5 years ago we published one of my favorite “12 Questions” posts, in which Royal Skousen discussed in some depth what he has learned from his extensive work on the earliest editions of the Book of Mormon. His book, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, is being published in September by Yale University Press (and yes, you can order it at Amazon right now). To mark this milestone, Royal was kind enough to update his “12 questions” discussion, which we have posted below, for the benefit of those who did not catch it the first time. Enjoy!
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Live(ish)-blogging Sunstone, Day 2
I missed out on the morning, because I had to finish grading papers. I’m now at D’Arcy’s session on virginity. I’m not true live-blogging it, I’ll post some summary notes as we go along.
Notes From All Over For Week Ended July 25
Comment here on the Notes From All Over for the past week.
Divide? Maybe not so much — Part 2
(See my disclaimer in Part 1 concerning the title) So, let’s discuss some of the less-acknowledged ways Mormons and evangelicals are alike. First we’ll start with things in evangelical thought which bear an unexpected resemblance to LDS thought.
The participatory nature of salvation for the dead
Last Sunday, I taught the EQ lesson on salvation for the dead. We covered all of the usual ground: Joseph Smith’s personal sadness at Alvin’s funeral where the preacher informs the family that Alvin is going to Hell; the various statements critical of the then-popular idea among New England Protestants that the unbaptized would be condemned en masse (Jack, I believe that many modern Protestant faiths give much more flexibility on this concept — is that correct?); the shoemaker story designed to highlight the artificial line between the two groups; and so on. I’ve heard all of this a dozen times in Sunday school or EQ. But from there, I nudged the class in a different direction, an idea that I had been wondering about. Given that church members (1) reject the idea of damnation for the untaught, and (2) believe that baptism is necessary for salvation, it is clear that some form of work-around is necessary. But is there any reason why the work-around should take the form that it does?
12 Questions for Marvin Perkins, Part Three
Here is Part Three of our 12 Questions with Marvin Perkins, comprised of Brother Perkins’ responses to our next five questions. See Parts One, Two, and Four for our introduction of Brother Perkins and his responses to our other questions.
Notes From All Over — for Week Ended 2 May
Comment here on the Notes From All Over for the past week.
Notes from All Over thru April 25th – Comments
Here’s the place to make your comments on our ‘Notes from All Over’ for last week.
The Salamander Letter in a nutshell
So, what is this scary Salamander Letter that the church is hiding from everybody?
Revelation 1:12-20
Previous post here
Just Pretend It Already Has 26 Comments . . .
. . . because this may be the longest post you’ll read this year. (I want a Niblet!!) Randy wanted me (and Nate) to explore the issue of presiding a little more on the temple thread, but some yahoo cut off comments, so Randy emailed me.
Sunday School Lesson 24
Lesson 24: Doctrine and Covenants 26, 28, 43:1-7, 50, 52:14-19
12 Questions for Terryl Givens
Professor Terryl Givens–who has another book out within the last month, The Latter-day Saint Experience in America (Greenwood Press)–has been kind enough to answer twelve questions for us.
Christmas Music Geekery, Part II–Hodie and Messiah
Yesterday I mentioned Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘Hodie’, but did not rhapsodize about it. Allow me to rhapsodize:
12 Answers from Royal Skousen
Professor Royal Skousen has gone far beyond what we asked of him and provided a full and fascinating response to our twelve questions.
12 Answers! for Ken Jennings, part two
Here’s the second half of our 12 Questions with Ken Jennings. (Click here for part one.) We thank Ken for participating in our 12 Questions feature, especially for his smart (but delicate) responses to the obnoxious, smart-aleck questions that seem to come with the territory. .
Sunday School Lesson 29
Lesson 29: Alma 36-39 Alma 35:15-16 explains why Alma says the things in these chapters to his sons, Helaman, Shiblon, and Corianton: because he grieved for the hardness of the hearts of the people to whom he and others had been sent as missionaries. (See Alma 31:6-7.) How does that explain what he says, especially since one of the three sons to whom he speaks, Helaman, was not part of that mission?
Sunday School Lesson 20
Lesson 20: Mosiah 25-28; Alma 36 Warning: the materials for this lesson may be the longest I’ve produced so far. As always of course, they are intended only to help you think about the material. No lesson could cover all of the significant ideas and questions that come up in these chapters. The first part of the materials is a chronology created by Arthur Bassett. I post that chronology in response to Tom Johnson’s note (here) that I was not clear about the chronological relation between Mosiah and Alma in the materials for Lesson 19.
Hello, Out There!
Early this morning, our Site Meter rolled over the 20,000 visitor mark. Kaimi noted the first 10,000 five weeks ago, on January 22. That first 10,000 required nine weeks of blogging. Based on traffic this week — which passed 400 visitors per day for the first time on Wednesday — we will reach the next 10,000 sometime well before the end of March. Although I rarely purport to speak for all of the bloggers on this site, I think that I can safely venture the following: we all appreciate the opportunity to engage in this forum, and express thanks to our visitors, particularly those who take the time to share insights about Mormonism. Keep coming back, and tell your friends!
How Big is Joseph Smith Polygamy Denialism in the Church? Insights from the B.H. Roberts Foundation’s Current and Former Latter-day Saint Survey
Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here. The people who do believe that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy fall into two camps. The first is those who simply do not know. Presumably because the practice wasn’t public until Brigham Young’s day, and because the Nauvoo practice is much more sparsely documented, Brigham Young, and not Joseph Smith, became the icon of polygamy. Although people more familiar with official Church history (or even a careful reading of D&C 132) would have also known about Joseph Smith’s plural wives, anecdotally there are cases of people simply not being aware because the emphasis was always on the better documented Utah-era polygamy. (And although the 20th century Church did not emphasize Joseph’s plural marriages, the Church did not hide it; and in the late 19th century it went out of its way to gather invaluable primary source, first-hand evidence of his plural marriages and publicize them in order to stick it to the RLDS during the Temple Lot trial.) And so while the Church is publishing more content on Joseph Smith’s plural marriages (and there’s just more content available now overall, with perhaps the summum of this being Brian Hales’ and Don Bradley’s excellent multi-volume work and website on…
Pascal’s Wager and the Restored Gospel
Hell to Heaven We Latter-day Saints hold to a rather benign form of hell. I think this a feature, with traditional hell being the ultimate bug. However, one implication of our benign afterlife of second chances is that arguably this-worldly religious decisions have less “import.” If your decision to not be baptized leads to you burning in traditional hell for all eternity, that’s different then if you spend some time in spiritual prison while you are instructed and spiritually sensitized in preparation for receiving eternal ordinances. While the Latter-day Saint framework makes more sense to me in terms of mercy and reason, it does attenuate Pascal’s Wager for us. (Pascal’s Wager is the idea that everybody should be a religious believer because the cost of being wrong [hell] is eternally greater than the cost of being wrong in a universe without God). Pascal’s Wager smells funny and smacks of spiritual blackmail, but logically it seems pretty airtight. As a child I remember brooding on the issue before I ran across it formally (in saying this I’m not claiming I’m some Pascal–I’d wager many if not most thought experiments or theoretical concepts have been thought up by many random children before some 19th century white guy was the first one to put it in a book in a particular part of the world and have the concept forever attached to his name. Besides, Pascal is Pascal for much more than this…
Latter-day Saint Book Review: Seizing Power, The Strategic Logic of Military Coups
Seizing Power by political scientist Naunihal Singh is the preeminent scholarly work on coups d’etat. In it, Singh pairs in-depth investigations of coup attempts in Africa and Russia with a quantitative analysis of correlates of successful coups worldwide. He finds that coups can largely be characterized as coordination games, where military commanders often join the side that they think will win. If they choose correctly their power increases, if they choose wrongly they will probably be executed or imprisoned, so perception becomes everything and both sides of a coup have an incentive to exaggerate their level of support within the state apparatus. This is all fascinating but, to paraphrase Elder Uchtdorf, “what does this have to do with the Church?” Below are several episodes in Church history where the themes discussed in Singh’s work were at play. As a disclaimer, I am NOT comparing Spencer W. Kimball or (most of) the others in this list to military coup leaders, and I do not want to overdraw the comparison between the Church and an unstable government. Rather, the point here is the principles involved even if the contexts are vastly different. Attempted Take Over of the Kirtland Temple With that disclaimer, this episode is the one that could probably be accurately described as an attempted coup. During the Kirtland Safety Society debacle, The Martin Harris/Waren Parish splinter group literally tried to occupy the Kirtland temple with weapons. Singh discusses how…
The Angel and the Hermit, and church governance
The Gesta Romanorum, a medieval collection of moralizing stories, includes the tale of a hermit who despaired at the world’s injustice and resolved to abandon his calling.
Mercy, kindness, and caring – a Sunday Sermon
At one point in his ministry, “an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.” He wanted to see what Jesus would answer, asking him: “Teacher … what must I do to inherit eternal life?” To this, Jesus responded with a question of his own: “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” As an expert in the Law of Moses, the lawyer quoted from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, saying: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” To this, Jesus responded: “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” The lawyer wasn’t fully satisfied with the answer, however, and “wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” Rather than responding with a question, this time Jesus responded with a parable: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and took off, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came upon him, and when he saw him he was moved with…
Susa and Alma’s Divorce
In Saints, volume 2, one of the key players was Susa Young Gates. A prominent daughter of Brigham Young who went on to do a lot of notable activities herself, Susa is a relatively well-known figure in Latter-day Saint history. One aspect of her story that received attention in Saints was Susa Young Gates’ divorce with Alma Dunford. The was an important part of both of their life stories, and an aspect that was the focus of a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk with Lisa Olsen Tait. What follows here is a co-post to the interview (a shorter post with excerpts and some discussion). One of the great difficulties in talking about any divorce is that they affect many parties and involve many different factors. To make matters more difficult in this case, as Lisa Olsen Tait observed, “we have to remember that in those days, divorce was an adversarial process—one party had to file a complaint against the other party establishing grounds for divorce. There was no such thing as ‘no-fault’ divorce.” It can also be difficult to write about situations that lead to divorces when domestic abuse is involved, as was the case for Susa and Alma. People are complicated and have many aspects in their lives to consider, but abuse is also abhorrent and should not be excused. With all of that in mind, Tait wrote that she recently published a study of the…
Latter-day Saint Book Report on “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara”
In 1857 officials raided a home in the Jewish ghetto in Bologna, Italy and forcefully removed a 6-year old child based on the testimony of a servant that he had been baptized as an infant and was, therefore, Christian. At the time Bologna was under the direct rule of the Pope (back in the day the Pope ruled over a chunk of Italy as a sovereign). While Catholic canon law stipulated severe penalties for baptizing a Jewish child without the consent of their parents, once a baptism did take place it was considered valid, and sometimes that child was removed to be raised in a Christian home or religious house. Jewish children being abducted because of surreptitious baptisms had happened before, but this particular case happened after a tipping point in small-l liberal sentiment in Europe, and became exhibit A for the perception that the Church was increasingly out of touch. A diplomatic storm arose as emperors, prime ministers, and the newly liberated European Jewish community all put immense pressure on the Vatican to release the child back to his parents. However, Pope Pius IX wouldn’t budge because of his sincere religious interpretation, and there’s some evidence that the capture of this Jewish boy was one of several straws that broke the camel’s back, eventually leading to the invasion of the Papal States and the destruction of the Pope’s temporal power in Italy. On a personal level, Edgardo was adopted…
Siring Gods
In my last post I noted that a paper I wrote on pre-Utah fertility rhetoric and theology for the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar was no longer available on their website, and that this was discouraging because I hadn’t kept a final copy because I assumed it would always be available on their site. After scrounging around my email I found what I think is a final copy, so I am posting it here so that it has some online presence. It is meant to be a prototype first chapter for a book on Latter-day Saint fertility norms, theology, behavior, and rhetoric that I’ll probably get to sometime after I retire. It was written a while ago now, so forgive the occasionally cringe academic-ese writing. Siring Gods: The history of Mormon fertility patterns and theology Chapter 1: Then shall they be Gods, for they have no end: The roots of Mormon fertility theology and the beginning of polygyny. Pre-Nauvoo The pre-Nauvoo LDS Church was theologically conventional relative to its later manifestation. During their time in New York (1830-1831), Ohio, (1831-1838) and Missouri (1838) Mormons had particular beliefs about the theological disputes of the day such as the gifts of the spirit or baptism by immersion, but these positions were within the realm of acceptable variation for the general religious milieu of the day (with a few obvious exceptions that helped contribute to tensions with the surrounding environment such as a new line…
Anti-“Utah Mormon” Bigotry
A few scattered thoughts on both anti-“Utah Mormon” and anti-Latter-day Saint bias in general. (Sorry to mix the two but they are often synonymous and I don’t want to write two posts.) I still remember the first time I met a socially awkward non-Utahn, and my surprise at my surprise. I realized that I had been conditioned to see Utah Mormons as weirdos, and non-Utah Mormons as living some Seinfeld-esque, fun life filled with attractive, erudite, and witty friends and coworkers. Of course, I’m hard pressed to think of a time when that was said explicitly, but growing up in Utah I had realized that the thousands of little slights about Utah had built up. There is a double standard on the part of some people who would never be caught dead critiquing, say, New York Jews, but feel absolutely no compunction about saying rather cutting things about Utah Mormons. I occasionally see a hesitancy by some inside the Church to push back against anti-Latter-day Saint sentiment in cases where they feel the antipathy comes from our purportedly backwards social history. If you believe that you need to be consistent and grant a pass to antipathy towards other religious minority groups that don’t exactly score high on social justice issues such as religious LGBT acceptance (e.g. Muslim immigrants). Of course I don’t think one should dismiss anti-Muslim sentiment because of their beliefs on hot button social issues,…
[Spiritual Languages] The End of the Beginning
I apologize for the long gap between my last post and this one. My husband is one of those *religious scholars*, and he supervises an archaeological dig in Galilee and just had to go back after two years’ Covid hiatus. This has kept me busy at home; too busy to write, but has still given me time to think. I’ve been trying to decide the best way to end this series, but it’s been hard to know how to do it. Endings and beginnings are often the hardest, after all. There is no conceivable way that any amount of writing could begin to cover all the ways that we can experience the spirit. But that leaves us still having the problem of knowing whether what we are experiencing is actually the spirit or not. How do we know it’s not just us? This can be an important question, but underneath it is almost always one deeply problematic assumption: that something cannot be from both us and God. We have this compulsive need to make sure we firmly understand exactly where we end and God begins. Apparently there is a fixed line of demarcation and there can be no bleed over. We use terms like being a window or a door or letting go so God can take over or letting God write our story to remind ourselves of this distinction and the importance of keeping it safe from any human…
Jesus in Recent Latter-day Saint Art
At the Mormon History Association conference this weekend, Anthony Sweat shared a funny story during his presentation on “A White Jesus and a Global Church.” Apparently there were some individuals who were visiting BYU from Saudi Arabia to observe teaching at the institution. During a class that Dr. Sweat was teaching, the Saudis saw a print of the famous Del Parson Jesus the Christ painting. They asked through an interpreter who the painting was depicting. Dr. Sweat explained that it was Jesus, and the Saudis busted up laughing and started chattering. Confused, Sweat asked the interpreter what they were saying and the interpreter explained that they were laughing about Jesus being portrayed as a white American mountain man. Dr. Sweat asked them about what they thought Jesus looked like and they responded that he probably looked like them, which probably isn’t far from the truth. In his presentation, Anthony Sweat went on to discuss the history of how Jesus has been portrayed and ultimately made the point that the traditional European iconography of Jesus as European in appearance is well-established and doesn’t need to go away, but that there does need to be more diversity in depictions of Jesus available for a global church. I’m not going to rehash the whole issue of Jesus’s complexion again, but I am interested in some of the artwork that has been produced in the Church in recent years that provide a different vision…