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History is a fascinating world to explore, with many twists and turns along the way as we come to understand more about the narratives we have received and how they were formed. Each generation of historians has the opportunity to try and peel back the world we live in and get at the truth of what happened in the past. A fascinating example of this was discussed in a recent 10 questions interview with Gary Boatright, the operations manager for Church historic sites. What follows here is a co-post to Kurt Manwaring’s interview—a summary with some commentary and quotes from… Read More
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3 responses
In the movie version of the popular Harry Potter series, a father-figure to the titular character tells Harry that: “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters [henchmen of the main villain]. We’ve all got both light and dark inside of us.” While a fantasy film, there is a kernel of truth in the statement—we are all complex people, with goodness and evil in each of us. Whether intentional or not, we have failings and blind spots and we fall short being the best person we could be. Sometimes it is difficult to realize that to be true… Read More
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43 responses
Before I move on from discussing the First Vision, I wanted to share something that I find exciting. Once in a while in Mormon studies journals, special volumes focus on the First Vision—such as the Spring 1969 issue of BYU Studies and a 1980 volume of the Journal of Mormon History. These volumes, along with a few other essays, books, and articles published from time to time form the backbone of the academic discussion about Joseph Smith’s earliest visionary experience. The latest volume of BYU Studies, as it turns out, is the next volume to focus on the topic of the First Vision, featuring papers… Read More
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John Hammond’s Quest for the New Jerusalem: A Mormon Generation Sagastates that Sidney Rigdon, “by his own admission, ‘made up’ religious experiences in his youth,” which seems like something worth looking into. Read More
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53 responses
Edited with author’s note on the comments at end of post. Abortion is a hot-button issue. Maybe the hot-button issue. That’s why–after finishing a draft of this post in November of 2019–I sat on it for almost a year. I’ve rewritten it and am posting it because I’ve realized it’s important to understand not only the what of the Church’s position, but also the why. This is tough, since the Church has a publicly available policy on abortion but no single, authoritative theological rationale for the policy. This provides a certain amount of leeway in interpreting and applying the Church’s… Read More
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How do we account for differences between the various accounts we have on record of the First Vision? What role does memory play in how it was presented over time? How have we viewed those accounts since they were first recorded? These are big questions that are central to our understanding of Joseph Smith’s experience. Steven C. Harper took a look at these questions and more in his book First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (Oxford University Press, 2019) and also sat down recently for a 10 questions interview with Kurt Manwaring to talk about his book and the First… Read More
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This coming week’s Come, Follow Me lesson covers Alma 30-31. Here are a collection of quotes from General Auxiliary Leaders of the Church, that you can use in your family or personal study. Alma 30 The Book of Mormon warns against false teachings. “As you use your agency to carve out time every day to draw close to God’s voice, especially in the Book of Mormon, over time His voice will become clearer and more familiar to you.” (Michelle Craig, Young Women General Presidency, “Spiritual Capacity,” General Conference, October 2019) Alma 30:6 What is an anti-Christ? “Korihor was an anti-Christ.… Read More
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9 responses
Imagining the Book of Mormon as a complex work reflecting numerous steps of compilation and abridgment helps explain some curious features of the encounter with Sherem in Jacob 7. Read More
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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