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Among “amateur” LDS scholars (however you want to define that), Morgan Deane is, in my estimation, unfairly overlooked. While his specialty – military history – is something of a niche (though it shouldn’t be), it readily works with the Book of Mormon, especially with the accounts of wars. Part of the issue, methinks, is that “war” and “violence” are not particularly palatable topics amongst academics, and so we get occasionally forced eisegesis like the kind in the book Proclaim Peace (which, I think, has a decent premise taken way too far; we really should eschew violence as often as possible… Read More
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7 responses
Marion D. Hanks is one of the most influential general authorities who never served in the Quorum of the Twelve or First Presidency. Today he is best known for his hymn, “That Easter Morn”, his advocating for Christlike service, and the support he lent to Black members of the Church in the years leading up to the Priesthood Revelation. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Hanks’s son and biographer, Richard D. Hanks, discussed Marion D. Hanks’s life and legacy. Read More
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Apologies for doing another one of these so soon after the other one, but when it rains it pours. Since I last posted OpenAI released “advanced voice mode” to all plus subscribers. What this means is that the lag we’re used to when talking to AI is now gone, and now it is indiscernible from speaking to a real human being, up to and including detecting sarcasm, humor, and the like. I have been using it to brush up on my very rusty mission Spanish, and now any pre-missionary who wants to go above and beyond and practice, say, giving… Read More
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I don’t usually respond to articles that I dislike, generally just letting them talk for themselves, but the Miller and Dunn chapter promotes the myth of “soaking,” which is supposedly a chastity loophole that I discuss here. They reference a college newspaper which cites TikTok, so still no real evidence that soaking is a thing. Read More
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17 responses
The Church recently released a new batch of hymns for the new Latter-day Saint hymnbook. I feel like some of my predictions are paying off with the new round of hymns. Back in 2018, I called it that “This is the Christ,” “Come, Lord Jesus, Come,” and “Amazing Grace,” would likely be added. (I could say the same for “Come, Thou Fount” with the last round, but that one was beyond obvious.) But, beyond those, there are some very excellent inclusions that I am excited about. Let’s go through each of the new hymns and I’ll share some thoughts and… Read More
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A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (“enjoy” isn’t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can’t get out of it, it is hard to know anything about the internal sense experience of those events. I recall reading one account where the writer who had been subjected to torture dismissed the phrase “burn like a red hot iron.” Unless you have been burned by an… Read More
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Growing up in the Church, I repeatedly heard stories where missionaries encountered people who had been reading anti-Mormon literature and told them that “you wouldn’t decide on which car to buy by reading only the stuff put out by a company’s competitors – you would also read what the company that produced the car has to say to get a balanced view. The same should be true for religions.” When looking at historical sources, unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to do the same, because the religion’s own sources are no longer extant. Such was the case with the early Pharisees… Read More
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Open Canon: Scriptures of the Latter Day Saint Tradition, edited by Christine Elyse Blythe, Christopher James Blythe, and Jay Burton is a book that I loved reading. It is an anthology of essays focusing on the documents created and used as scripture in the broader tradition of religions that trace their roots to the early Latter Day Saint movement. The focus on the creation and reception of texts, the various branches of the Smith-Rigdon movement, and thoughts about texts that could be considered non-canonical scriptures are all right up my alley, and given the quality of research being presented, I… Read More
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22 responses
As a TBM there are a surprising number of issues dealing with religion where I have some agreement with Richard Dawkins, and one of them is that the King James Version is the best version of the Bible. When I say “best,” I don’t mean “most accurately conveys the oldest documents.” I know there are older arguments that try to argue something along these lines (J. Reuben Clark wrote a booklet about it, but when I was in Stephen Robinson’s class at BYU he didn’t seem to think his arguments held much water), but I have no reason to doubt… Read More
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7 responses
J.R.R. Tolkien had an enormous impact on my teenage years. I read Lord of the Rings by the time I was eleven and loved it enough to reread it each year for the next few years. By the time I was thirteen, the Silmarillion was my favorite book and my mom was bringing home the History of Middle Earth series from the library for me to read. As a result, Tolkien had some impact on my religious thoughts during this formative period. Read More
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A few days ago OpenAI released its much-rumored “Strawberry” system titled Chat-GPT4o1. While previous LLMs can provide an impressive writing at, say, the undergraduate level (especially if prompted well), the new system can “think” and plan better for technical concepts, and it can now answer scientific, technical questions more accurately than a PhD in that field. If Chat-GPT4 is undergraduate level, Chat-GPT4o1 is graduate level. Of particular utility is explaining difficult concepts. For example, I’ve never had anybody explain to me, at a very high level, Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; it’s the kind of thing where people who… Read More
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This morning this headline was prominently displayed at the top of the page of CNN (on the mobile version, the Internet version was much more tame to their credit). The version I snapshotted above is newer, the original version had “Mormon” prominently displayed in both the title and the subheading. (It originally said something like “Small town Mormon doctor is accused of abuse…More than 100 former patients say Mormon doctor abused them.”) Of course, if the doctor was a stake president and systematically used his position to abuse most of his victims, then such a headline would have been… Read More
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10 responses
Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist by Christine Talbot is a provocative and insightful entry in University of Illinois Press’s Introductions to Mormon Thought series. Read More
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31 responses
Years ago I wrote a very high-level, abstract post where I analyzed whether the Church was replacing itself, arguing that a lot of the “growth” we’re seeing is an artifact of population momentum, and that we shouldn’t pat ourselves on our back too much (although we should some, since we’re doing a lot better than most/almost all). Now that I’ve run some numbers on Latter-day Saint fertility I am going to be more specific with my numbers to make a related point, although here I am putting conversion baptisms to the side and simply asking whether, without missionary activity,… Read More
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The “New Mormon History” was an era when Latter-day Saint historians began to rely on the techniques of modern academic and professional historians in their approach to research and writing about the Church. Leonard J. Arrington is, in many ways, the face of this movement and was given the moniker of “the Father of Mormon History” as a result. What is sometimes overlooked, however, was that the people doing “New Mormon History” built on the shoulders of a circle of earlier historians. A central figure in that group was Dale L. Morgan. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint… Read More
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Today marks the 100th anniversary of President Russel M. Nelson’s birth. Celebrations in Utah are abounding to mark this milestone—the first time The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had a Centenarian at its helm. For example, Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox declared the day as “President Russell M. Nelson Day” in the state, honoring Nelson for his service in the military, as a surgeon, as an ecclesiastical leader, and as a family man. The Church, meanwhile, is planning a special broadcast this afternoon to celebrate the occasion as well. Here at Times and Seasons, I’m not aware… Read More
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Mormon Studies is relatively open-minded when it comes to accepting the contributions of amateurs. Here I am defining amateurs as people who are not employed by academia as their main gig, whether or not they have a graduate degree–some do, some don’t; also, here I am defining “Mormon Studies” broadly, as any original research endeavor that touches on Mormonism in some way. In this post I am making a list of amateurs who have in my eye have made significant contributions to the Mormon Studies world, including many that some people may not be aware of. Of course, I am… Read More
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It seems that there is always more to discover and discuss about Joseph Smith’s introduction of plural marriage into the church. Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy, edited by Cheryl L. Bruno is going to be a landmark in those discussions moving forward. Read More
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A part of the graph, the link below has the whole thing. Of the big AI players, Anthropic’s Claude is quite good at making diagrams, so I used it to generate an infographic I’ve always wanted to see, something that conveys in one visual how far away from Christ a book in the NT was written, the size of the work, and whether it’s considered “authentic” by scholars, either in the sense that it was written by whoever it claims to be written by (the undisputed Pauline epistles), or whether it has authentic first-hand reports from the time of Christ… Read More
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Latter-day Saint missionaries helped bring basketball to Scotland, who’d have thought? (Actually, there’s probably a paper waiting to be written on all the ways that missionaries helped disseminate basketball, including famously helping coach the German basketball team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics). Also, the latest (maybe last? He’s getting old) publication by Richard Bushman. And James Faulconer, despite being retired, is still producing scholarship. Finally, Mormon diet books! Read More
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46 responses
When I was a priest, the adult advisor was excited to teach us a lesson about the premortal existence. He bounded up, grinning from ear to ear as usual, and said “I’ve been doing lots of reading, and I have some great stuff to share,” and he did. For the most part, it was an excellent lesson. Then, suddenly, he pulled out a quote from some obscure seventy back in the 1950s that said that we were blessed according to how we had lived in the premortal existence, and we must have been pretty awesome to have been born into… Read More
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Monument in Warsaw to Janusz Korczak’s “Last Walk” as he accompanied his orphans to the Treblinka trains. Janusz Korczak is a remarkable figure that is surprisingly almost unknown in the United States despite being quite famous in Europe. A children’s author and pedagogue, his books, particularly King Matt the First about a child who becomes a king and rules like a child was as well known among Poles and Germans as Peter Pan was among British children. (while a lot of classic works of children’s literature don’t hold up anymore, this charming work still does, and is highly recommended). Raised… Read More
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In modern Latter-day Saint terminology, the Endowment is a specific ordinance performed in temples around the world. In the first temple to be constructed by church members (the House of the Lord in Kirtland), however, the term has a somewhat different meaning. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Scott Woodward discussed what the Kirtland endowment was thought to be. What follows here is a copost to the full interview. Read More
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1. …and all I got was a finisher’s medal Saying that God told me to run a marathon is a provocative formulation, but not inaccurate. Read More
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A few days ago Latter-day Saint apologist Jacob Hansen of A Thoughtful Faith had a debate with noted Catholic apologist of Pints with Aquinas fame Trent Horn that has been garnering some attention. At the outset, I love these sorts of things. A respectful but straightforward debate about contrasting religious views can help both sides articulate their beliefs and responses better. When a faith does not face explicit doubts and pressures their scalpels become dull. Another example of this in our tradition is Stephen Robinson’s excellent back and forth How Wide the Divide? With Craig Bloomberg. Eminently respectful but… Read More
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Bruce R. McConkie: Apostle and Polemicist, 1915–1985 by Devery S. Anderson is the latest entry in Signature Books’ Brief Mormon Lives project. As has been the case with other books in the series, this one is a short biography of an individual of note in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is very well done. Read More
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In the AI world there is a debate swirling about how much AI providers should censor their image generation. Of course there are plenty of things to mock in past attempts to censor or otherwise put a thumb on the scale of AI to be more socially appropriate. Exhibit A of course were the racially diverse, Black SS stormtroopers created by Google Gemini, but anybody who’s spent a decent amount of time using AI has run into these guardrails, and sometimes they can be annoying. I had a tragicomical experience myself in the early days of Midjourney when they didn’t… Read More
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While Bruce R. McConkie’s controversial Mormon Doctrine is famous in Latter-day Saint circles, it wasn’t his first controversial project. Prior to that time, he worked on preparing a “best-of” collection from the Journal of Discourses that was known as Sound Doctrine. The project was close to publication when the First Presidency intervened and shut it down. Devery S. Anderson shared some information about the volume in a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a copost to the full interview. Read More
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I assume they aren’t actually this dour, but what some people envision a disciplinary council looks like. Here I’m not addressing the normative question of whether we should excommunicate, I have already said my piece about that here. A while ago I was speaking to my stake president and made some humorous quip about him excommunicating people, and he had responded that he had actually never excommunicated anybody before. I was kind of surprised at this, as my father who has served in bishoprics in the 1990s and 2000s referred to disciplinary councils and excommunications during his time. (And yes,… Read More
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Unique But Not Different: Latter-day Saints in Japan by Shinji Takagi, Conan Grames, and Meagan Rainock is a fascinating glimpse into the world of Japanese Latter-day Saints. The book is based on a comprehensive survey data, which it explores to examine the diverse social, political, and ideological backgrounds of Japanese Latter-day Saints. Over the course of exploring those data, the book provides valuable insights for scholars, missionaries, Church leaders, and members alike about the state of the Church in Japan. The format is very academic in its investigation of the survey results and reads more like a scientific paper than… Read More