Doctrine – Theology – Philosophy
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.
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 have to read these, but if it’s a brief from a person or organization that is important I assume they do, and occasionally the judge will cite an amicus brief in their decision-making. I went through the Supreme Court docket and identified all the recent cases where the Church submitted an official amicus brief as an interested party in some precedent-setting, landmark case before the Supreme Court. I then used AI to summarize it. So if you want to see the Church’s official position on, say, people not baking cakes for same-sex couples for religious reasons, it’s all there. As seen, the Church’s messaging to the Supreme Court (unsurprisingly) deals with religious liberties issues; matter of fact, it appears they have had something to say about virtually every major religious liberty case that has come before the Supreme Court. The Church appears to be helping build safeguards around religious liberty issues even if they do not immediately affect its operations. On one hand the Church tends to officially stay out of fights it doesn’t need to be involved in. For example, it doesn’t have the…
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 Conference on March 4, 2023. From there, he worked on and published an article in BYU Studies and then discussed symbols in Wilford Woodruff’s journals in an interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
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 long time. Not so. I had NO interest in philosophy as an academic discipline as an undergrad and focused on history then and throughout my academic training. I came across my interest in Plato from that angle. The only philosophy class I ever took was part of a four-course overview UC Santa Barbara had all the religious studies PhDs take, the second one on religion and philosophy. That particular course was generally considered the most difficult course of the entire program as the professor had us start with Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which is really hard especially if you have no philosophy background. Perhaps the most discouraging moment of the whole process was when I showed up to discuss Hegel having no ideas what I’d read, and another student saying, “This is nothing compared to Heidegger.” Being and Time was later in the course and was indeed much harder than Hegel. Rough course (though Hegel was a good crash course in Christian Platonism after the professor explained what he was talking about). I came to Plato (as I’ll discuss in my next…
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 and most people knows about the big tough issues (e.g. pretty much all Latter-day Saints know about Joseph Smith’s polygamy now). But still, there are some more niche issues that are still primarily the purview of the more well-read class. And with the Internet it is becoming easier to become part of said class. While in the past you essentially had to have access to a university library to be well-read in Church issues, now primary sources abound on the Internet–if you can filter out all the noise, at this point organization is the primary hindrance. To this end, I have found the BH Roberts Foundation’s Mormonr pages very useful both in summarizing these issues and presenting scans of the actual primary sources involved so that I can read them for myself and make up my own mind. [Full disclosure, I very occasionally do some work for the BH Roberts Foundation with their surveys, but they don’t know that I’m writing this]. As I’ve schlogged through these primary sources there are a number of “tough issues” that I realized I had misperceptions about since I…
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 advantage of the appeal of baseball to increase the number of baptisms they reported, regardless of whether it led to actual, long-term conversion. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Greg Prince discussed baseball baptisms. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.
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 to explain how several objects symbolizing political and religious authority came to be the rightful possessions of the Nephite king, while another important goal is to explain how the Nephite people came to exist in their current form. As that form changed, so did the text.
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 reasonable people can come together. Like many I have been often disappointed by the paucity of republicans willing to stand-up to Trump, and I’m saddened that the one Senate republican who has a track record of putting his power where his mouth is will be retiring. However, in his recently published book, Bob Woodward reports that Trump wanted Mo Brooks, the Congressman from Alabama, to call for a special election to reinstate him as President 6 months into President Biden’s term. Evidently at this point Congressman Brooks (who admittedly had supported Trump’s earlier shenanigans with the 2020 election) had reached his limits, and he refused to do so. Predictably, President Trump’s feelings got a boo boo, he withdrew his support from Brooks, and Brooks lost his primary. Congressman Brooks is rather unique in that he was a Latter-day Saint convert in the deep, deep South who still won political office. In contrast to some Utah politicians whose Mormonism is an asset to play up in time for an election, one can’t help but see Brooks’ Mormonism as sincere given that it was undoubtedly a liability…
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 document that existed in history offers insights on the text that a focus only on its 19th-century context would overlook; and the historicity of the Book of Mormon offers a compelling explanation for a number of things that are otherwise difficult to explain.
In this next post in something of a series (I’m holding off numbering these or giving them all the same title, since the concept is a bit amorphous) I wanted to lay out my approach to belief in topics that are historical. This title is something of a play on words, as I don’t mean so much as believing a believer’s narrative about historical things pertaining to Mormonism. Instead, what I mean is that I “believe” what the historical documentation and scholarly evidence indicates. I “believe” history. Yes, I’m well aware that there’s a lot of debate about a lot of issues, but in my personal beliefs about God and theology, I’m on board with what scholars are able to demonstrate as the historical evidence. That is, I’m good with saying what the scholarly evidence demonstrates, as opposed to holding to scriptural claims of historical events without evidence.
This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah by W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth is a fascinating and detailed glimpse into the debates about slavery and race in Utah Territory in the 1850s. Incorporating never-before transcribed accounts of the 1852 legislative session that saw Utah Territory leadership pass a series of laws intended to regulate unfree labor, this volume provides a thorough analysis of those laws, the debates that surrounded them and how they fit into the national context of the United States at the time. In doing so, the book also offers insights into the early development of the priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment. Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over–all while membership could be increasing or even exploding in terms of percent population. How can this happen? In many countries the background population will be cratering. Throughout the history of Church growth we have largely taken the growth or stasis of the denominator of background population more or less for granted. While Church growth ebbs and flows depending on historical contingency, the populations the Church has been ensconced in have been either growing, or in a few cases, in a state of stasis such as modern day Western Europe. This is about to change. The implosion of fertility rates has not received nearly the attention it merits. We’re talking zombie apocalypse here, with overgrown, abandoned towns and villages and a permanent state of economic recession from the aging population (and that’s in the developed world, in developing countries with low fertility without government resources to care for their aged old people without living children to care for them will literally be dying in the streets). When I was going to graduate school the five-alarm fire, “lowest low” fertility was around 1.3 children per woman. For a…
