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22 responses
I’ve been thinking about the issue of race in the Church (and the history of the temple and priesthood ban in particular) a lot lately. As part of that thinking, I am working on a series of posts wrestling with the oft-proposed idea of an apology for the ban, but I did have something I wanted to share as a middle of the road approach before I get into the more in-depth discussions. One thing that could be done to help address the issue of both historical and ongoing racism within the Church would be to publicize a brief document… Read More
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6 responses
Thinking of the Book of Mormon as the result of a series of textual accretions and combinations might help make sense of how curiously overdetermined the account of Nephite origins is. Read More
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15 responses
I wrote this in over three years ago in response to a call for personal essays on LDS single experiences; alas, it was declined primarily for a lack of anecdotes. It’s not something I would necessarily write today and is longer than a normal blog post. Nevertheless, it’s still a perspective that I rarely see, so I wanted to make it available somewhere. Please don’t take issue with my use of “Mormon.” I wrote this before Pres. Nelson was even Church president and the word “Mormon” is essential to the content of the essay. If it grates against you, please… Read More
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34 responses
This is a comment and reflection on David Bednar’s speech on corona and religious freedom, to be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGU7GG5t6Ek Of course religious freedom is an important value in human civilization, and, yes, of course it has to be defended, David Bednar, of the Twelve, was completely right in taking up that issue, especially in the week devoted to that principle. The United States were founded on it, and the first colonists—after the Amerindians and some loads of ‘boat refugees’ from the Middle East—fled Europe just because the lack of it. Bednar’s recent discourse on TV was a warm-but-stern plea… Read More
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4 responses
Today marks the 176th anniversary of the day that Joseph Smith died in an untimely fashion. As I’ve been pondering on what his legacy means to me personally, I wanted to write about three topics that were central to Joseph Smith’s ministry, at least according to his own words. As far as I am aware from the records I have searched through, he only used the term “fundamental principle” to describe aspects of our religion on three occasions. The first was in 1838, when he wrote that the “the fundamental principles of our religion” were focused on the Atonement of… Read More
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4 responses
Is philological deliberation useful for studying the Book of Mormon? Is it even permitted? Read More
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4 responses
I finally achieved a long-term goal of mine. For years, I’ve been trying to talk my wife into going out on a Church History pilgrimage, with the Kirtland Temple being one of the highlights of the trip we’ve been talking about, but it hasn’t happened until now. Well, it kind of happened, anyway. You see, a couple days ago, I took a tour of the Kirtland Temple from the comfort of my basement via Zoom. As part of the Community of Christ’s response to the current pandemic, the Kirtland Temple has remained closed to in-person visitors, but they have started… Read More
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2 responses
Why is 3 Nephi, which records the central event in the history of Nephite salvation and destruction, located between Helaman and 4 Nephi? Read More
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41 responses
One of my favorite episodes of the science fiction TV series Firefly is the “Jaynestown” episode. In it, a self-serving mercenary of questionable moral character ends up visiting a planet he has been to before. In the past, he’d attempted to rob the local aristocrat, but in the process of making a get-away, he had to jettison the money, dropping it over a village of oppressed laborers in the process. The villagers didn’t know, however, that it was an accident or that Jayne had fully intended to keep the money for himself rather than sharing it with them, so by… Read More
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If you trace the history of a text from earlier manuscripts to later ones, it’s not unusual for the text to be extended in various ways. Read More
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21 responses
I remember talking to an atheist on the riverfront walk in Dubuque, Iowa one day while serving my mission. He told my companion and me that he couldn’t believe in God after some of the things he had seen, and went on to describe (in a fair amount of gruesome detail) visiting a Catholic church in South America in the aftermath of an attack by a militant group of some sort and seeing the mutilated bodies of the Christians laying scattered about. If God existed, he reasoned, God would have not allowed such horrific act to take place. I was… Read More
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5 responses
The material culture of Nephite literacy is the one aspect of Nephite civilization about which we have any kind of historical evidence. Read More
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12 responses
The following is a guest post from Stephen Cranny. 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 calculated the percent of people who self-identify as Latter-day Saints who are “active” (attend Church about once a week) from the early 70s to today. The estimates are a little unstable because of the small numbers involved, but suggest that “activity” has actually been increasing. The numbers are derived from the General Social Survey, a large, representative survey of the US… Read More
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8 responses
Mark Ashurst-McGee asks about the uniformity of the Golden Plates in eyewitness accounts, even though they contain both Mormon’s abridgement and Nephi’s small plates, and this is in fact genuinely weird. Read More
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8 responses
Unless someone gets lucky with a spade or a metal detector, the full extent of Mormon’s sources will remain unknown. To keep even tentative answers on the side of plausibility rather than fantasy, how we think about Mormon’s sources should be informed by any information we have about Nephite literacy and textual culture. Read More
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5 responses
The logical place for a philological approach to the Book of Mormon to begin is with Mormon, its eponymous editor, and his sources. How much did Mormon know about the Nephites, and what kind of records did he have to work with? Read More
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5 responses
When I look at recent studies of the Book of Mormon, the biggest deficit I see is the lack of instinct for philology. Read More
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2 responses
I think one of the most repeated refrains I see in comment threads in the bloggernacle is that our Church meetings generally lack the vibrancy and ability to deeply engage with the scriptures and ideas in ways that can stimulate interest and growth. As Terryl L. Givens put it in a recent interview, “one of the main reasons we’re losing people is that we’re boring them to death.”[1] The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship is one organization that is working to provide resources that provide thought-provoking discussions, deep thought, and spiritual growth to members of the Church. One… Read More
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9 responses
The Author In my childhood, I watched my evangelical classmates devour the Left Behind series, curious what a Mormon analogue would look like. Lo and behold, in 2003 Deseret Book published a novel titled The Brothers. Befitting his history as a military pilot, the author had previously focused on military techno-thrillers, and the book series to which The Brothers was a prologue — The Great and Terrible — was mostly of that genre. While it turned out that The Great and Terrible was not exactly comparable to Left Behind — it wasn’t about the end of days — The Brothers… Read More
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43 responses
At the “Be One” celebration in 2018, President Dallin H. Oaks discussed the frustration he experienced as a member of the Church before the ban on individuals of black African descent holding the priesthood or receiving saving temple ordinances was lifted. He said that he “observed the pain and frustration experienced by those who suffered these restrictions and those who criticized them and sought for reasons. I studied the reasons then being given and could not feel confirmation of the truth of any of them.” As he “witnessed the pain of black brothers and sisters,” he “longed for their relief.” … Read More
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7 responses
Imagine that when you check the news tomorrow morning you see that Russell M. Nelson has announced that he is running for the office of the President of the United States. Now imagine that later the same day, you receive a call from your bishop, and he extends a calling to you to serve as a missionary—specifically for the purpose of campaigning for President Nelson across the country. What would your thoughts be? How would you react? While the idea might seem a bit farfetched today, there was a time when Joseph Smith did start a campaign to become President… Read More
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31 responses
How we approach the scriptures affects what we see in them. In other words, our assumptions, our traditions, our cultural baggage that we carry with us as we enter the world of scriptural texts are lenses that give meaning and shape to what we find inside those scriptures. Two approaches that I would like to examine today are looking at the scriptures and the teachings of the prophets as a unified, static monolith of doctrine vs looking at them as a dynamic collection of texts written by individuals who each had their own limited view. I intend to look at… Read More
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5 responses
Last Friday, the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square released a new extended play record (EP), “When You Believe: A Night at the Movies.” I bought and downloaded the music this weekend and I have listened to it several times since then. The EP is short (totaling five tracks and about 23 minutes), but it is a lot of fun and displays a high quality of performance. My biggest complaint is that there isn’t more. One of my first thoughts with the idea of the Tabernacle Choir recording soundtrack pieces was the question of whether the choir can bring something to… Read More
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2 responses
Some years ago I learned of and became fascinated with a 1976 Venezuelan LDS novel, La Puerta Azul, o Georgina Altamirano, La Venezuelana que se convirtió en Mormona. This autobiographical novel was written by the granddaughter of the “patriarch of Meridan Letters,” Tulio Febres Cordero. It also was the first long-form Latter-day Saint literary work I knew of that was written in another language[1. There could well be others. The first non-English Mormon literary work was published in 1846, so there has been plenty of time for such works to be written]. But, although I have a copy, I haven’t yet… Read More
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34 responses
One of my favorite quotes of all time about Mormonism focuses on the concept of Zion. “Zion-building is not preparation for heaven. It is heaven, in embryo. The process of sanctifying disciples of Christ, constituting them into a community of love and harmony, does not qualify individuals for heaven; sanctification and celestial relationality are the essence of heaven. Zion, in this conception, is both an ideal and a transitional stage into the salvation toward which all Christians strive.”[1] Fiona and Terryl Givens have captured here what I find to be one of the most essential parts of my religion—the development… Read More
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13 responses
Yesterday, the Church released new guidelines about the appearance church meetinghouse. The latest in the series of Christocentric reforms during President Nelson’s tenure, the intent of the guidelines is to help “create a feeling of reverence and dignity” in the spaces that “establish the first impression and feelings that individuals receive when entering a meetinghouse.” In line with the recent strong emphasis on Jesus the Christ’s role in the Church that began with insistence on using the Church’s full name and continued with the shift from using the Angel Moroni to the Christus statue as the Church’s primary symbol, “framed… Read More
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13 responses
Think through this with me: How much art do we see through the Church or because of the Church? I’m talking about all forms of art; visual and performance, representative and symbolic, etc. and etc. What art is delivered to us by the Church? How much art is in our worship and lessons? What impact does it have? And what art do we participate in because of the Church? Read More
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6 responses
Our kwanzan cherry has started to shed its exuberant blossoms. The hues inhabit the world that exists in my mind between purple and pink. The tree can only hold those flowers aloft for a few days, maybe a week. A splash of love and color, and then they are gone. I’m standing on the park strip in front of our house, in a black-and-white mask my middle daughter bought from her favorite leotard company early in the pandemic. Read More
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82 responses
One of the most central and difficult issues of Christian theology is how to fit together a commitment to monotheism with a belief that Jesus is a divine being. While we, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have resolved some aspects of this in our own ways, we still have areas that are unclear when it comes to working out this theological knot. While I’m aware that we are looking at scriptures and doctrines that represent ideas that have evolved over time, my hope today is to muse on what we currently believe as a… Read More
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24 responses
Whereas disease, as now with COVID-19, causes death to many and harm to many more, and worsens poverty and hunger even among those it does not strike directly, and causes fear in those who await infection and its consequences, and inflicts sorrow and grief on those who lose family and beloved friends; while Jesus, in His atoning mercy Read More