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6 responses
The Listener, by James Christensen Meditation is one of those practices with religious roots that has managed to become popular even in very secular, non-believing spaces, but I haven’t really caught the meditation bug. I’ve done a few guided meditations and have enjoyed them, but in terms of stress release I’d rather just get a massage or play soccer. On a recent podcast I listened to the guest mention that he had tried the floating tank fad and “just got bored.” It was one of those moments when you hear somebody confirm something you haven’t been able to admit to yourself… Read More
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The Mexican Revolution impacted every Mexican, and that included the Mexican Latter-day Saints, some of whom did their best to stay out of the conflict, some of whom became casualties of war, and some of whom joined in the revolution. Read More
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A monthly piece summarizing all recent, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books published on Latter-day Saints. Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History. Oxford University Press, 2023. The venerable Richard Bushman’s latest; a cultural history on the golden plates as artifacts. He’s been working on this for years. “Bushman examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and critics—and by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others—from Smith’s first encounter with them to the present. Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? And why do they remain objects of fascination to this day?”… Read More
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6 responses
A couple years ago, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints included a list of the covenants made during the endowment session in their general handbook. It was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. Yet, I missed a part of the significance of the text presented until reading a recent interview with Samuel R. Weber over at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk—not only are the specific covenants included, but definitions were as well. In particular, the Law of the Gospel, had an official definition pinned down for the first time in recent history, which… Read More
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Hell to Heaven We Latter-day Saints hold to a rather benign form of hell. I think this a feature, with traditional hell being the ultimate bug. However, one implication of our benign afterlife of second chances is that arguably this-worldly religious decisions have less “import.” If your decision to not be baptized leads to you burning in traditional hell for all eternity, that’s different then if you spend some time in spiritual prison while you are instructed and spiritually sensitized in preparation for receiving eternal ordinances. While the Latter-day Saint framework makes more sense to me in terms of mercy… Read More
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Back when I was studying biological engineering in college, I remember one Sunday where a stake high councilor came and spoke in our ward. He based his remarks on Elder Quentin L. Cook’s talk “Lamentations of Jeremiah: Beware of Bondage”. When he discussed how “Turning from the worship of the true and living God and worshipping false gods” results in forms of “spiritual, physical, and intellectual bondage,” the high councilor decided to add his own embellishments and examples of what those types of bondage looked like. His first example of intellectual bondage was the belief that organic evolution was real.… Read More
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The Mexican Revolution was a decade of terrible destruction that brought a wave of changes to the Church in Mexico. Read More
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At my old blog haunt, I used to post notices of interesting places Latter-day Saints (aka “Mormons”) show up. Here’s an interesting one (even if the LDS content is minimal one of the prosecutors was a practicing member): Read More
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Jesus the Messiah was the son of a righteous and godly woman named Mary, through whom he had many ancestors discussed in the Hebrew Bible. Among those were several remarkable women. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Camille Fronk Olson discussed some of the women in the genealogy of Jesus. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview. Read More
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80 responses
Pearls Being Clutched I vaguely recall when I was younger learning about the special restrictions put in place in regards to Church membership for people from a polygamous background. I could think of a few narrow cases where I didn’t think the restrictions were necessary, but they would have been such a small portion of everything that goes on that I didn’t give it more than a passing thought. Fast forward to November 2015. The Church very explicitly connected the November Policy of Consistency to the long-standing policy regarding polygamous children. Again, I had had some reservations about the latter,… Read More
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One response
George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy by Kenneth L. Cannon II is an entry in the Signature Books brief biographies series focused on one of the most influential and best-known Latter-day Saints in the 19th century. As a missionary, publisher, representative for Utah Territory to the United States Congress, businessman, apostle, and long-term First Presidency member, he accomplished a lot during his lifetime. The brief biographies are essentially a Latter-day Saint version of the Penguin Lives series that was published by the Penguin Random House and Viking Press–short, accessible biographies of notable individuals. At 250 pages (plus index… Read More
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The closure of the mission in Mexico in 1889 led to an 12-year gap in the presence of missionaries and official church leadership in central Mexico. Ammon Tenney worked to restart the mission, connecting with the Latter-day Saints who were effectively abandoned and beginning new efforts at proselytizing. Read More
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8 responses
Seizing Power by political scientist Naunihal Singh is the preeminent scholarly work on coups d’etat. In it, Singh pairs in-depth investigations of coup attempts in Africa and Russia with a quantitative analysis of correlates of successful coups worldwide. He finds that coups can largely be characterized as coordination games, where military commanders often join the side that they think will win. If they choose correctly their power increases, if they choose wrongly they will probably be executed or imprisoned, so perception becomes everything and both sides of a coup have an incentive to exaggerate their level of support within… Read More
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I know I’ve talked a bit about Joseph F. Smith (JFS) lately, but the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk recently shared another interview about him. This time around, Dennis Horne spoke about Joseph F. Smith’s succession to the presidency of the Church, but it also covers other info about this pivotal president of the Church. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview (a shorter post with quotes and some commentary by myself). Read More
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The following is a guest post by Randall Davis. Amidst the tapestry of human experience, religious freedom–the right to worship in accordance with one’s own conscience–is a deeply-valued principle that forms the bedrock of much goodness in our world today. Having associated with people of various faith traditions over the years, I have seen the enriching influence of religion in their lives, and from our discussions, they recognize that religious freedom carries both duties and responsibilities that honor the sanctity of other beliefs. Read More
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Regrets of the Dying The Top Five Regrets of the Dying was a bestselling book by a palliative care nurse who spent a lot of time with patients as they were passing away. I’m not going to recommend it as a book; the writing isn’t the best and it gets kind of repetitious, but the idea sparked an interest in me on taking an end-of-life perspective, which seems like one of the more accurate lenses through which to view things big picture. Here I’ll go through each regret with commentary on how it interrelates with the gospel and gospel living. I… Read More
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While efforts to gather converts from central Mexico failed and the mission in central Mexico closed, there would still be future successes. Among the earliest converts in the 20th century in Mexico, the Bautista family would go on to have an impact on the Church for years to come, including the development of an indigenous-affirming perspective on Lamanite identity. Read More
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The Joseph Smith Papers recently released a final podcast series, the Road to Carthage podcast, focusing on the final days and immediate aftermath of Joseph Smith’s life. It was an explosive time, filled with tension both within and outside of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, podcast host Spencer W. McBride talked about the events that led to Joseph Smith’s death in 1844. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview (a shorter post with excerpts and some discussion). An important piece… Read More
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In partnership with the Church, IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) has recently made the entire 1850-1890 set of census data available in tabular (spreadsheet) form for analysis. While individual records have been available for some time, as has a 1% sample of the quantitative data, this new development allows us to download all of the census responses for the 19th century at once. As you can imagine, this is a fairly large file, but if you subset Utah it is much more manageable. The wonderful IPUMS folks have harmonized the different questions asked across time so that you can… Read More
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An attempt to found a colony of Mexican converts in the north didn’t end up going as well as anyone had hoped, to disastrous results. Read More
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Church History, General Doctrine, Latter-day Saint Publications, Latter-day Saint Thought, Mormon Studies, Race and the Priesthood, Scriptures
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This is, I think, the best thing to come out of Deseret Book in a long while. I somewhat wish these books had existed when I was much, much younger, but the expertise (and, frankly, spiritual maturity of many members) likely didn’t really exist in the right forms until recently. What follows is my totally idiosyncratic, personal ranking of the series. Every book is excellent (how often can you say that about a book series like this?), so this is not “best to worst” but more “what Ivan enjoyed or found most useful” This may or may not help you.… Read More
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The Gesta Romanorum, a medieval collection of moralizing stories, includes the tale of a hermit who despaired at the world’s injustice and resolved to abandon his calling. Read More
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19 responses
Vietnamese depiction of the Pure Land, the Mahayana Buddhist paradisiacal afterlife Egyptian depiction of the Field of Reeds, the ancient Egyptian paradisiacal afterlife While I’m open to the idea of “sacred envy,” where we see things in other faith traditions and communities that we wish we had, that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing places where we feel our own faith gets it right where most don’t; it is the faith we have chosen after all. Some of the big ones here for me are: Heavenly Mother, collapsing the ontological distance between divinity and humanity, and an active afterlife. I have… Read More
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The Bible and the Latter-day Saint Tradition, published by University of Utah Press, is an impressive collection of information about Bible studies and how Latter-day Saints interact with the Bible. Read More
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Joseph F. Smith “(remember the F)” is one of the most important and influential presidents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even though he isn’t frequently discussed in church settings. It was during his administration that the Church really started to take on its current form – rejection of polygamy, modern monetary auditing systems, the first attempts at correlation, temples outside of the United States, our understanding of priesthood as an entity unto itself, the vision that is now D&C section 138 was received, and the purchasing and development of historical sites all were developments overseen by… Read More
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A sacrament meeting talk given 23 July 2023 At the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew recorded that the Lord, Jesus Christ stated: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you… Read More
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26 responses
Recently I’ve done a series of posts explicitly identifying different rhetorical strategies used in social media spaces around Church topics (One on apologizing for others, and one on disingenuously citing prophets and invoking one’s church heritage). I didn’t mean for it to be an ongoing series, but I’ve just been noticing these more and more, so if you’ll indulge me for two more (for now)… First, On social media spaces it has been common for people (often outwardly very Mormon-y) to communicate commonsensical truisms as if they are somehow deep or controversial as opposed to just reminding us of the… Read More
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Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, Language and Literature, Pearl of Great Price, Philosophy and Theology
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One of the recurring irritations of reading apologetic, polemic, or scholarly work in Mormon Studies addressing Joseph Smith’s translations of ancient scripture is that the authors nearly always ignore the perspective of practicing translators and the field of translation studies, instead basing their analyses in simple notions of linguistic equivalence that may still prevail in graduate language exams, but that the field of translation studies abandoned as unworkable several decades ago. Read More
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A lot of early missionary work in Mexico was driven by an understanding that the missionaries were preaching to Lamanites. But being considered a Lamanite can be both a blessing and a curse. Read More
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The Responsible Woman, by James C. Christensen I’m on the record as being very pro-big families. As we become more and more of a minority you have to be clever about how to pull it off logistically since society is increasingly built around the 1.6 kid family. Given Latter-day Saints’ (albeit increasingly fading) penchant for large families I thought it was appropriate to post the little hacks and tricks we’ve come up with on the way for others. Anything we haven’t thought of is welcome in the comments. Keep all clothes in the same area by the laundry room. This one… Read More