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It’s perhaps a little unpopular to argue that Brigham Young got anything right about polygamy, but one place where I think he was onto something was to point out the all-too-common hypocrisy of many vehement anti-polygamists (see full quotes below). Mark Twain authored that famous jab about how ugly Mormon plural wives were–but maybe that’s because the women he collected were younger. Victorian-era Church leaders were indeed onto something about how people would preen about those awful Mormon abominations against public virtue and then visit a prostitute (London alone had over 80,000 of them, and I assume they weren’t just… Read More
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I’ve always loved the idea of being “anxiously engaged in a good cause.” The sense of agency generally assumed from the phrase suggests that I can figure out myself good things that need doing and how to make those things happen. The idea that not everything good is planned out and my role is flexible is very appealing. Of course, that has some risk with it. Read More
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32 responses
I finally got around to calculating the Church leaving rates from the latest Pew Religious Landscape Survey. The PRLS is one of the few surveys that has questions about both former and current religious affiliation with a large enough sample size that it can tell us something about Latter-day Saints. So what do we find? According to the 2023-2024 PRLS, 54% of people who were raised Latter-day Saint still identify as such. So about half. However, when we run the same numbers for 2014 it was 64%. And when we run the same numbers for the 2007 wave it was… Read More
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A series I am going to occasionally come back to on my takes on early Church primary sources that I’m reading. We have a tendency to only read secondary takes, whether a talk, book, or commonly shared anecdote, but there are often insights buried in the primary sources that don’t make it into the collective consciousness. Mormonism “Unvailed” (not to be confused with the much later work Mormonism “Unveiled” by John D. Lee/Lee’s ghostwriter) was the first anti-Mormon book. Most of it was a basic history of the Church thickly layered with invective about those scoundrelly scoundrel dupes thrown in,… Read More
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How do we define the word ‘stewardship’? In church we use it quite a lot — maybe as much as we use the word ‘responsibility’ — but since we use both and since they are somewhat interchangeable, I wish I knew of a clear statement that distinguished how we use these two terms. As far as I can tell, ‘stewardship’ is something larger, taking in more than just specific tasks or the clear responsibilities of a role. A stewardship seems more all-encompassing — and this graphic I found, which to me resonates with the covenants in the Temple, I think… Read More
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A common theme in Latter-day Saint circles, admittedly with some scriptural support (Alma 34), is the idea that what matters at the end of the day is where we are with God at the moment of our death. That if somebody lives a sanctified life but throws it all out the last week of her life then she’s in a worse place than somebody who conversely lived a non-gospel life and found Jesus at the end. That the moment of death is sort of a “pencils down” moment in the test of life. In terms of Church history, perhaps one… Read More
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I am for open borders (more or less, with some exceptions we needn’t go into here). I was even quoted in a conservative newspaper’s article headlined “Illegal immigrants have a friend in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” based on a Deseret News article I wrote (although it didn’t exactly help my thesis that a lot of the comments were along the lines of “get out of my country Mexicans”). You could take John Corrill’s and others’ accounts of how we were treated as impoverished never do-well immigrants and they would not look out of place in some… Read More
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Guest post by Joseph Green I’ve been reading with interest the new book on evolution published by BYU’s College of Life Sciences, The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution. (While the print version has yet to be released, a free copy of the PDF is available now on the college’s web site.) As someone who accepts the science of evolutionary biology, I fully concur with the editors’ thesis that evolution is compatible with the restored gospel. However, because I have a degree in biblical studies, I’m also interested in how the authors interact with scholarship regarding the various creation… Read More
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If “that which is of God is light,” then we all want to be enlightened; that is, brought into God’s presence and to His understanding. While sections 49 and 50 of the Doctrine and Covenants were written to ‘enlighten’ Leman Copley and others, we might also find in them other light, addressing issues for us today in addition to the unenlightened ideas that they held onto. What other enlightenment can we find in these sections? Read More
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Prepare Me for Thy Use: Lessons from Wilford Woodruff’s Mission Years, by Kristy Wheelwright Taylor is a wonderful, concentrated dose of Wilford Woodruff’s life for devoted Latter-day Saints. Taylor is able to draw upon her work as board secretary for the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation and knowledge of the sources available through the Wilford Woodruff Papers project as well as other publications about Wilford Woodruff in compiling this book. As the title suggests, the historical narrative of the book focuses on the missionary journeys taken by Woodruff between 1834 and 1847, following a roughly chronological approach. The chapters, however, are… Read More
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Bound feet. This will become relevant later. Obviously all sorts of content warnings here, as the kids say. In the Friends episode “The One With Free Porn” Joey and Chandler accidentally start receiving free porn through their cable service, and don’t turn off the TV for fear that they’ll lose it. The running joke throughout the episode is that their sense of reality and expectations about sexuality in daily life are warped, being surprised and dismayed that the pizza girl just drops off the pizza and the bank tellers just deposit their money. Not to suddenly go dark, but on a… Read More
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13 responses
There has been some recent excitement in the Latter-day Saint scholarly community about the recent publication of BYU Life Sciences, The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and Evolution. It’s a publication that’s been years in the making, and highly anticipated during the last few years, so it’s good to see it come to fruition. Co-editor Jamie Jensen recent discussed the book in an interview at the Latter-day Saint history and theology site, From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview. Read More
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The Doctrine and Covenants very rarely mentions women. In fact, it only mentions two contemporary women by name: Emma Hale Smith and Vienna Jaques. The former is by far the better known of the two, but Vienna Jaques is remarkable, for a few reasons. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, biographer Brent Rogers discussed her life and role in the Church’s history. What follows here is a copost to the full interview Read More
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This past Sunday I was struck by a question in Sunday School. After the teacher had explained that the early Church had been forced to move from place to place until it reached Utah, a man who was baptized a few years ago asked, “Why were church members forced to leave so many places? I mean, the members here are so nice!” The subsequent discussion was wonderful, as well-informed members pointed out the need for gathering, how gathering can feel like a threat to outsiders, how members often didn’t act as they should — they weren’t always nice. One example… Read More
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A prophet looking into a curved universe One of the more curious asides in modern revelation is D&C 121 when God tells Joseph that he was living in a time “Which our forefathers have awaited with anxious expectation.” When all sorts of truths would finally be revealed: And also, if there be bounds set to the heavens or to the seas, or to the dry land, or to the sun, moon, or stars—All the times of their revolutions, all the appointed days, months, and years, and all the days of their days, months, and years, and all their glories, laws,… Read More
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In the previous two posts in this series, I discussed an 1886 dictated revelation from John Taylor. A related claim to this document that I am addressing here is that when fundamentalist Latter-day Saint groups began to become a religious movement in their own right during the 1910s and 1920s, the leadership of the majority group claimed to have been given authority to perform plural marriages in perpetuity by President John Taylor. It’s uncertain what John Taylor said and did in this regard, but the position of the revelations and praxis of church presidents both before and after Taylor indicate… Read More
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This is about six years too late to count as a book review, but Don Bradley’s The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories is excellent. It is a rare combination of scriptural investigation and historical whodunit that is both fascinating and insightful. Read More
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I get the idea of seeking good things, even gifts, but somehow it feels a little like being a child, pining away for the popular toy of the moment as a Christmas gift. If it’s a gift, shouldn’t it be something unexpected? Or at least shouldn’t we be humble enough to accept the gifts that are right for us instead of what we desire? Read More
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How do we make sense of John Taylor’s 1886 revelation, in the light of the Church’s stance that monogamy is the rule and polygamy is an exception? My response is that, first, one needs to keep in mind that dictated revelations (like the 1886 revelation, or even those in the Doctrine and Covenants), are not the unfiltered word of God. Second, one part of the process of weighing the validity of a revelation is the canonization process (a process that the 1886 revelation has not passed). Third, the text of the revelation is more ambiguous than it seems at first… Read More
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6 responses
Bushman, Richard Lyman. “What Are We to Make of the Gold Plates?.” BYU Studies Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2025): 9. Read More
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Cinema Some AI generated, Church-related movies I created with Google’s new Vemo 2. David W. Patten’s fun, 2nd-hand, late account of being visited by Cain Joseph Smith writing D&C 121 in Liberty Jail Moroni burying the plates While AI has been able to do very short movie clips for some time now, I’ve waited for a while to do this post until it was somewhat passable. I think we’re kind of there now, but there’s still a lot of work to do. The clips are still quite short, and progress is still being made in fine-grained control over camera angles… Read More
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Assuming you are regularly in an LDS ward and stake buildings in the U.S., and likely other places as well, signs like this one are probably familiar. The Church uses uniform and consistent materials in buildings, and most, if not all, rooms have a label like this on them. The size, font and orientation of these signs are all consistent, which makes it easy for most of us to figure out where we should go in the building. Of course, you may have noticed something added to this particular sign. Read More
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Back in November, I started a series entitled Monogamy is the Rule, outlining why we should expect monogamy to be the standard for marriage, both in this life and in the life to come. In the first of the series, I discussed how commandments and expectations from the Lord can change at different times, and that today, monogamous marriage is the commandment that must be kept to receive exaltation rather than plural marriage. In the second of the series, I discussed how there are multiple ways to interpret the revelations that have been used to undergird the practice (D&C 131–132).… Read More
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A series I am going to occasionally come back to on my takes on early Church primary sources that I’m reading. We have a tendency to only read secondary takes, whether a talk, book, or commonly shared anecdote, but there are often insights buried in the primary sources that don’t make it into the collective consciousness. The Evening and the Morning Star was the first Latter-day Saint newspaper, published in Independence and then Kirtland. As you maybe could tell from my last post that cited copiously from it, I’ve been schlogging through its issues (okay, maybe skimming, but it was… Read More
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Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Latter-day Saint Thought, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
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D&C 45 covers a lot of different things, from the role of the Savior to the safety of Zion. In the last few decades our LDS culture has also made a lot of this section’s observation that His disciples will ‘stand in holy places, and … not be moved.’ As an image that description suggests both that there are specific physical locations in which we should stand, and that we should remain in those locations. But I think these images are metaphors, and not physical sites — wasn’t the Good Samaritan ‘standing in holy places?’ It seems to me that… Read More
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7 responses
In my last post, I discussed the process of canonization. While formal canonization has been rare since the late 19th century, key additions to the scriptural canon—such as the Pearl of Great Price and select sections of the Doctrine and Covenants—highlight a pattern shaped by prophetic authorship, broad communal use, and alignment with institutional priorities. These examples underscore a dynamic model in which “functional canon”—those texts already valued and widely cited—often lays the groundwork for what becomes official scripture. As the Latter-day Saint community continues to evolve, the interplay between tradition and revelation may yet open the door to future… Read More
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20 responses
Canonization is a fascinating process. And with an open canon, Latter-day Saints have the potential to expand books of scriptures like the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. The process of expanding the canon is a rare event in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially since the 1870s, but some of the more recent additions give insight into the process and how it could unfold in the future. Read More
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Orson Hyde dedicating the Holy Land for the return of the Jews in the style of Jewish artist Chagall While the confidence intervals are large, a relatively recent Pew survey suggests that Latter-day Saints are the most pro-Jewish religious group besides Jews themselves, and an older Gallup survey shows that Latter-day Saints are the most pro-Israel religious group besides Jews. (Yes yes, I know that being pro-Israel does not equal being pro-Jewish necessarily, but still, in this case I think the two are at least related.) Our philo-semitism does not surprise me. Our own religious aesthetic has Hebrew overtones; when… Read More
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The 13th International Art Competition exhibition at the Church History and Art Museum in Salt Lake City opened this morning. The theme of the competition is based on Doctrine and Covenants 81:5: “Wherefore, be faithful; stand in the office which I have appointed unto you; succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees.” All told, 584 artists entered the competition, from which 150 pieces of art were selected for the exhibition, with artists from 26 different countries contributing to the display. Laura Paulsen Howe (Church History Museum art curator) compared the compilation to… Read More
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Doing good works for proselytizing purposes is fine. I’ve heard complaints that doing so is somehow selfish (Helping Hands shirts, etc), and people point to Matthew 6:1-4. But there’s also Matthew 5:14-16 “let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” I’d say the difference is between seeking attention as an individual vs. gaining attention for the group. Jesus encouraged proselytizing, and, as I see it, Jesus wanted people to follow him, and was okay performing his own good works to gain disciples. Read More