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I highly recommend Wrestling with the Restoration: Why This Church Matters, by Steven C. Harper, for any member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is, at its heart, apologetics done well. In other words, it is a response to critics of the Church on a series of historic and praxis concerns. But rather than trying to bend reality to fit a desired result (as often happens in apologetic works), it incorporates historical research and what that process has revealed into the narrative of Church history that it shares. In addition, the book functions as a primer… Read More
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A Public Square Magazine article has been making the rounds about the history behind the Church being caught flat-footed in responding to probably the most influential piece of anti-Mormon literature of the 2010s. Not that people in the Church ecosystem didn’t have good responses, but at the time it hit the traditional institution on whom such a response would normally fall (the Maxwell Institute) had recently shifted emphasis, leading to a lacuna, and responses fell on the back of volunteers who had families to feed and callings to fulfill, so they were predictably delayed and probably less developed than they… Read More
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Park, Benjamin E. “Mormonism in Antebellum America.” In The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States Since 1775, pp. 175-183. Routledge, 2025. Mormonism began with a text steeped in political protest. When the Book of Mormon rolled off the press in early 1830, its first readers immediately recognized its connection to America’s inchoate democratic climate. The scriptural work spoke of kings, judges, and sovereignty. It warned about the dangers of majoritarian rule and the promise of millennial reign. Mankind would not know true peace and full liberty until God ruled as a divine monarch. But more than… Read More
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Considered the preface to the D&C, the first section, subject of the second Come Follow Me lesson, argues for the importance of revelation in the restoration, and for recognizing that the Lord reveals his word through “the weak and simple.” Just like with the restoration itself, the call for our attention to revelation is a frequent topic in LDS poetry—indeed revelation of new scripture is a significant element that set the church apart from traditional religious groups. Read More
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Okay I want to get to my bigger point about how I think Greek stuff is good, and how they developed very good stuff in line with Mormonism. But first I want to do a few more posts on OT historicity because I think it’s interesting. One of the biggest issues related when the Pentateuch was written (there are other issues too that I’ll discuss in later posts) is the large trove of papyri found at the Egyptian isle of Elephantine in the Nile. A group of “Judeans” (what they called themselves, Adler, 202) had settled there in some time… Read More
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A little while ago OpenAI announced o3, a new (and extremely expensive) LLM. There’s a lot to say about its new capacities in a variety of domains, but the one relevant here is its performance on the ARC Challenge, a measure of general intelligence. Without boring you about the technical details, previous LLMs have done quite poorly at such measures of general intelligence, but o3 is now scoring at human-level. So have we achieved the vaunted “artificial general intelligence”? Not quite, there are other general intelligence tests that it still doesn’t do quite so well on, but the writing is… Read More
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Culture is important. Cultural items not only enhance what we say and teach, making the ideas more memorable and meaningful, they also add additional information, and engage our brains on a level that enhances our learning. As a student of literature as well as the gospel, I’ve long been convinced that our modern culture has discarded much of our culture too early, leaving us without the touchstones we need to keep us grounded in the gospel. As a result, for many years I’ve tried to enhance the Sunday School curriculum (currently the Come Follow Me series) with examples of LDS… Read More
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So as I went over my notes on the two books I wanted to discuss, I noticed that it would be good refer to a trend they both mention: that the books after the Pentateuch in the OT, especially the history books, don’t seem to know about the Pentateuch. My apologies if this is well known to other readers; both authors cite other books. This point is significant for the theme of these posts since Adler’s focus in on the Pentateuch and not the OT as a whole. Read More
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For the last several weeks, Syria has been a rare and unlikely bright spot in a grim world. Read More
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The 6th Article of Faith can be interpreted along a continuum. On one extreme you might have a super strict interpretation that holds that Jesus had deacons, teachers, priests, and elders quorums, the whole bit, and on the other side, which I’m more partial to, is that Article of Faith 6 is true in a general sense, with a lot of room for variation for the particulars. There are fundamental offices, like the Quorum of the 12, but beyond those basics there’s a lot of flexibility. One one hand, given that these offices and what they mean have changed quite… Read More
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As I did last year, in case it’s of use to anyone, I’ve prepared a list of my top 10 books that I’ve read this last year. (That can include books that were not published within the last year, though the majority of them were published in 2023 or 2024). Also, since I published 25 book reviews in 2024, I’ll include links to those reviews and relevant excerpts for the books where that is applicable. Read More
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Joseph Fielding Smith was one of the movers and shapers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the twentieth century. Although lacking in professional training in theology or history, his impact in those areas can still be felt today in the Church. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Matthew Bowman discussed some of Joseph Fielding Smith’s life and legacy. What follows here is a copost to the full interview. Read More
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So, yes, I did want to repost this one as well, but frame it a little differently than how I had originally. This continues a series where I argue that Joseph Smith’s perennialism, I think, allows for greater flexibility to deal with biblical scholarship that seems to be increasingly calling lots of the OT historicity into question. Again, I’m not a biblical scholar, but I’ve noted this scholarly trend and I’ve seen a lot of evangelicals and Mormons express faith concerns over learning about this scholarship. Read More
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Forgive me for reposting this, but I wanted to have this up on the blog so that I could refer to it in future posts. So here I’m continuing my posts arguing that Joseph Smith was onto something in embracing the ancient theology, or larger truth in addition to the Bible. While the Bible in certainly important in Mormon theology and historical conceptions, Mormonism rejects Protestant sola scriptura. We do so not only in have additional scripture, God goes so far as to tell Nephi in his strident rejection of sola scriptua “I shall also speak unto all nations of… Read More
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One of the more curious aspects of the temple ceremony was the charge to avoid “loud laughter.” [Note, I originally spoke in the present tense, but evidently it has been removed–with all the recent changes I somehow missed that]. It’s like only eating meat during the winter, one of those things that was indisputably, canonically there but virtually nobody, no matter how conservative, made a point of it. However, I get the concept even if I’m a little fuzzy on the operationalization: avoid frivolity and light mindedness because reality with all its pain and suffering–and glory–is essentially and fundamentally serious.… Read More
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A brief PSA: the blog was having problems so we reset it and lost some content, so apologies to everybody who spent the time to comment only to have it be lost in the memory hole. Read More
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The Ascension Lately I’ve dipped into literary depictions of the Savior’s life. Unsurprisingly given the subject matter, historically responses to literary depictions of the Savior have been quite polarizing, and sometimes controversial. For example, evidently The Man Born to Be King, an early, relatively milquetoast (by today’s standards) radio depiction of the Savior’s life, was blamed for the fall of Singapore. Gradually fictional depictions of the Savior moved from being more devotional–like Ben Hur–to the more naturalistic, like the Master and the Margarita, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Quarantine, King Jesus, and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel… Read More
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Four years ago, I brought up resources to assist in study of the Doctrine and Covenants. There were some significant books that were mentioned, but not as many as I had assumed there would be. That launched me on a path that has led to my book, Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine and Covenants. In addition, I have continued to search out relevant books and other literature about the Doctrine and Covenants. That work of seeking out resources, combined with the extensive interviewing work of the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, is brought together in… Read More
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I put up part one a while back (sorry, many life distractions in the meantime) and am finally getting up part 2. The bigger purpose of these posts is to share some thoughts on a bigger point about rethinking the grand narrative of biblical metahistory that we’ve constructed of Mormonism. Mormons tend to argue for Mormonism as some kind of playing out of biblical history, restoring biblical religion etc. I’ll be arguing in these posts (and have argued) that a lot of such notions are problematic since the Bible is problematic historically, but that there are other ways to think… Read More
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41 responses
So I asked Chat-GPT to show two middle aged people…and this is what a middle-aged woman looks like apparently, but at least it shows the correct number of fingers. In the Church we segregate certain callings by sex. In addition to the obvious Relief Society/priesthood quorum distinctions, primary presidencies are female, while clerks and leadership positions are male. These distinctions are overlapping, but not exactly collinear, with the all-male priesthood and leadership issue, which is a much bigger question that I have addressed parts of elsewhere, but for the purposes of this post will put off to the side even… Read More
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The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is one the most common ritual and use of set ritual prayers in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Weekly observance is a high frequency compared to many Christian denominations’ observance of similar rites and begs to question of why we observe it so frequently. David F. Holland discussed the ritual of the sacrament in a recent post at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, based on his work in Moroni: a brief theological introduction. What follows here is a co-post to the full discussion. Read More
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As a musician in the Church, I’ve organized several Christmas programs for sacrament meetings over the years. The format that I’ve come to prefer is to have two narrators, one sharing Christmas and Advent themed thoughts, then another reading related scriptures to tell the story of Christmas. After each narrator shares a thought, a music number is performed that relates to the thoughts. (I generally recommend keeping the ward choir contributions to three or less, depending on your ward/branch’s circumstances, so the other ones are usually Primary, solos, and small groups performing.) I thought I would share the basic template… Read More
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Hinderaker, Amorette. ““It was Nothing That was Super Subversive”: Resistance as a Narrative Process in Dialectical Identity Spaces Among Mothers of LGBTQ+ Children in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Communication Studies (2024): 1-22. Read More
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I finally got around to reading the Epistle of 1st Clement. Written by Clement of Rome (or, as bishop of Rome, Pope Clement I if you’re Catholic), 1st Clement represents one of the earliest if not the earliest authentic Christian document after the apostles. There has been a lot of back-and-forth about the nature of the Great Apostasy in Latter-day Saint circles. As far as what we canonically know from D&C in the core of our concentric circles of authoritativeness, God told Joseph Smith that all the other sects were “wrong” and doctrinally incorrect. We also know, per John the… Read More
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The process of coming to understand how sealing created kinship networks was complicated, however, and became intertwined with the development of plural marriage in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle sealings (and their promised blessings) from plural marriage, even though monogamous marriages are the official standard in the Church today. Read More
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Back in February, I announced that I have a book about the Doctrine and Covenants that is scheduled to be published by By Common Consent Press this December. After a lot of hard work by a lot of different people, I am happy to say that is still the case! Fragments of Revelation: Exploring the Book of Doctrine and Covenants is now available for pre-order for the Kindle edition (which should be released in a week), with the paperback version planned to be released in the near future. Read More
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I try to avoid having too many “pet peeve” posts that focus on the negative, but it’s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission… Read More
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of the bajillion media depictions of gay missionaries No, I have not seen the movie Heretic yet. Based on what I have read, however, [spoiler alert] apparently it begins with a sexually explicit discussion between sister missionaries, and there are possibly sexual overtones near the end when one of the sister missionaries is shown to have a subdermal birth control, which the movie states would be a reason for Church discipline if known, which implies that either 1) the movie was implying that the sister missionary was sexually active, or 2) the birth control was used… Read More
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Periodically someone or another will issue a call to remove hymns with militaristic themes or martial music from the hymnbook, or at least rewrite them to make them overtly pacifistic. The sentiment is noble and understandable, but mistaken. The new hymnbook may reduce the number of martial hymns or soften their edges, but I hope the new hymnbook keeps at least some of them. Especially in troubled times, the martial hymns are one place I can find peace. Read More
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Sorry for all the election posts, but I would be remiss if in closing I didn’t say a word about one of the weirder/more entertaining aspects of the 2024 election that dovetails neatly with my own eccentric interest in religious demography and politics: the rise of the Amish as political kingmakers. In general this election has thrown a wrench in the “demography is destiny” ideology (I say ideology because there was never a lot of evidence to the idea that immigration would cause permanent democratic majorities; of course I’m partial but the DNC could have, you know, actually spoken to… Read More