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18 responses
So here I present an idea about Christ’s injunction to the rich young man that I read in a book I really like. We all know the story and know it’s often used to as bludgeon to declare that Christians are coming up short of their charitable obligations. Read More
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Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Hymns, Latter-day Saint Thought, Poetry, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
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I feel like I could just repeat the introduction I made three weeks ago, to the lesson for the week ending April 6th, which also spoke about the gathering. However, this week’s lesson is a little different, since it focuses on why we are gathered instead of simply that there is a commandment to gather. Since I explained three weeks ago that the nature of gathering has changed over the history of the church, from a physical gathering to a spiritual gathering, its no surprise that the reasons for gathering are different as well. But I suspect that today’s reasons… Read More
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13 responses
Spoiler alert. One of the most powerful scenes dealing with abortion in cinema is in the Godfather Part II (much more nuanced than, say, Cider House Rules, which is basically the pro-choice version of a preachy 1980s seminary movie.) In it Mafia don Michael Corleone’s wife admits that the child he was looking forward to wasn’t lost to miscarriage but to an abortion. It was an abortion. An abortion, Michael. Just like our marriage is an abortion. Something that’s unholy and evil. I didn’t want your son, Michael, I wouldn’t bring another one of you sons into this world! It… Read More
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10 responses
It was a Jehovah’s Witness many years ago that pointed out to me the connection between “these my brethren” in Matthew 25:40 and Jesus calling those who “do the will of God … my brother, and my sister, and mother.” (Mark 3:31-35, Matt 12:46-50, Luke 8:19-21. See the comments in my last post). I’m interested in what you think of that connection, but I do think that it suggests an element of community building in Matthew 25:31-46 that I see as similar to Mosiah 18:8-9. Read More
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5 responses
Now more than ever, we need the 12th Article of Faith. Read More
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The Church Historian’s Press recently published a history of the Young Women’s organization in the Church entitled Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024. In connection with the release of this landmark study, Lisa Olsen Tait discussed the book in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview. Read More
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8 responses
One of the most counter-intuitive and abhorrent, yet strangely logically airtight arguments in modern-day ethics is Peter Singer’s argument for why, if we are okay with killing and experimenting with animals, we should then be okay with experimenting on mentally handicapped humans and killing babies. Of course killing and experimenting on infants and the disabled are absolute atrocities and I reject them out of hand, as I do their analog to slaughtering cattle, but his fleshed out argument is actually pretty solid if you accept the premises. We don’t consider it any less atrocious to torture a dumber human being… Read More
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13 responses
I want to share a few thoughts on Christianity and community building. I know this is a big topic discussed for thousands of years, but I want to give my two cents anyway despite not being a trained theologian. In my amateur opinion, I do think that Jesus said that community building was important and it’s how I interpret what he was saying about the kingdom of God. I see this interpretation as similar to how I interpret Joseph Smith’s thought. I thought Elder Uchtdorf’s talk had a lot of wonderful related things to say on the topic and will… Read More
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The Come Follow Me lesson for the week ending on April 20th, Easter, takes a break from the section order in the Doctrine and Covenants to focus on how Christ is portrayed in the scripture. The lesson focuses on three attributes of Christ’s role: His living nature, his gift of the resurrection to all of us, and his atonement. Fortunately, this simplifies finding poems that match the message. As a people, we have not neglected Christ in our poetry. And I’m pleased to point out that the poems for this week are likely not poems that most readers have seen before.… Read More
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3 responses
Note: This was in the queue before I realized that it was falling on General Conference weekend, so it’s not in response to anything said over the pulpit. I recently read an account of the three great medieval Jewish-Catholic disputations (Judaism on Trial, McCoby). These were debates arranged by the Christian authorities where the top rabbinical scholars were pitted against typically former Jewish, now Christian theology scholars. They were conducted under some duress by the Jewish community, who knew that a misplaced phrase could lead to a pogrom or expulsion for their community, and were constantly trying to thread the… Read More
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5 responses
One observation about Brigham Young—particularly when it comes to his most controversial ideas, like the Adam-God teachings—is that he tended to take ideas from Joseph Smith and then amplify them. The priesthood and temple ban on individuals with black African ancestry, for example, can be seen as an expansion of things Joseph Smith accepted and taught as explanations for slavery, some of which was reflected in the Book of Abraham. Plural marriage originated with Joseph Smith and was stabilized and expanded under Young’s leadership. The Adam God teachings were an amplification of the role Adam held in Joseph Smith’s thought,… Read More
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3 responses
First off, apologies for all the AI posts, but the big AI players do this thing where they drop their latest products right next to each other to try to steal the news cycles from each other, so AI alternates between droughts and floods. So on that note, the other big news besides the resolution of the character consistency problem in AI-generated images is that Google’s Gemini 2.5 has jumped ahead of the other models on the benchmarks. Among other things I won’t go into, this is interesting because Gemini can output a very large amount of text. Before, the… Read More
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BYU published a few books late last year in connection with the Doctrine and Covenants. Among these is The Voice of the Lord: Exploring the Doctrine and Covenants, edited by Alexander L. Baugh. The book is a collection of essays previously published by BYU in a variety of forums (Sydney Sperry symposium publications, Religious Educator issues, BYU RSC books, etc.) with the goal of serving as “an additional resource for individuals to enrich and enhance their own personal study and their appreciation for the teachings, doctrines, and principles in Doctrine and Covenants” (p. ix). Read More
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7 responses
Hahne, Madeleine Ary. “Factors Influencing Climate Change Beliefs among American Latter-Day Saints.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 29, no. 1 (2025): 19-48. Read More
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A while ago, I published a series of posts, “Making Sense of Prophecies,” that connected my academic research to the prophecy of “Lutius Gratiano.” (You know the one: “The old true gospel and the powers thereof are lost….”) Then the editor of the Journal of Mormon History suggested the topic might work as an article. Read More
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Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Latter-day Saint Thought, Poetry, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
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For a lesson titled “Declare My Gospel”, the individual sections don’t seem to focus as much on missionary work as you would think. Instead, the missions discussed are more like the statement often attributed to St. Francis, “Preach the gospel. If necessary use words.” Of course, the problem with preaching through actions, even though they are more powerful than words, is that actions are even more liable to be misinterpreted than words are. In this sense, actions are more like poetry than sermons, because they can be interpreted in many ways. By preaching ‘slant’ — that is, from an unusual… Read More
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4 responses
So I wanted to wrap up a few more thoughts I mentioned in my last post, but at the request of the TS bloggers, I put them over at the Juvenile Instructor. So you can check them out over there. One on BH Roberts’s problematic claims of Platonism corrupting Christianity, another noting problems with Stephen Webb talking about that issue, and finally one highlighting the endowment as indicative that JS was seeking to restore what he believed was LOST to the Bible, rather than focusing on biblical practice itself. Greek mystery rites were very important to the concept of the… Read More
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12 responses
The New Testament is basically contradictory about the divine nature of Christ. On one hand Christ clearly talks to God as a separate being and identifies his will as being separate from God’s (Luke 22:42), but elsewhere he refers to himself as the Father in a very literal, I-am-physically-the-same sense (John 14:8-14). And then we have the issue with the fact that two divine beings (if we assume that Christ is both divine and a distinct person from God)=polytheism. So in the end your take on the Trinity or godhead comes down to which bullet you are going to bite.… Read More
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2 responses
People are probably going to bring up the Confessing Church frequently, so it’s best to get some things straight at the outset. Read More
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13 responses
When I was on my mission, there were a few hot commodities on the book market that most of the missionaries wanted to get their hands on. Foremost among them were Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith and Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, with bookstores in Nauvoo, Illinois being the location in my mission where missionaries could find these books. I picked up both books there while I was serving in the Nauvoo Stake, though later that same day the mission president explicitly banned Rough Stone Rolling and had his brother-in-law come as a visiting seventy to reinforce the ban. I didn’t… Read More
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10 responses
For what seemed like forever the moat protecting the jobs of illustrators from AI was the fact that it was hard to nail down consistent characters. You could maybe, with clever prompting, get one frame to kind of look like the other, but it didn’t really work, which is why a lot of early AI-storyboard uses were for stories that didn’t require a lot of scenic or character consistency (like my Midjourney edition of the creation story). Well, that moat has now been bridged. Both Google Gemini and Chat-GPT have more or less resolved the character consistency issue in the… Read More
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6 responses
I love finding out about key people in the history of the Church of whom I was previously unaware. Signature Books’s latest entry in its Brief Mormon Lives project, Eduardo Balderas: Father of Church Translation, 1907–1989, by Ignacio M. Garcia, is a great example of this. Read More
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Come Follow Me Currculum, Doctrine and Covenants, Language and Literature, Music and Poetry, Poetry, SS Lesson – Doctrine and Covenants
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The concept of gathering maybe one of the most-changed concepts in LDS belief. In D&C 29 the call to be “gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land” clearly refers to a physical gathering, where members of the church lived near each other. Later the number of places of gathering increased, and each place was called a ‘Stake.’ More recently, esp. beginning in the 20th Century, the concept of gathering became a spiritual idea—a gathering of people who have the same connection to God. Under this new definition each member ‘gathers’ by being baptized and making commitments,… Read More
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12 responses
Book of Mormon in Elvish per Scripture Central In terms of translating sacred scripture, we have nothing on the Protestants. One of the go-to sources for describing and cataloging languages, the publication Ethnologue, was originally started (and is still used, I believe) as a tool to help Evangelical Christians record which languages still needed Bible translations. A question I’ve had in the back in my mind for a while is if we’ll ever get to a point of saturation with scriptural translations, where we’ll basically have translations for all major languages outside of some uncontacted Papua New Guinean tribe and… Read More
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The reading associated with this week in “Come, Follow Me” includes section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the revelation addressed to Emma Hale Smith. Luckily, the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk published an interview with Robin Jensen on that very subject, including a great discussion about how the revelations were a collaborative process. What follows here is a copost to that interview. Read More
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15 responses
What does it mean to abstain from food polluted by idols? It’s one of the more pressing questions that we face today. Read More
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5 responses
I don’t consider myself a terribly spiritual person. This isn’t as self-deprecating as it sounds, in part because although we tend to conflate “spiritual” with “righteous” or “good” they’re technically distinct concepts. I do the right things for the most part and my heart is in the right place, but I don’t have that kind of intense, interpersonal day-to-day interaction with God that some people have. Some of this is a function of effort, but I’m convinced that some people were simply just born with that particular gift. So on that note I was going to make my way through… Read More
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The Utah War is a subject of ongoing interest in the history of Utah and the years leading up to the American Civil War in the United States. As a Latter-day Saint who was raised in Utah, I’ve generally been introduced to the perspective of the Latter-day Saints rather than the rest of the nation. In University of Nebraska Press’s publication of On the Overland Trails with William Clark: A Teamster’s Utah War, 1857-1858, ed. William P. MacKinnon and Kenneth L. Alford, however, I gained a deeper understanding of the experiences and views of the other side of the conflict. The… Read More
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It’s hard to argue with the phrase “all things must be done in order.” For most rational people, doing things in order is important. But, what exactly do we mean by ‘order’? Whose order? Does the order need to be torn up sometimes? Order suggests the arrangements and procedures that support society and our institutions. In a church, where these structures are believed to have been established by God, doing things in order is in a sense following the commandments. And in a church that purports to be a restoration of the church established by Christ, we assume that the… Read More
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3 responses
The Church recently announced that “The southwest corner of Temple Square has reopened to the public. Landscaping is still underway, but visitors can enjoy seeing three newly restored monuments.” As I have walked into the Tabernacle for rehearsals of the Bells at Temple Square each week, I have been a bit sad to see that those monuments do not include my favorite one (and a companion as a bell at Temple Square), the Relief Society Memorial Campanile. Often referred to as the Nauvoo Bell, the bell in the Campanile has a fascinating history that doesn’t actually include Nauvoo. Read More