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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…
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Latter-day Saint Book Review: The Coup at Catholic University
Note: This post was in the queue before this piece by Matthew Bowman went up at the Salt Lake Tribune. So it wasn’t created as a response to it, but in a way it does respond to the idea that the Catholics have figured out a way to effectively balance free thought with the religious…
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The 1930s Crisis in the Church in Mexico
The history of the Church around the world is still a developing field and while Mexico is one of the countries that has received attention, Fernando Gomez‘s A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Mexico, 1875-1946 shows that there is still more to learn and discover about the history of…
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This is bad for the Church
Personalist autocracies are bad for 99.99% of the people who live under them. By enabling bribery and corruption, they’re a significant drag on the economy. A few people get rich, while everyone else ends up worse off. By promoting incompetent but loyal functionaries, they make it difficult to accomplish important government tasks or provide the…
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Corruption and the Future of the Church
Note: It looks like we’ve missed our monthly “cutting-edge research” installment, but I haven’t forgotten…there was just no peer-reviewed articles dealing primarily with the Church this month! Hopefully to be continued next month. One of the more interesting studies in political science was the famous diplomat parking paper. In New York City and Washington DC…
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A Review: The Doctrine and Covenants Study Guide: Start to Finish
As I’ve been working on my annotated Doctrine and Covenants this year, one resource I’ve enjoyed reading is The Doctrine and Covenants Study Guide: Start to Finish (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2024), ed. Thomas R. Valletta. The book is formatted as the text of the Doctrine and Covenants with comments in wide margins and…
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CFM 3/10-3/16: Poetry for “The Rise of the Church of Christ”
I’m currently spending time looking at the idea of ‘restoration’—probably the key idea that early members of the Church sought after. Our denomination is, and was then, considered a restoration of Christ’s original church. This lesson, covering mainly D&C 20, sometimes called the ‘constitution of the church, looks further at exactly what this means, and…
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What do Latter-day Saints Believe? Insights from the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey
The 2024 PRLS just dropped. Taken every 8 or so years, the PRLS is one of the primary sources of religious beliefs and practices of Americans. While there are other, larger and more consistent surveys that either have a larger sample size (the CES) or a larger range of questions (the GSS), the PRLS is…
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Claude 3.7, Data Visualizations, and Gospel Pedagogical Tools
In AI world Anthropic recently released Claude 3.7 with extended thinking. The “extended thinking” function is the fruit of a realization in the AI labs that if you give the AI longer to think their responses are more thorough and accurate, so in addition to expanding the compute size you can expand the compute time…
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A Review: Seven Visions: Images of Christ in the Doctrine and Covenants
The recently-published book Seven Visions: Images of Christ in the Doctrine and Covenants by Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch is a fantastic opportunity to listen in on a conversation between two brilliant theological minds as they explore seven different sections of the Doctrine and Covenants with a Christological focus. The book is structured as…
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CFM 3/3-3/9: Poetry for “Learn of Me”
It might seem strange that the title of a lesson based on D&C 19, apparently written as Martin Harris struggled with wether to mortgage his farm to pay for the publication of the Book of Mormon, should be titled “Learn of Me.” But D&C 19 doesn’t talk about mortgages or farms, and the more I…
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When Religions Rebrand: The Community of Christ and the Nation of Islam
What happens when a leader of a faith does not actually believe in its founding precepts? Presumably this kind of situation would be rare, but I recently finished reading a history of the Nation of Islam, and was struck by the parallels and sometimes contrasts between its recent history and that of the Community of…
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Annotated Doctrine and Covenants, 10 – 19
Continuing my series of annotated and formatted text of the Doctrine and Covenants, here are D&C 10 – D&C 19. As noted before, be aware that this is still a very rough draft based on the 1921 edition (for copyright reasons). I have a lot of work to go before I plan to look into…
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Capital-S Sacred Symbols, Geometries, and Sounds
Om, the vocal essence of the universe according to various South Asian religions Even if one does not accept the Church’s truth claims, it clearly has a knack for tapping into deep, primordial religious themes and principles that pop up across time and space. One of these is what I’m going to call capital-S and…
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It’s bad
In polite society we treat elections as an opportunity to advance our self-interest or express policy preferences, about which reasonable people can disagree. And most of the time that may be true and we’re left to choose between various imperfect options, but in this era I think the dwindling tribe of values voters has it…
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A Review: Seeing: Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants
The seventh and final book out of the Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series that I read is the one by Mason Kamana Allred on Seeing. This one and Philip Barlow’s entry on Time seemed like the most strange or esoteric topics in the series, but like Barlow’s book, Allred’s offers interesting insight and…