• 92 responses

    Someone feels the need to tattle on us to the bishop every so often. Read More

  • 27 responses

    A dear friend sent me an email: “Whassup with Isaiah 6:10?” Read More

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    A lot happened in Nauvoo that doesn’t get covered in Sunday School or the one-volume treatments of LDS history. But Glen Leonard’s Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise tells the story in detail from start to finish. Read More

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    A new issue of The Mormon Review is available, with a review of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Vertigo” by Joseph M. Spencer. The article is available at: Joseph M. Spencer, “The Romance of Materialism: Notes on Hitchcock’s Vertigo,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no. 6 [HTML] [PDF] For more information about MR, please take a look at the prospectus by our editor-in-chief Richard Bushman (“Out of the Best Books: Introducing The Mormon Review,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no.1 [HTML][PDF]). In addition to our website, you can have The Mormon Review delivered to your inbox. Finally, if you have recently read a book,… Read More

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    10 responses

    I’m posting this at Times and Seasons as follow-up to a three-part series I wrote here a couple years back (see here, here and here). I’ve cross-posted it over at A Motley Vision’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone. September 17th marked the two-year anniversary of the closing of Crossfire Canyon (real name: Recapture Canyon) to off-highway vehicular (OHV) travel. Since then, the canyon has become an even more volatile epicenter of rhetorical and legal power struggles over land use policy. Private citizens, environmental and off-road advocacy groups, and the federal government have all entered dogs in the fight. Read More

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    “We can’t get in,” a young man argued. “The Masons are like a super-secret society!” Read More

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    My basic problem with Blake Ostler’s expansion theory is that it approaches via intellectual history what is at heart a problem in textual history Read More

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    The Bible, as we have received it, sets out the drama of salvation with its wrenching fall and crucifixion, but joyous resurrection and exaltation. Though its compilation is in many ways ad hoc, there is a satisfyingly comedic structure to the whole. As Terryl Givens puts it in his The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, just out from Oxford University Press, “There is a neat symmetry . . . Primordial creation is balanced by apocalypse and heavenly postscript . . . All tears are wiped away, and the primal fall and alienation are remedied by reunion under the… Read More

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    My Teen Swears in the Name of Art

    They immersed themselves in the characters and, by so doing, opened the door to deeply significant conversations between the cast, their parents, and the community. Artistic explorations have the power to touch us deeply, in ways that detached discussion about concepts cannot. Read More

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    This new volume is the second overall in the Joseph Smith Papers, but is the first of the Revelations and Translation series which will provide transcripts of many of the earliest manuscripts of Joseph Smith’s written revelations and translations… Read More

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    A new issue of The Mormon Review is available, with a review of Dan Brown’s new novel The Lost Symbol by Scott Holley. The article is available at: Scott Holley, “Exaltation and The Lost Symbol,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no. 5 [HTML] [PDF] For more information about MR, please take a look at the prospectus by our editor-in-chief Richard Bushman (“Out of the Best Books: Introducing The Mormon Review,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no.1 [HTML][PDF]). In addition to our website, you can have The Mormon Review delivered to your inbox. Finally, if you have recently read a book, seen a… Read More

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    Corianton – An Unholy Review

    Short review of Corianton: By today’s standards, it wasn’t a very good movie. But by 1931 standards? Well, it wasn’t a very good movie. Read More

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    My copy of the new LDS edition of the Bible in Spanish arrived yesterday, one of the 750,000 copies printed recently (according to a contact I have in the Church department that prints these materials). So I thought I would pass on my impressions. Read More

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    Want to really knock the socks off of your youth with a fun and very different object lesson? Then try out miracle berries. Read More

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    I went on one of the best dates I’ve been on in some time tonight – my daughter and I went to BYU’s World of Dance. Read More

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    Yesterday in Elders Quorum I taught Lesson 40: “How Glorious are Faithful, Just and True Friends.” It was a lot of fun — it’s a great set of discussion materials. Today, I read a fascinating article in the New York Times about the science of human friendship and connection. I love the idea of Zion as a community. Most of our most rewarding experiences come in the context of interaction with other people. And when the church community is functioning right, it can not only provide a setting but also facilitate the building of those kinds of bonds of friendship… Read More

  • 107 responses

    A new issue of The Mormon Review is available, with an essay on Goethe’s Faust by Terryl Givens. The article is available at: Terryl Givens, “The Redemption of Eve: Joseph Smith and Goethe’s Faust,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no. 4 [HTML] [PDF] For more information about MR, please take a look at the prospectus by our editor-in-chief Richard Bushman (“Out of the Best Books: Introducing The Mormon Review,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no.1 [HTML][PDF]). In addition to our website, you can have The Mormon Review delivered to your inbox. Finally, if you have recently read a book, seen a movie,… Read More

  • 46 responses

    “So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the desert,’ do not go out; … do not believe it” (NIV Matt. 24:26). Read More

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    In How to Kill a Dragon, the Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins defines formulas as “set phrases which are the vehicles of themes.” Read More

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    “Usefulness” was a coveted characteristic Read More

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    Many years ago, a friend told me in jest, when I wondered about missing Church on Sunday, “There are only 48 lessons in the Priesthood manual. Attending anything more than that is brown-nosing.” Read More

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    Writing about the punch after the Boise State-Oregon game, Gene Wojciechowski at ESPN notes, (emphasis added) Sportsmanship isn’t dead in Football Bowl Subdivision programs, but it’s on a respirator. I covered the Minnesota-Syracuse game Saturday, then watched large chunks of the Charleston Southern-Florida, BYU-Oklahoma and Alabama-Virginia Tech games. On Monday night I watched the Miami-Florida State game. You know how many times I noticed a player helping an opposing player off the ground? Zero. Is good sportsmanship dead in college football? Is it dead at BYU? And if so, what can or should we do about it? Read More

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    In Nephi Anderson’s short story, “On the Border-land of Light,” his protagonist meets a woman who knows little of Mormons: “Have you never been down in the lower valley?” he asked. “No, never. You see we were afraid of the Mormons at first,… Read More

  • 56 responses

    MR: “Eliade’s Return”

    A new issue of The Mormon Review is available, with a review of Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return by Richard Lyman Bushman.  Eliade is a major scholar of religious studies, and his ideas regarding sacred space and sacred time have been hugely influential on how two generations of Mormon intellectuals have thought about the temple.  The article is available at: Richard Lyman Bushman, “Eliade’s Return,” The Mormon Review, vol.1 no. 3 [HTML] [PDF] For more information about MR, please take a look at the prospectus by our editor-in-chief Richard Bushman (“Out of the Best Books: Introducing The… Read More

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    5 years ago we published one of my favorite “12 Questions” posts, in which Royal Skousen discussed in some depth what he has learned from his extensive work on the earliest editions of the Book of Mormon.  His book, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, is being published in September by Yale University Press (and yes, you can order  it at Amazon right now).  To mark this milestone, Royal was kind enough to update his “12 questions” discussion, which we have posted below, for the benefit of those who did not catch it the first time.   Enjoy! Read More

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    A wonderful woman who served as my Education Counselor a number of years ago served a mission for the church around the time she was 19. She fell in the fabulous loophole. Her father was a mission president, so she was allowed to serve while he served, even though she was “underage.” But George Durrant was not just any mission president. Read More

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    Saturday, my son passes the 18 month mark of his mission–and he will then also pass me, having served longer on his mission than I did on mine. I confess, I’m a little jealous. Read More

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    According to scripture, what ought one do in order to run and not be weary, walk and not faint? That’s easy, right. The answer is set out in plain view, in the Book of Isaiah. Wait — Isaiah? Read More

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    I finally got my hands on a copy of The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch’s look at how the egalitarian democratic spirit that pervaded post-Revolutionary America influenced five early American religious movements: the Christians (such as the Disciples of Christ), the Methodists, the Baptists, black churches, and Mormonism. Read More

  • 28 responses

    Don’t ask me to “bless the refreshments” at a ward (or any other) function. Just don’t. Read More