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A History of Young Women’s Organizations in the Church
The Church Historian’s Press recently published a history of the Young Women’s organization in the Church entitled Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024. In connection with the release of this landmark study, Lisa Olsen Tait discussed the book in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows…
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Are Humans More Important than Animals? Speciesism and the Gospel
One of the most counter-intuitive and abhorrent, yet strangely logically airtight arguments in modern-day ethics is Peter Singer’s argument for why, if we are okay with killing and experimenting with animals, we should then be okay with experimenting on mentally handicapped humans and killing babies. Of course killing and experimenting on infants and the disabled…
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Christ and Community: Introduction
I want to share a few thoughts on Christianity and community building. I know this is a big topic discussed for thousands of years, but I want to give my two cents anyway despite not being a trained theologian. In my amateur opinion, I do think that Jesus said that community building was important and…
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CFM 4/14-4/20: Poetry for “I Am He Who Liveth, I Am He Who Was Slain”
The Come Follow Me lesson for the week ending on April 20th, Easter, takes a break from the section order in the Doctrine and Covenants to focus on how Christ is portrayed in the scripture. The lesson focuses on three attributes of Christ’s role: His living nature, his gift of the resurrection to all of…
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Religions on Trial, Then and Now
Note: This was in the queue before I realized that it was falling on General Conference weekend, so it’s not in response to anything said over the pulpit. I recently read an account of the three great medieval Jewish-Catholic disputations (Judaism on Trial, McCoby). These were debates arranged by the Christian authorities where the top…
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Samuel Weber on Adam-God Doctrine
One observation about Brigham Young—particularly when it comes to his most controversial ideas, like the Adam-God teachings—is that he tended to take ideas from Joseph Smith and then amplify them. The priesthood and temple ban on individuals with black African ancestry, for example, can be seen as an expansion of things Joseph Smith accepted and…
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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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The Voice of the Lord: A Review
BYU published a few books late last year in connection with the Doctrine and Covenants. Among these is The Voice of the Lord: Exploring the Doctrine and Covenants, edited by Alexander L. Baugh. The book is a collection of essays previously published by BYU in a variety of forums (Sydney Sperry symposium publications, Religious Educator…
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Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, March 2025
Hahne, Madeleine Ary. “Factors Influencing Climate Change Beliefs among American Latter-Day Saints.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 29, no. 1 (2025): 19-48.
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Making Sense of Prophecies: An Update
A while ago, I published a series of posts, “Making Sense of Prophecies,” that connected my academic research to the prophecy of “Lutius Gratiano.” (You know the one: “The old true gospel and the powers thereof are lost….”) Then the editor of the Journal of Mormon History suggested the topic might work as an article.
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CFM 4/7-4/13: Poetry for “ Lift Up Your Voices … to Declare My Gospel”
For a lesson titled “Declare My Gospel”, the individual sections don’t seem to focus as much on missionary work as you would think. Instead, the missions discussed are more like the statement often attributed to St. Francis, “Preach the gospel. If necessary use words.” Of course, the problem with preaching through actions, even though they…
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Joseph Smith and the Ancient Theology: Conclusion
So I wanted to wrap up a few more thoughts I mentioned in my last post, but at the request of the TS bloggers, I put them over at the Juvenile Instructor. So you can check them out over there. One on BH Roberts’s problematic claims of Platonism corrupting Christianity, another noting problems with Stephen…
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My Problem with the Trinity
The New Testament is basically contradictory about the divine nature of Christ. On one hand Christ clearly talks to God as a separate being and identifies his will as being separate from God’s (Luke 22:42), but elsewhere he refers to himself as the Father in a very literal, I-am-physically-the-same sense (John 14:8-14). And then we…
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The Confessing Church
People are probably going to bring up the Confessing Church frequently, so it’s best to get some things straight at the outset.
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On a New Edition of Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith
When I was on my mission, there were a few hot commodities on the book market that most of the missionaries wanted to get their hands on. Foremost among them were Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith and Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, with bookstores in Nauvoo, Illinois being the location in my mission where missionaries could…
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AI Art and Gospel Stories: Or, Children’s Book Illustrators are Now Unemployed
For what seemed like forever the moat protecting the jobs of illustrators from AI was the fact that it was hard to nail down consistent characters. You could maybe, with clever prompting, get one frame to kind of look like the other, but it didn’t really work, which is why a lot of early AI-storyboard…
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A Review: Eduardo Balderas: Father of Church Translation, 1907–1989
I love finding out about key people in the history of the Church of whom I was previously unaware. Signature Books’s latest entry in its Brief Mormon Lives project, Eduardo Balderas: Father of Church Translation, 1907–1989, by Ignacio M. Garcia, is a great example of this.
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CFM 3/31-4/6: Poetry for “Jesus Christ Will Gather His People”
The concept of gathering maybe one of the most-changed concepts in LDS belief. In D&C 29 the call to be “gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land” clearly refers to a physical gathering, where members of the church lived near each other. Later the number of places of gathering increased, and…
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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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On Section 25
The reading associated with this week in “Come, Follow Me” includes section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the revelation addressed to Emma Hale Smith. Luckily, the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk published an interview with Robin Jensen on that very subject, including a great discussion about how the revelations were a collaborative…
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Civil religion and imperial cult
What does it mean to abstain from food polluted by idols? It’s one of the more pressing questions that we face today.
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Devotional Meditations as a Genre
I don’t consider myself a terribly spiritual person. This isn’t as self-deprecating as it sounds, in part because although we tend to conflate “spiritual” with “righteous” or “good” they’re technically distinct concepts. I do the right things for the most part and my heart is in the right place, but I don’t have that kind…
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A Review: On the Overland Trails with William Clark: A Teamster’s Utah War, 1857-1858
The Utah War is a subject of ongoing interest in the history of Utah and the years leading up to the American Civil War in the United States. As a Latter-day Saint who was raised in Utah, I’ve generally been introduced to the perspective of the Latter-day Saints rather than the rest of the nation.…
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CFM 3/24-3/30: Poetry for “All Things Must Be Done in Order”
It’s hard to argue with the phrase “all things must be done in order.” For most rational people, doing things in order is important. But, what exactly do we mean by ‘order’? Whose order? Does the order need to be torn up sometimes? Order suggests the arrangements and procedures that support society and our institutions.…
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The Former Bell at Temple Square
The Church recently announced that “The southwest corner of Temple Square has reopened to the public. Landscaping is still underway, but visitors can enjoy seeing three newly restored monuments.” As I have walked into the Tabernacle for rehearsals of the Bells at Temple Square each week, I have been a bit sad to see that…
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Hunger
During those infrequent occasions when I’ve been able to teach pre-modern history and literature, one of the surprisingly consistent elements of the material we look at is hunger.
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The Color of Paradise
It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant. The visit of Moroni to Joseph Smith provided one of those so-rare glimpses into the aetherial beyond when Joseph Smith tried to describe Moroni with the…
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Joseph Smith as a Visionary: A Review
The latest offering from the Brigham Young University Religious Education Symposium in Honor of Sidney B. Sperry is Joseph Smith as a Visionary: Heavenly Manifestations in the Latter Days. Joseph Smith, Jr. is known for experiencing several visions, such as the First Vision, the visits of the Angel Moroni, the Vision of the Three Degrees…
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CFM 3/17-3/23: Poetry for “Seek for the Things of a Better World”
Most of this lesson comes from D&C 25, the revelation in which Emma Smith is called to select the hymns for the Church’s first hymnal. But that calling is a small part of a revelation meant to provide Emma with help and support, as well as guidance in where she should devote her efforts—in “the…