Search results for: “A Mormon Image”
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A Mormon Image: A Photograph of Joseph?
Some believe that this image is a photograph of the Prophet Joseph Smith. If they are right, it is the only known photographic image of Joseph . . .
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A Mormon Image: C.C.A. Christiansen
Since blogs seem to thrive on regular features, I have decided to start one here at T&S. Because my father is an art historian and a curator at the Museum of Church History and Art, I have always been interested in the images and art that Mormonism has produced. Thus, I will begin regularlly posting…
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Book Review: The Mormon Image in the American Mind
J. B. Haws, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception, Oxford University Press.
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Book Review: Head Start with the Book of Mormon
When I think about the curricula available to evangelical homeschoolers, I instantly become guilty of several of the deadly sins. Oh, if I were a young earth creationist, the riches that would be mine!
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Mormon Images: Office Decor and the Place of Mormonism in American History
A few weels ago I finished my stint at the public trough and left the service of the federal courts. I know work for the law firm of Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood in Washington, DC. The identity of the firm is significant only because this is the firm (and office) where Rex E. Lee…
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Mormon Images
There is a strange schizophrenia about popular images of Mormons. On one hand, we get stereotyped as shinny, well-scrubbed, conservative, paragons of middle American virtues circa 1955. On the other hand, we get stereotyped as dangerous, homicidal, polygamist fanatics. As Gordon points out in his post the latter stereotype popped up recently in Law &…
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Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird
In honor of Anthropic’s collaboration with the Vatican, a ChatGPT-generated image of Dario Amodei eating a Filet-O-Fish, IYKYK. As a group Latter-day Saints have this psychological drive for the ever-elusive mainstream acceptance. We’re generally known for being nice and orderly, if a little weird and on the wrong side of the sociocultural elites. We have…
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From the Archives: Letters to a Mormon Pioneer
Whenever you produce a book, you will inevitably reach a point where you have to edit out something dear to you, but which isn’t going to be as important to someone else or the book as a whole. Sometimes referred to as “kill your darlings,” it’s a difficult process. I faced it while writing A…
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A Review: Mormon Barrio: Latino Belonging in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues its trajectory as a global faith, the specific experiences of its diverse subcultures become increasingly vital to our collective self-understanding. For decades, the history of Latino and Latina Saints in the United States has remained a relatively quiet corner of Mormon Studies, addressed in fragments…
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Latest AI Updates: “Mormon Trail,” a Graphic Novel of Mormon/Moroni, and 3 Nephi on Gold Plates.
OpenAI just came out with their latest stepwise improvement, so I went ahead and cancelled my Gemini subscription and got a ChatGPT one (that’s not saying I’ll stay loyal, I’ll probably switch back at some point when Google pulls ahead). To give you a sense of where we’re at right now, a few days ago…
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A Review: 40 Questions About Mormonism
Understanding the perspectives of those outside our faith tradition is an essential exercise for any Latter-day Saint seeking to navigate the broader religious landscape. For decades, much of the literature written by traditional Christians about the Restoration felt less like a conversation and more like a caricature. However, in recent years, a more rigorous and…
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The Book of Mormon Witnesses, The Miracle of the Sun, and Other Historically Plausible Miracles
Many stories of miracles are reasonably attributable to wishful thinking, bad record keeping, friend-of-a-friend rumors, or some kind of neurosis or hallucination. However, there are a number of historical episodes that meet the standard criterion for historical plausibility. Multiple witnesses, contemporaneous accounts, disinterested observers. Popular secular Substacker Astral Codex Ten referred to the Fatima Miracle…
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A Review: Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite
The study of race and Indigeneity within the Restoration has undergone a significant transformation in the last decade. If works by Matthew L. Harris and others have mapped the theological and political struggles of Black Saints, Elise Boxer’s Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025) performs an equally vital—though still decidedly…
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The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel
As of about a month or so ago, GPT 5.2 Pro is starting to autonomously solve previously unsolved mathematical “Erdos” problems (a famous set of unsolved problems proposed by arguably-smartest-man-of-all-time Paul Erdos). We’re officially at the point where it can solve math problems we haven’t been able to. However, my understanding is that these are…
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Mormon Studies Books in 2026
Building on the collection of links about Latter-day Saint books for last year (Mormon Studies Books in 2025), here is the collection of books I’ve been able to find out about for 2026. I will continue to update this page throughout the year, as reviews, interviews, and podcasts become available for the books and other…
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Mormon Austins: Blue Islands and Swing Precincts Across the Mormon Corridor
VoteHub just came out with what is probably the best political data visualization dashboard I’ve seen. It allows you to dive into the precinct level results, and shades it by margins and not just who won, so we can literally see the geographic gradients as we shift from more Democrat areas to more Republican areas.…
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Manufacturing Mormon Types from Noise: A Statistical Reality Check on Clustering Claims in Religious Survey Data
Guest post by Josh Coates. Josh studied Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is the Executive Director of the B. H. Roberts Foundation. A recent report boldly declares that the “Devout No Longer Define Mormonism. Devout Traditionalists, once two-thirds of the LDS population, are now a minority” based on the Pew Religious Landscape…
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What’s the Best Work in “Mormon Cinema”? The Rotten Tomatoes Verdict
For the most part the Rotten Tomatoes score for a movie is a reasonably good heuristic for quality. In terms of my own tastes, if it scores really high on both critic and user rating it’s typically a solid film. There are of some biases of course. IMHO movies in the older canon have inflated…
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The Sound of Mormonism: A Media History of Latter-Day Saints: A Review
A few years back, Jared Farmer gave an interesting lecture in Logan, Utah for the annual Arrington Mormon History Lecture series called “Music & the Unspoken Truth,” which focused on the relationship between sound, religion and place, with a particular focus on Music & the Spoken Word. Since then, he has expanded the text of…
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Tidbits from Early Church Primary Sources: Mormonism Unvailed
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…
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The Next Generation of AI Lit: 5-7K Word AI Mormon Horror Short Stories
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…
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When are We “Done” with Book of Mormon Translations?
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…
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The New Ex-Mormons
We just returned from our yearly-ish pilgrimage to Utah. Trips to Utah are always an opportunity to stick my finger in the air to get a more subjective, qualitative sense of things are going in the Church. Of course, Utah does not equal the Church in so many ways, but it does act as a…
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Atonement in the Book of Mormon
The Atonement of Jesus Christ is central to our faith and also central to the message of the Book of Mormon. What exactly, however, does the Book of Mormon say about the Atonement of Jesus Christ? In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Nick Frederick discussed Atonement in the…
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The Curious Role of the Book of Mormon Witnesses in Evangelical Debates about the Resurrection
While we Latter-day Saints have our apologists and reason-based arguments for faith and defenses against attacks on the faith, those are, by our own admission, to help create a place for faith or respond to criticisms that attack that faith, we are careful to formally base our religious epistemology in the numinous, personal spiritual experience. …
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2024 Call For Library Research Fellows In Mormon Studies, University of Virginia
The University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies Program is pleased to announce the inaugural award of the Aileen H. and Hal M. Clyde Research Fellowship in Mormon Studies and Gender. For the year 2024, as many as two fellowships of $2,500 will be awarded for research in the Gregory A. Prince Collection related to Mormonism and…
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 21: Maya
As the Church became strongly established in Mexico, it spread from the historic epicenters in Mexico City and the northern colonies to reach across the full country—including among the Maya peoples of southern Mexico.
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 20: Stakes and Temples
The Third Convention was reunited to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in part due to the observation that stakes with local leadership and local temples would come only as the schism healed and the Church continued to become stronger in Mexico. It took some time, but stakes and temples did come.
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Mormonism in Mexico, Part 19: The Third Convention
Events conspired to create a schism in the Church in Mexico, but eventually the Third Convention group that had split reunited with the Church.