The term “revelation” in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a word with multiple interpretations, as can be seen in the process that led to the 1978 priesthood revelation.
Category: Latter-day Saint Thought
Doctrine – Theology – Philosophy
To Live in Utah or not to Live in Utah? The Grand Debate
I asked Dalle-3 to “Create two images side-by-side, one representing Utah in a good light and one representing Utah in a bad light. Show me images that show bad things particular to Utah and good things particular to Utah, instead of just generic bad and good things.” In the image it generated “the left side highlights Utah’s natural beauty and outdoor activities, while the right side depicts issues like smog from the Salt Lake City inversion, a dried-up Great Salt Lake, and urban congestion.” For my family living in Utah is the eternal question (“next year in Utah”). Like a lot of members, we have a lot of ties leading back to our homeland. For my children Utah is the land of milk and honey, a Willy Wonka-esque existence of eternal grandparent candy and attention, where the urinals flow with ambrosia and nobody ever raises their voice. They talk about “those East Coasters” with a lilt of disdain despite the fact that they themselves are, in fact, born and raised East Coasters (kind of the flip side of those lifelong Utahns who say they’re “from” the cool state they lived in for a few years as a kid while their parents were in graduate school). As of now we feel that we are where we need to be right now, but we’ve thought through the pros and cons many times. Con: Housing Affordability Dear Utahns, this is insane. You can’t…
Wilford Woodruff and the Founding Fathers
While Wilford Woodruff has only one canonized document in Latter-day Saint scriptures (Official Declaration 1), he did record a number of visions and revelations of his own. Perhaps the best-known among these is his vision of Wilford Woodruff and the Founding Fathers that led him to do proxy temple work for them and other eminent individuals. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Jennifer Mackley discussed what we know about Wilford Woodruff’s vision. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.
Interesting Wikipedia Articles About Latter-day Saints
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Murderer, Ex-Mormon (according to Wikipedia) James Earl Ray A recent project of mine has been to figure out a way to generate a list of all Wikipedia articles that mention the word “Mormon” or “Latter-day Saint” so that we can generate the comprehensive compendium of all things Latter-day Saint/Mormon on Wikipedia. This project was inspired in part by an episode of the Omnibus podcast by Ken Jennings and Jon Roderick (incidentally, IMHO the wittiest podcast out there) about a prison breakout by James Earl Ray, the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr. Ken Jennings, who as most of us know is a member, bemusedly noted that the Wikipedia article on Ray indicated that he had been raised a Mormon. After preliminarily digging into the cited reference, however, Jennings seemed skeptical, and when I checked the page myself that little bit had been removed. (As an aside, given the sensitivities around racial issues given our history, I’m 1000% sure we would all know if the killer of Dr. King was raised Mormon). Still, it made me curious about other less-known tidbits, plus I thought it would be fun to have a variety of other comprehensive lists: a complete list of all celebrities raised Mormon, a complete listing of all organisms named after Mormons (more than you’d think), etc., which could easily be generated by scraping the meta-tags on the ur-list. To create such a list I…
The Latter-day Saint Chicago Experiment
The Chicago Experiment was an effort to train some of the best teachers in the Church to the academic standards of Biblical Studies applied elsewhere in Western Civilization during the 1930s. The results were mixed, with some of the scholars going on to improve the Church Education System, while others struggled to reconcile what they had learned with their faith. Casey Griffiths discussed the Chicago Experiment in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saints history blog, From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the interview.
The Endowment and the Traditional Latin Mass: Beauty, Holiness, and Structure
Due to some things I’m involved in, I recently attended a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). For the uninitiated, after Vatican II the Catholic Mass was changed to be more user-friendly. It was conducted in the vernacular instead of Latin and was shortened. While in the past the priest traditionally faced towards the East as he was blessing the Eucharist, facing towards God and the coming of Christ, gradually it became more standard for priests to face the congregation.
All Indians Today Descend From Lehi
As the children of Lehi and Sariah intermarried with first Ishamel’s offspring and then their children intermixed with the natives of the Americas, what has been the result genetically after 2,600 years? Are the American Indians encountered by the Europeans in 1492 and beyond also descendants of Lehi and Sariah?
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, June 2024
Greenhalgh, Spencer P., and Amy L. Chapman. ““Come for the Memes, Stay for Defending the Faith”: Far-Right and Anti-Feminist Red Pill Influences in the# DezNat Twitter Hashtag.” Mormon Social Science Association: 2:1.
Sien Hoornik, Vincent Van Gogh, and Making All Things New
Sorrow, a Van Gogh drawing of a pregnant Sien Hoornik Selling only one painting during his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh has become the archetype of the tortured genius not appreciated until after his death. His long-running mental health problems have been the subject of movies and ballads (with one moving example being Don McLean and later Josh Groban’s Vincent). There’s something about the narrative that tickles at our Jungian senses. Somebody who is dealt a bad hand all throughout their life has a deus ex machina glory thrust upon them, sort of a posthumous version of the classic folklore motif of the peasant who finds out that they’re royalty. Much less well known is Van Gogh’s muse during his time in The Hague whose life paralleled his in some ways. Sien Hoornik was a single mother prostitute born into abject poverty who gave birth to four children (two of whom died), and who was wracked by venereal diseases throughout her life. Van Gogh took her and her children in while she worked for him as a model in what some consider to be his only romantic relationship. They considered marriage, but due to pressure from Van Gogh’s family about marrying beneath his social status he eventually turned her out, after which time she probably went back to working as a prostitute to feed her family. She took her own life about twenty years later. Now that she belongs to the…
Wedding Rings as Symbols
I’ve attended my fair share of Latter-day Saint weddings in Utah and there is one common element that has puzzled me.
Public schools should not post the Ten Commandments
Schools should post the Proclamation on the Family instead.
The Buddhist Alma the Younger and Forgiving the Unforgivable
While Saul/Paul and Alma the Younger were arguably committing the worst kind of sins by fighting against God, in both narratives they were sincere and possibly even well-meaning, albeit theologically wrong. They weren’t, say, torturing or killing people en masse as far as we know, and it seems like if there is a textbook case for something you could do that crosses the line into never being able to achieve forgiveness in this life, that’s what it would involve. (In the excellent Latter-day Saint film Brigham City *spoiler alert* the person you later find out is the killer asks the protagonist whether he thinks people can be forgiven for committing horrendous murders, with the bishop/detective character simply stating that he doesn’t know. *End spoiler alert*.) In the course of some other reading I’ve been doing, I stumbled across the story of Angulimala (sorry, WordPress is awful at rendering accent marks, so apologies to the spelling purists), a sort of Buddhist Saul figure with a touch of Hannibal Lecter. While well-known in Asia, with several movies made about him in Buddhist countries, to the West he is much less familiar. In a modern moral paradigm where we would see the torturing murderer as being darker and more beyond hope than somebody who has a sincere theological disagreement a la Saul (not to downplay his culpability in throwing people in jail for their sincere theological disagreements), the message of redemption becomes all…