Actually, it’s more like the Intermountain Cornhuskers, or the Mormon Maccabees Read More

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As we’re all told in Sunday School, “Gospel” means “good news.” And it’s certainly good news that T&S emeritus (and current BCC) blogger Kristine Haglund is going to be taking over as editor of Dialogue. Read More

[This post was originally put up on Holy Saturday, April 7, 2007. I thought about putting up something different this year, but I couldn’t think of anything that can approach the beauty of this essay. Enjoy] Read More

[This post was originally put up on Good Friday, April 6, 2007. I thought about putting up something different this year, but I couldn’t think of anything that can approach the beauty of this little story. Enjoy.] Once upon a time, three little trees stood in a forest high on a mountain, dreaming of what they would be when they were grown. Read More

Television police dramas are so popular that they have come to influence the American legal system — or so say believers in the “CSI Effect.” Read More

No, it isn’t. Which means that defining an early Christian apostasy as the loss of priesthood authority doesn’t tell us anything, even in a Mormon framework, about the apostasy as a historical event Read More

[Revised from the Archives.] The Garden of Eden story doesn’t have a point. Read More

We worshiped as a family, at a natural altar of stones, on a snow-specked mountain side. Read More

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the seemingly secular things that I’ve come to hold sacred, whether they be songs, books, films, works of art, or even places. My spiritual regard for these things is often rooted in my own experience, yet, I also believe that I’ve come to appreciate many of them in a spiritual sense because they broach truth in their own right. Brigham Young once said “The truth and sound doctrine possessed by the sectarian world, and they have a great deal, all belong to this church” (JD 11:375). Read More

The Church History Library/Archives staff have been hit with a wave of telephone calls today from Church members looking for confirmation of the latest rumor to hit the LDS fan rumor mill. Read More

Our Sunday School class opened this morning with a discussion of the “generals in the war in heaven” nonsense that the Church is trying so hard to quash. Read More

When we arrived at church two weeks ago, everything looked normal. The building was clean and not a chair was out of place. Read More

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, don’t forget to check out Sunstone West this weekend. Tonight’s program includes a showing of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, and tomorrow’s program includes a list of speakers and presentations on some interesting-sounding topics. I hope to see some of you there. Read More

My father used to point to the ceiling in our living room and claim he could still see a dent made by my head as I jumped up in excitement over discovering that my call was to the Switzerland Geneva Mission. Read More

Although she had immigrated to Boston, the story of Misha Defonseca didn’t get nearly as much press last week in the U.S. as it did in Europe, when she joined a long line of self-confessed fakes Read More

One of the distinctive features of the Book of Mormon is its pervasive anxiety about literacy Read More

The Church says it intends to discipline the missionaries responsible for these photographs. Given that they appear to have returned from their missions, what is that discipline likely to be? Beyond that, while these pictures certainly aren’t respectful or in good taste, how many returned missionaries out there have similar sorts of photographs sitting in their picture albums at home? Might not want to upload those to Facebook or Flicker any time soon… Read More

A few recent comments over at BCC have elaborated on a theme that one hears from time to time on the internet: “I didn’t get the whole scoop on LDS history while I was in Primary.” Read More

Elder Packer’s article in this month’s Ensign closes with some thoughts on Evolution that have the potential to stir up a debate on the issue within the Church after several relatively quiet years. Read More

How about the one about the frog in boiling water? Read More

Remember that one about youth being generals in the war in heaven? Read More

Among my many other vices, I like to read poetry. Read More

Should a psychologically healthy person be happy, cheerful, carefree? If you are not cheerful is there something wrong with you? Let’s see what Mormon scripture has to say. Read More

Today’s news carries a deja vu article: Surveys show high rates of depression in Utah, and some psychiatrists wonder if Mormon culture is part of the cause. (The story runs under a pretty direct illustration that shows an apparently depressed woman and a photo of the temple in the background.) Read More

I’m frequently asked how to homeschool kindergarten, so I thought it might be useful to post it for future reference. Read More

The Salt Lake Tribune recently ran a column written by Grant Palmer arguing that Christian salvation turns not on the performance of ordinances but rather on an ethical life. Theologically speaking, the article (as Dave has pointed out nicely) is a pretty pedestrian, anti-sacramental, and essentially Protestant reading of the New Testament. The really interesting question raised by the article is not its theology, but rather what it is doing on the editorial page of an mainstream, secular newspaper. I think that we can safely dismiss the notion that the column was published because the Trib has taken it upon… Read More

Mormons contributed to Mitt Romney’s campaign over the past year and half in some pretty eye-popping numbers (see, e.g., here and here). As such, I decided to comb through the campaign finance contribution records to see who exactly some prominent Mormons were donating to this past election cycle. Read More

Once upon a time, The Great Apostasy by Elder James E. Talmage was on every Mormon’s reading list. But somehow that topic went out of fashion for a couple of decades — no LDS books treated the subject and it received considerably less attention in General Conference talks. Suddenly, the Great Apostasy seems to be back. Read More

SMPT is meeting at the University of Utah on March 27-29, and the conference program is now posted on the web. Featured speakers include Stephen T. Davis of Claremont McKenna College and Jad Hatem of Saint Joseph University, Beirut. The conference is free and open to the public. Davis will also deliver a Tanner-McMurrin Lecture at Westminster College that weekend. Read More