While watching last weekend’s General Conference, with the sustaining of President Monson and the calling of new people into Church leadership, one of the things I felt is how fortunate the Church is to have as its leaders men and women who have achieved significantly in many walks of life. This is in contrast to most other denominations, where people with these skills would be excluded from formal church leadership. For example, what other church has attorneys in its most senior leadership? Read More

Mormon Studies has become a relic area for outdated ideas about texts and their transmission. That becomes clear in reading a number of contributions to Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy (FARMS, 2005) Read More

Ardis Parshall has presented in previous postings “The CSI Effect and Mormon History”, 3/20/2008, and “And Yet Another Joseph Smith Photograph”, 4/1/2008, arresting images that have, at first glance, an arguable relationship to our known historical depictions of the Prophet Joseph Smith, but turn out, on further research, to have no chance of being what we wish they were. In commenting on Ardis’ second post (#14, #48), I pointed out the reasons why there are likely to be a great many old images that resemble our mental image of the Prophet, and why it would be extremely difficult to verify… Read More

To help us compensate for the shortage of lawyers at T&S, Raymond Takashi Swenson has agreed to guest blog for a week or two. Read More

“Change for the better can come to all. Over the years we have issued appeals to the less active, the offended, the critic, the transgressor — to come back. ‘Come back and feast at the table of the Lord and taste again the sweet and satisfying fruits of fellowship with the Saints.’ In the private sanctuary of one’s own conscience lies that spirit, that determination to cast off the old person and to measure up to the stature of true potential. In this spirit, we again issue that heartfelt invitation. Come back, we reach out to you in the pure… Read More

As has become tradition around here, Times and Seasons is opening up a thread for comments and discussion, insights and observations, thoughts and questions, arising from Sunday afternoon’s General Conference session. Enjoy! Read More

As has become tradition around here, Times and Seasons is opening up a thread for comments and discussion, insights and observations, thoughts and questions, arising from Sunday morning’s General Conference session. Enjoy! Read More

Since Kaimi was kind enough to link to it, I thought I’d elaborate a bit on some comments of mine which Peggy Fletcher Stack used in her excellent article summarizing the accomplishments of President Hinckley, and the opportunities and challenges facing President Monson. It would be interesting to hear more from some of the other sources she made use of in putting her piece together (Melissa Proctor, Ronan Head, etc.), but for now, here is at least a little bit the context of my remarks. Read More

As has become tradition around here, Times and Seasons is opening up a thread for comments and discussion, insights and observations, thoughts and questions, arising from Saturday afternoon’s General Conference session. Enjoy! Read More

As has become tradition around here, Times and Seasons is opening up a thread for comments and discussion, insights and observations, thoughts and questions, arising from Saturday morning’s General Conference session. Enjoy! Read More

On this 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and in the pre-Conference blogging lull, perhaps there is room in your day to remember Dr. King’s visit to Salt Lake City. Read More

I’m reading a short book that reviews what one might call the virtues of teaching: learning, authority, ethics, order, imagination, compassion, patience, character, and pleasure. Each virtue (which might be though of as an aspect of the character of an ideal teacher) is reviewed in its own chapter. The ethics chapter suggested an interesting question to me: Is there an LDS ethics of teaching that differs in any particulars from a Christian or secular ethics of teaching? Read More

The April 1st posting of this article may tempt you to think this is an April Fool’s prank. I wish it were. It is not. Read More

Mormon belief in an early Christian apostasy suggests a couple of historiographic projects that are, I think, doomed to failure, but there might be an alternative Read More

This is a big week for Mormon Studies on the Wasatch Front, with events at the University of Utah, Utah Valley State College, Westminster College, and BYU. Read More

Sunday morning. Clicked off This Week with George Stephanopoulos just a couple of minutes after clicking it on. Feeling especially weary of the twenty-four hour news cycle for some reason today… the relentless intensity, the insatiable talking-heads, and a seemingly never-ending electoral season. Read More

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