Doctrine – Theology – Philosophy
Before I move on from discussing the First Vision, I wanted to share something that I find exciting. Once in a while in Mormon studies journals, special volumes focus on the First Vision—such as the Spring 1969 issue of BYU Studies and a 1980…
John Hammond’s Quest for the New Jerusalem: A Mormon Generation Sagastates that Sidney Rigdon, “by his own admission, ‘made up’ religious experiences in his youth,” which seems like something worth looking into.
Edited with author’s note on the comments at end of post. Abortion is a hot-button issue. Maybe the hot-button issue. That’s why–after finishing a draft of this post in November of 2019–I sat on it for almost a year. I’ve…
How do we account for differences between the various accounts we have on record of the First Vision? What role does memory play in how it was presented over time? How have we viewed those accounts since they were first…
This coming week’s Come, Follow Me lesson covers Alma 30-31. Here are a collection of quotes from General Auxiliary Leaders of the Church, that you can use in your family or personal study. Alma 30 The Book of Mormon warns…
Imagining the Book of Mormon as a complex work reflecting numerous steps of compilation and abridgment helps explain some curious features of the encounter with Sherem in Jacob 7.
I’ve been thinking about the issue of race in the Church (and the history of the temple and priesthood ban in particular) a lot lately. As part of that thinking, I am working on a series of posts wrestling with…
Thinking of the Book of Mormon as the result of a series of textual accretions and combinations might help make sense of how curiously overdetermined the account of Nephite origins is.
I wrote this in over three years ago in response to a call for personal essays on LDS single experiences; alas, it was declined primarily for a lack of anecdotes. It’s not something I would necessarily write today and is…
Today marks the 176th anniversary of the day that Joseph Smith died in an untimely fashion. As I’ve been pondering on what his legacy means to me personally, I wanted to write about three topics that were central to Joseph…
Is philological deliberation useful for studying the Book of Mormon? Is it even permitted?
I finally achieved a long-term goal of mine. For years, I’ve been trying to talk my wife into going out on a Church History pilgrimage, with the Kirtland Temple being one of the highlights of the trip we’ve been talking…
Why is 3 Nephi, which records the central event in the history of Nephite salvation and destruction, located between Helaman and 4 Nephi?
One of my favorite episodes of the science fiction TV series Firefly is the “Jaynestown” episode. In it, a self-serving mercenary of questionable moral character ends up visiting a planet he has been to before. In the past, he’d attempted…
If you trace the history of a text from earlier manuscripts to later ones, it’s not unusual for the text to be extended in various ways.
I remember talking to an atheist on the riverfront walk in Dubuque, Iowa one day while serving my mission. He told my companion and me that he couldn’t believe in God after some of the things he had seen, and…
Mark Ashurst-McGee asks about the uniformity of the Golden Plates in eyewitness accounts, even though they contain both Mormon’s abridgement and Nephi’s small plates, and this is in fact genuinely weird.
Unless someone gets lucky with a spade or a metal detector, the full extent of Mormon’s sources will remain unknown. To keep even tentative answers on the side of plausibility rather than fantasy, how we think about Mormon’s sources should be informed by any information we have about Nephite literacy and textual culture.
The logical place for a philological approach to the Book of Mormon to begin is with Mormon, its eponymous editor, and his sources. How much did Mormon know about the Nephites, and what kind of records did he have to work with?
When I look at recent studies of the Book of Mormon, the biggest deficit I see is the lack of instinct for philology.
