When God became American is the novelized biography of Joseph Smith by the French author Marc Chadourne: Quand Dieu se fit Americain. Read More

Two years ago, I came within twenty-four hours of abandoning my academic career before it started. None of the applications I had sent out had gone anywhere, I had completed my degree, and my department had no money to keep me around. We packed up and got ready to drive out of town and out of academia, but we had to stay an extra day because our car was still in the shop. It had only taken so long to fix because the factory had shipped the wrong replacement part. The night before we finally left, the College of Charleston… Read More

Boston area Bloggernackers, save the date: you and your families are invited to a beach party/barbecue at my house Saturday, July 30 from mid-afternoon (2-3ish) until whenever. Dinner around 6. We have room for weekend guests, too, if anybody wants to drive up from NYC or down from Montreal, or as one intrepid bloggernaclite is doing, drive out from Idaho in a U-Haul! E-mail me (Kristine at timesandseasons dot org) for directions. Read More

My children have been taking swimming lessons. Naturally, this provides me with both motive and opportunity for asking self-indulgently angsty existential questions. Read More

It is hard not to admire Winston Churchill. Read More

There has been some recent discussion of faith-promoting stories and other Mormon folklore, including its complex relationship to factual history, the difficulty of finding an original source, and the tension that skepticism can incite. My question is: if you can prove that a faith-promoting story is false, should you tell anyone? Is there any need for a Mormon Mythbusters? This is not a hypothetical question. Read More

Cannibalism, it seems to me, is one of the unspoken issues that lurks beneath all Mormon sacrament meetings. Read More

As many of you know, BYU’s football team has been in a bit of a slump for the past three seasons. I am very encouraged, therefore, by the new coaching staff’s innovative efforts to recruit new players. Watch out, Utes! Read More

Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today. . . Yes, it’s officially my last day on the job today. On Friday, we leave town. Read More

In a comment on Gordon’s recent post, Jed Woodworth raises an interesting point. He, entirely accurately, points out that the notion that the temple is a place that most members should regularly attend is a late 20th century phenomena in Mormonism. Prior to that time, the temple, for most members, was generally a place visited once or twice in a life time, and work for the dead was largely delegated to specially called temple workers. Indeed, during the 1930s, Heber J. Grant actually hired people to do temple work on behalf of his ancestors as a kind of make-work project.… Read More

When I lived in Oregon, a member of my ward suggested a state-of-the-marriage litmus test for couples who had been married in the temple. Read More

It occurs to me that there is a politically well-connected Mormon who is eminently qualified to take Justice O’Connor’s slot on the Supreme Court. (And no, I don’t mean Orrin Hatch.) Read More

Who before 1830 was anticipating the Restoration? For many cases we like to cite, the evidence consists of quotes that have been in circulation for a century or more, and that often rest on a fairly shaky foundation. Musings of poets require much interpretation, and what deists expected was nothing like what Joseph Smith provided. Roger Williams is a more likely candidate, but the quote usually attributed to him is poorly sourced and possibly apocryphal. Are unambiguous statements and reliable bibliography too much to ask for? Like urban legends and fairy tales, apocryphal prophecies and other faith-promoting stories are useful… Read More

We saw March of the Penguins on Thursday. It was great. Read More

Recent weeks have seen stimulating (and occasionally heated) discussion of a July Ensign article on the life of Bathsheba W. Smith. The article, meticulously parsed by Justin Butterfield, omits, together with other biographical material, all references to Bathsheba Smith’s sister-wives and any reference to the polygamous families of her husband, George A. Smith. This conspicuous lacuna looks to many readers like a deliberate effort to edit the historical record, selectively striking embarrassing references to polygamy—and, in the process, variously flouting standards of historiography and simple honesty, dishonoring the memory of polygamous wives, and writing women out of Mormon history. I’m… Read More

Here is an empirical question that I don’t really know the answer to: Read More

We are commanded to mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort. And so, in the aftermath of tragedy and terror in London, we all join together in saying “I am a Londoner.” Our thoughts and prayers at this time are with the brave citizens of London and of England, and in particular with the many victims of the attack. Read More

Ed Firmage, for many years the token Mormon at the U of U law school, is an interesting apostate. Read More

A little while ago, Times & Seasons was pleased to announce that Jonathan Green–scholar, master of trivia, academic vagabond and world-class T&S commenter–had agreed to grace our blog with a guest stint. Since his initial post, however, he’s been on the move, taking his family from Charleston, South Carolina (where he had a visiting position at the College of Charleston) to Lansing, Michigan (where he will take up a visiting position at Michigan State University), with stops at Arkansas (where he and his family visited Chez Fox and we shared some nice BBQ ribs) and Illinois in between. (Yes, I… Read More

When the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake were being announced, I remember how in our priesthood meetings in Provo exciting plans were forged to turn the event into a massive missionary opportunity: we would fill the streets with members passing out copies of the Book of Mormon and taking referrals. Read More

A fascinating op-ed in the New York Times discusses the idea of “judicial activism.” The authors suggest that one measure of activism is the amount of times a judge votes to invalidate legislation passed by Congress. Using that measure, they write that: We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. Read More

Here’s a sentence I wouldn’t have expected to find in a Deseret Book: If Emerson was right that a stubborn insistence on consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then Paul’s place among the larger intellects of Western thought must be reckoned as secure. Read More

Early last year, I discussed an idea that I called “the Iago problem.” I argued that one answer to the question “why are there no Mormon Shakespeares” was that church members may lack the skill to breathe life into a truly evil character like Iago. Recently, I rethought the question. And now, I’m not sure that the Iago problem is really much of a problem. Read More