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Joseph Fielding Smith was one of the movers and shapers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the twentieth century. Although lacking in professional training in theology or history, his impact in those areas can still be felt today in the Church. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Matthew Bowman discussed some of Joseph Fielding Smith’s life and legacy. What follows here is a copost to the full interview. Read More
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So, yes, I did want to repost this one as well, but frame it a little differently than how I had originally. This continues a series where I argue that Joseph Smith’s perennialism, I think, allows for greater flexibility to deal with biblical scholarship that seems to be increasingly calling lots of the OT historicity into question. Again, I’m not a biblical scholar, but I’ve noted this scholarly trend and I’ve seen a lot of evangelicals and Mormons express faith concerns over learning about this scholarship. Read More
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Forgive me for reposting this, but I wanted to have this up on the blog so that I could refer to it in future posts. So here I’m continuing my posts arguing that Joseph Smith was onto something in embracing the ancient theology, or larger truth in addition to the Bible. While the Bible in certainly important in Mormon theology and historical conceptions, Mormonism rejects Protestant sola scriptura. We do so not only in have additional scripture, God goes so far as to tell Nephi in his strident rejection of sola scriptua “I shall also speak unto all nations of… Read More
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One of the more curious aspects of the temple ceremony was the charge to avoid “loud laughter.” [Note, I originally spoke in the present tense, but evidently it has been removed–with all the recent changes I somehow missed that]. It’s like only eating meat during the winter, one of those things that was indisputably, canonically there but virtually nobody, no matter how conservative, made a point of it. However, I get the concept even if I’m a little fuzzy on the operationalization: avoid frivolity and light mindedness because reality with all its pain and suffering–and glory–is essentially and fundamentally serious.… Read More
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A brief PSA: the blog was having problems so we reset it and lost some content, so apologies to everybody who spent the time to comment only to have it be lost in the memory hole. Read More
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The Ascension Lately I’ve dipped into literary depictions of the Savior’s life. Unsurprisingly given the subject matter, historically responses to literary depictions of the Savior have been quite polarizing, and sometimes controversial. For example, evidently The Man Born to Be King, an early, relatively milquetoast (by today’s standards) radio depiction of the Savior’s life, was blamed for the fall of Singapore. Gradually fictional depictions of the Savior moved from being more devotional–like Ben Hur–to the more naturalistic, like the Master and the Margarita, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Quarantine, King Jesus, and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel… Read More
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Four years ago, I brought up resources to assist in study of the Doctrine and Covenants. There were some significant books that were mentioned, but not as many as I had assumed there would be. That launched me on a path that has led to my book, Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine and Covenants. In addition, I have continued to search out relevant books and other literature about the Doctrine and Covenants. That work of seeking out resources, combined with the extensive interviewing work of the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, is brought together in… Read More
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I put up part one a while back (sorry, many life distractions in the meantime) and am finally getting up part 2. The bigger purpose of these posts is to share some thoughts on a bigger point about rethinking the grand narrative of biblical metahistory that we’ve constructed of Mormonism. Mormons tend to argue for Mormonism as some kind of playing out of biblical history, restoring biblical religion etc. I’ll be arguing in these posts (and have argued) that a lot of such notions are problematic since the Bible is problematic historically, but that there are other ways to think… Read More
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41 responses
So I asked Chat-GPT to show two middle aged people…and this is what a middle-aged woman looks like apparently, but at least it shows the correct number of fingers. In the Church we segregate certain callings by sex. In addition to the obvious Relief Society/priesthood quorum distinctions, primary presidencies are female, while clerks and leadership positions are male. These distinctions are overlapping, but not exactly collinear, with the all-male priesthood and leadership issue, which is a much bigger question that I have addressed parts of elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post will put off to the side even… Read More
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The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is one the most common ritual and use of set ritual prayers in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Weekly observance is a high frequency compared to many Christian denominations’ observance of similar rites and begs to question of why we observe it so frequently. David F. Holland discussed the ritual of the sacrament in a recent post at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, based on his work in Moroni: a brief theological introduction. What follows here is a co-post to the full discussion. Read More
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As a musician in the Church, I’ve organized several Christmas programs for sacrament meetings over the years. The format that I’ve come to prefer is to have two narrators, one sharing Christmas and Advent themed thoughts, then another reading related scriptures to tell the story of Christmas. After each narrator shares a thought, a music number is performed that relates to the thoughts. (I generally recommend keeping the ward choir contributions to three or less, depending on your ward/branch’s circumstances, so the other ones are usually Primary, solos, and small groups performing.) I thought I would share the basic template… Read More
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Hinderaker, Amorette. ““It was Nothing That was Super Subversive”: Resistance as a Narrative Process in Dialectical Identity Spaces Among Mothers of LGBTQ+ Children in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Communication Studies (2024): 1-22. Read More
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I finally got around to reading the Epistle of 1st Clement. Written by Clement of Rome (or, as bishop of Rome, Pope Clement I if you’re Catholic), 1st Clement represents one of the earliest if not the earliest authentic Christian document after the apostles. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about the nature of the Great Apostasy in Latter-day Saint circles. As far as what we canonically know from D&C in the core of our concentric circles of authoritativeness, God told Joseph Smith that all the other sects were “wrong” and doctrinally incorrect. We also know, per John the… Read More
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The process of coming to understand how sealing created kinship networks was complicated, however, and became intertwined with the development of plural marriage in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle sealings (and their promised blessings) from plural marriage, even though monogamous marriages are the official standard in the Church today. Read More
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Back in February, I announced that I have a book about the Doctrine and Covenants that is scheduled to be published by By Common Consent Press this December. After a lot of hard work by a lot of different people, I am happy to say that is still the case! Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine and Covenants is now available for pre-order for the Kindle edition (which should be released in a week), with the paperback version planned to be released in the near future. Read More
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I try to avoid having too many “pet peeve” posts that focus on the negative, but it’s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission… Read More
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of the bajillion media depictions of gay missionaries No, I have not seen the movie Heretic yet. Based on what I have read, however, [spoiler alert] apparently it begins with a sexually explicit discussion between sister missionaries, and there are possibly sexual overtones near the end when one of the sister missionaries is shown to have a subdermal birth control, which the movie states would be a reason for Church discipline if known, which implies that either 1) the movie was implying that the sister missionary was sexually active, or 2) the birth control was used… Read More
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Periodically someone or another will issue a call to remove hymns with militaristic themes or martial music from the hymnbook, or at least rewrite them to make them overtly pacifistic. The sentiment is noble and understandable, but mistaken. The new hymnbook may reduce the number of martial hymns or soften their edges, but I hope the new hymnbook keeps at least some of them. Especially in troubled times, the martial hymns are one place I can find peace. Read More
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Sorry for all the election posts, but I would be remiss if in closing I didn’t say a word about one of the weirder/more entertaining aspects of the 2024 election that dovetails neatly with my own eccentric interest in religious demography and politics: the rise of the Amish as political kingmakers. In general this election has thrown a wrench in the “demography is destiny” ideology (I say ideology because there was never a lot of evidence to the idea that immigration would cause permanent democratic majorities; of course I’m partial but the DNC could have, you know, actually spoken to… Read More
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“Someday my prince will come, / in the Millennium, / and he will say to me, / ‘Will you be number three? / I will be true to you, / and you, and you, and you…’” Read More
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Attention everybody: Read More
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A few years ago I wrote a post questioning the now-common soundbite that a majority of Church members in the US are single. I cobbled together a variety of sources showing that, for people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints, that’s not the case, and I now suspect that the “majority single” position comes from looking at the Church’s raw records, which, as anybody who has systematically gone through a non-Utah ward list can tell you, is primarily populated by people who were baptized earlier in life but now have virtually nothing to do with the Church. I went ahead and… Read More
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“The lessons we learn from scripture depend on the questions we ask… The Book of Mormon…warrants the most challenging questions we can throw at it. This book attempts to ask those difficult questions.” So opens this third and final volume of The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, focusing on the books of Helaman through Moroni. Specifically, this commentary asks what the Book of Mormon says “about genocide, bigotry, environmental destruction, poverty, and inequality? What can it offer a world that is broken, full of hatred and unfettered greed?” The Book of Mormon and this commentary have lots… Read More
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I had heard that this was on the horizon, but now it’s free for everybody (well, 3 videos a month). You can upload a YouTube video and not only have it create a translation, but it is more or less in the voice of the individual, and the lips are synced so that it actually looks like they’re saying the words. I know that the Church is rightfully careful about the uses of AI, but the potential for this in the future is obvious. “For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fulness… Read More
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Come Up Hither to Zion: William Marks and the Mormon Concept of Gathering by Cheryl L. Bruno and John S. Dinger is an enlightening biography that brings attention to a significant yet often overlooked figure in the early Latter Day Saint movement. Read More
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A chart I ran across on Twitter that I use in my stats classes. I don’t know if they’re still around doing their thing, but a while ago the “Black Menaces” group got some attention by interviewing hapless BYU students about different social topics in a way to try to make them look stupid and close-minded. The not-so-subtle subtext was that only those silly privileged white kids would hold conservative opinions on social issues, whereas minorities with their wisdom gained from a lifetime of discrimination would naturally gravitate to another perspective. Like The Book of Mormon musical implying that Africans… Read More
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I love that Latter-day Saint temples tend to be well-decorated with artwork, including the temple murals. I still find it a bit painful that the murals were not preserved as part of the Salt Lake City Temple renovation, but still find the history of the original murals in the Salt Lake City Temple to be fascinating, particularly due to the Paris Art Mission initiative. Notably, Linda Jones Gibbs discussed the history of the Paris Art Mission in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview. Read More
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A few months ago I participated in a Traditional Latin Mass. More traditional-minded Catholics will genuflect when walking by or across the Host. As a non-Catholic I hadn’t considered what I should do until I found myself walking next to it and had to make a snap decision. On one hand as somebody who doesn’t believe that the Eucharist is God’s literal flesh, I thought it would be insincere for me to briefly kneel to it, and perhaps patronizing to those who do believe that; on the other hand it was very clear that that was the expectation, and it… Read More
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Slavery is one of the darkest subjects in the history of the United States. It was an issue that impacted so many lives (in ways that echo through to the present day) and arguments over it tore the nation apart. Utah Territory was no different in that they were caught in intense debates over the morality of the practice and what to do about it. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, W. Paul Reeve and Christopher B. Rich discussed the history of unfree labor and slavery in Utah Territory, building on their recently… Read More
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Williams, Peter. “Detecting Semantic Differences between LDS and Christian Speech.” Schwa (2024). Read More