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5 responses
Hyde touches on his own life and perspective for the first time. Read More
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Poetry for this week’s Come Follow Me lesson, D&C sections 64-66, addressing Forgiveness, Zion’s Ensign and Our Thoughts Read More
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5 responses
“The lack of any biography of Frank Cannon seemed a glaring gap in [Utah] annals. It was high time to tell his story.” Val Holley recently stated this during an interview with Kurt Manwaring where they discussed Frank Cannon and Holley’s recently-published biography, Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, Scoundrel (University of Utah Press, 2021). What follows here is a co-post to that interview, with quotes and some commentary. Feel free to read the full interview here. In summarizing Frank Cannon’s accomplishments, Holley stated that: Frank Cannon was Utah’s first U.S. senator after it became a state in 1896. During the 50… Read More
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Poetry for this week’s Come Follow Me lesson, D&C section 63, addressing rebelliousness and signs, but concluding that the Lord is in control Read More
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13 responses
At some point in the near future, the Missionary Training Center will likely reopen fully, and in some ways that’s unfortunate, because home MTC is good. Read More
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6 responses
Last night poet and author James Goldberg, current president of the Association for Mormon Letters (AML), gave a short but masterful Presidential address as part of the AML’s annual conference. His poetic style and urgent message is quite powerful, despite being just 12 minutes long. Please watch this and let me know what you think! I hope to post some thoughts during the week. Read More
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Poetry for this week’s Come Follow Me lesson, D&C sections 60-62, addressing missionary work and the Lord’s support for us. Read More
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9 responses
The following is Stephen Cranny’s third guest post here at Times & Seasons. Stephen Cranney is a Washington DC-based data scientist and Non-Resident Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. He has produced over 20 peer-reviewed articles and five children. I was surprised at the Church’s seeming statement (I’ll discuss why it was “seeming” later), echoed around the standard General Conference post-game analysis that half the Church in the United States was single. The surprise came from the fact that self-response surveys on religion and marital status consistently show that a solid majority of adult Latter-day Saints are married.… Read More
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The end is always a new beginning. The arrival of the first Latter-day Saints in Independence, Missouri was both an end and a beginning. They accomplished the goal of gathering to Zion, but then realized that now they had to actually build Zion—a process that has, in a variety of ways, continued ever since. For the Saints at that time, the revelations contained in D&C 58 and 59 show the process of realizing that the new beginning of Zion contained a new set of struggles, and struggles that were very different from what they expected. For us today, these sections… Read More
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4 responses
The end of the world is a pretty dramatic scene. Perhaps it is because of that drama that the idea has captured the imagination of human beings for thousands of years and continues to do so today. It is not an uncommon topic of conversation among Latter-day Saints that I have known, including the occasional discussion of dreams or visions about the End Times. These types of discussions interested Christopher Blythe, who has “always had a deep interest in apocalypticism” and felt that “much of the scholarship on Latter-day Saint last days beliefs seem to focus on official doctrine rather… Read More
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By going in order through the Doctrine and Covenants, the Come Follow Me lessons sometimes show the concerns of the Church at a particular point in time. The seven sections included in this lesson are quite varied, but all demonstrate temporal concerns — where to put all the immigrants arriving in Kirtland, how members should share what they have, how should church members fulfill the command to gather to Missouri and who should be doing the printing of Church publications. But despite these temporal concerns, in these sections there are clearly spiritual lessons which are germane to the temporal needs… Read More
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7 responses
It’s a well-known grammar joke that punctuation can save lives, since there is a difference between saying: “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and: “Let’s eat Grandma!” Punctuation and grammar do make a difference, as Oakhurst Dairy found out the hard way a few years ago. In a legal case about overtime for drivers and a state law in Maine, the debate centered on the grammar of the law, which required time-and-a-half pay for each hour worked after 40 hours, with exemptions for: The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and… Read More
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3 responses
I think this is more about foot washing than I’ve ever read anywhere before. Read More
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Poetry for this week’s Come Follow Me lesson, D&C sections 49-50, addressing marriage, identifying falsehood & edification through spiritual gifts. Read More
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2 responses
I started listening to Carol Lynn Pearson read her latest poetry collection — Finding Mother God: Poems to Heal the World — and I could not stop. And now I’m listening to it a second time. It’s vibrant and healing. I find Pearson’s words in this volume (and, in the audiobook, her delivery) irresistible. Pearson eloquently, insightfully, and powerfully captures a longing for a closer connection to a Heavenly Mother—and the promise of what that connection may bring—throughout, “so that God Herself and God Himself, who were always one, can join on earth to bless the confused billions” (from “Message… Read More
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9 responses
I served my mission in the Midwestern United States, and we had a decent amount of contact with groups, such as the Pentecostals, who were enthusiastic about charismatic gifts of the Spirit. I remember on one occasion, that a missionary serving in the same district approached me about an investigator they she been working with who believed that speaking in tongues (in the sense of spouting out what sounded like gibberish while under the power of the Holy Spirit) was a very important part of Christianity and a sign that God was involved in a Church. The missionary, on the… Read More
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Poetry for this week’s Come Follow Me lesson, D&C sections 46-48, addressing being welcoming, spiritual gifts, keeping a history and sharing the lands we own. Read More
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5 responses
Was I comfortable with the topic? the prospective client on the other end of the video call wanted to know. Read More
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Within the Book of Mormon, 3rd and 4th Nephi are arguably some of the most important portions of the book, with their focus on the in-person ministry of Jesus Christ among the children of Lehi and what followed because of that ministry. Daniel Becerra, author of the book 3rd, 4th Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction, recently sat down with Kurt Manwaring to share some of his insights from the process of writing his theological introduction to the books. What follows here is a co-post to the interview, with excerpts and some discussion, but if you want to read the full… Read More
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Article 13 On prayer and on the manner of worship. Prayer is one of the primary obligations of the Christian, and he is reliant on it for any consideration that might stir his ambition or instill it in him, for it is just as necessary for his growth and thriving as rain is for the fields. Read More
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Poetry for this week’s Come Follow Me lesson, D&C section 45, addressing the raising of gospel standards and establishing Zion. Read More
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6 responses
As a missionary, I occasionally found myself in the uncomfortable experience of listening to my companions talking about how proud they were to be part of a Church where every calling is performed on a voluntary basis, with no compensation—from the top leaders on down to the local level. My discomfort was caused because, in general, the missionaries in question were not aware that general authorities do receive a stipend—something that Church members became more aware of in light of the 2017 MormonLeaks documents, which indicated that the living stipend for Church leaders was up in triple-digit figures.[1] There are… Read More
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3 responses
“I have many more things I could like to write but have not time.” Thus wrote Emma Smith in a letter to her husband, Joseph Smith. I wish she did have the time! Jennifer Reeder’s biography of Emma Smith — First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith — left me wanting even more of Emma’s words. Emma Smith was a remarkable woman, and Reeder clearly feels a deep affection for her subject, despite their chronological separation of roughly one and a half centuries. Reeder isn’t blind to Emma’s flaws, but neither does she judge. Despite the fact that Emma… Read More
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6 responses
Orson Hyde blazes the trail for every Temple and Family History consultant ever since. Read More
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Poetry for this week’s Come Follow Me lesson, D&C sections 41-44, addressing the law, consecration for supporting the poor, and the role of revelation. Read More
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4 responses
What did Joseph Smith think? What was he like as a person? Questions like these are interesting to think about and are important considerations when you’re a part of a religion that draws so heavily on one person’s writings and ministry for its foundation. In a recent interview with Kurt Manwaring, R. Eric Smith, Matthew C. Godfrey, and Matthew J. Grow discussed some of their insights into Joseph Smith’s mind and life gained through both their work with the Joseph Smith Papers Project and in editing the recently-published Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith’s Life and Character (Deseret Book,… Read More
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If I were writing about the benefits of lay clergy in a missionary tract, I would probably spend less time on dusting one’s feet. Read More
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The revelations we are studying this week continue with themes found in revelations from throughout 1830, such as an imminent Second Coming and the gathering, but also set up an expectation for an endowment of power that would be an important theme for much of the remainder of Joseph Smith’s ministry. After the conversion of a significant number of people in Kirtland and the subsequent arrival of Sidney Rigdon and Edward Partridge in New York to meet Joseph Smith in December 1830, a set of revelations were recorded that indicated that the headquarters of the Church should shift to Ohio… Read More
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Poems about the Gathering, preparation in order to ally our fears, and the cares of the world, to accompany the Come Follow Me lesson for April 12 to 18. Read More
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6 responses
The teachings are familiar, but the images are surprising. Read More