Mormon Archive’s First Ten Thousand Years: Infrastructure, Materiality, Ontology, and Resurrection in Religious Transhumanism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2025): 1-19.
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Lost books, golden plates, and Mosaic authorship
Call it an archetype, call it folklore. Whatever you call it, the idea of finding something fantastical in an old book in a library, or in a book hidden away centuries ago, is one of those things that rattles around in our minds and has been rattling around our culture for centuries if not millennia:…
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CFM 2/3-2/9: Poetry for “This Is the Spirit of Revelation”
The restoration of the gospel can be seen as having two different aspects: the personal and the communitarian. While the First Vision is seen as indicating which Church to join, it is also a personal interaction between a 14-year-old boy and his God. Subsequent events in the restoration can also be seen in the same…
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Questions about Bishop Budde’s Remarks
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC has received a lot of attention for her remarks earlier this week at a prayer breakfast attended by the new occupant of the White House, which also drew a demand for her to apologize. The controversy raises a number of questions, I think, especially if…
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When is it Okay to Criticize Another Faith?
David Miscavige, the leader of Scientology Is it ever okay to criticize a faith? One can think of extreme situations that we can all agree on. The Aum Shinrikyo New Religious Movement (like most religion scholars, I bristle at the use of the term “cult,” since it disparages religions just for being small and new,…
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The Relief Society is Not the Oldest Women’s Organization in the World
It’s an old adage in Latter-day Saint circles that the Relief Society is the “oldest women’s organization in the world.” To be fair, I searched around briefly and could not find any current Church reference to it being the oldest, just “one of the oldest,” although I did find some speculation that it was the oldest.…
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Textual changes in Joseph Smith—History
My big project for the year associated with Come, Follow Me is working on an annotated Doctrine and Covenants and closely related content. For this part of the project, I am going through the assigned reading each week and comparing every major edition of the text that I can find (including those available through the Joseph…
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“But What Is Contained in the Bible”
“I sup[pose] I am not all[ow]d to go into investing[atio]n but what is cont[aine]d in the Bible & I think is so many wise men who wo[ul]d put me to death for treason,” Joseph Smith declared in the King Follett Sermon.[1] Smith then went onto make a claim about the first phrase in Genesis, a…
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A Latter-day Saint on Joe Rogan?
Joe Rogan is one of the top if not the top podcaster in the world today. He commands a huge audience. In the same way that being on Johnny Carson back in the day could make a career, so too is a spot on Rogan considered a golden ticket, especially in the comedy world. He…
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Where are the Latter-day Saint Shakespeares?
“Mormon Shakespeare,” Not the greatest, but I’m too cheap to pay the $30 a month for a Midjourney membership to make it better. Occasionally you have an idea percolating in the back of your head that you intend to eventually develop and write out, only to find that somebody has already quite adequately made the…
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Controversial Scholarship, Audience, and Red Lines
No doubt SOME found the posts unwelcome in challenging a historical theology central to belief. That’s totally understandable, and I’m guessing that attitude would fit the vast majority of active members. A similar percentage would likely find debates over controversial topics in Mormon history unwelcome. Lots aren’t interested in delving in.
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On the inefficacy of Zoom sacraments: a note on media and religious history
A telling aspect of the Restoration is what the golden plates couldn’t do.
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Boundary Maintenance at Universities
Every year or so there’s some post or article about BYU performing boundary maintenance, and another one just dropped. I’ve already said most of what I have to say about this issue elsewhere, but I just wanted to point out that if you applied for a US sociology faculty position and it was discovered that you,…
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OT Epistemology
Reading Stephen’s Old Testament posts I found them interesting but tended to come back to how to think about certainty. I started writing a comment but once I hit 500 words I figured it made more sense to just write a separate post. Start with a general observation: the claim “in the field of x,…
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Spiritually Moving Great Art, Part II
A few years ago I wrote a post on spiritually moving great art. Since then I have kept a Google Doc where I keep copies of good art that I find, so I thought it was time for a part II. Don’t worry, this isn’t another excuse to be a shill for the glorious AI…
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OT Historicity 4: “Standard Views”
Before I move on, I’m feeling like we’re getting a little confused over a few issues. 1) Claiming that the more “standard views” of the books I’ve mentioned are somehow novel or unsupported. 2) That I’m somehow going out on a limb by presenting such views as “pretty standard.” 3) That I’m doing something edgy…
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It is Okay for the Church to Defend Itself
A Public Square Magazine article has been making the rounds about the history behind the Church being caught flat-footed in responding to probably the most influential piece of anti-Mormon literature of the 2010s. Not that people in the Church ecosystem didn’t have good responses, but at the time it hit the traditional institution on whom…
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Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, December 2024
Park, Benjamin E. “Mormonism in Antebellum America.” In The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States Since 1775, pp. 175-183. Routledge, 2025. Mormonism began with a text steeped in political protest. When the Book of Mormon rolled off the press in early 1830, its first readers immediately recognized its connection to America’s…
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OT Historicity 3: Elephantine
Okay I want to get to my bigger point about how I think Greek stuff is good, and how they developed very good stuff in line with Mormonism. But first I want to do a few more posts on OT historicity because I think it’s interesting. One of the biggest issues related when the Pentateuch…
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Science is Approaching the Soul
A little while ago OpenAI announced o3, a new (and extremely expensive) LLM. There’s a lot to say about its new capacities in a variety of domains, but the one relevant here is its performance on the ARC Challenge, a measure of general intelligence. Without boring you about the technical details, previous LLMs have done…
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Old Testament Historicity 2: Differences with the Pentateuch
So as I went over my notes on the two books I wanted to discuss, I noticed that it would be good refer to a trend they both mention: that the books after the Pentateuch in the OT, especially the history books, don’t seem to know about the Pentateuch. My apologies if this is well…