Latter-day Saint Thought

Latter-day Saint AI Art Group

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I’m going to take advantage of blogger privilege to announce a Facebook group I’m starting for Latter-day Saint AI artists creating gospel-themed content to coordinate, showcase their work, and collaborate. I follow a number of AI art groups on Facebook that serious artists and graphic designers frequent, and people with an artist’s training and eye, combined with AI, have the potential to produce genuinely good art at scale that makes my amateur hour pieces I sometimes drop here pale in comparison. Of course, as these are secular groups, a lot of the subject-matter revolves around superheroes and other silliness (no offense), and some of them are outright softcore porn, but the same skills and technology have the potential to revolutionize the creation of moving, gospel-oriented pieces. Because it democratizes and expedites the art production process, AI has the potential to drastically expand the variety and volume of quality gospel art. Whereas before we had the same several dozen or so scenes, themes, and styles; now, in the right hands we can produce exponentially more variation across virtually any Church history, gospel, doctrinal, or scriptural theme. In my experience as a lurker in this world, the people that have the artistic know-how to know the difference between, say, a 1970s camera style and a 1980s camera style, or what an alcoholic paint looks like, for example, are typically the ones who, combined with some promptology, can produce masterpieces. Of course, beginners…

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Life in the Church, Parenting

How I taught the Proclamation on the Family

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As the Sunday School president at the time (December 2021), I told the teachers in advance that I wanted them to do two things. First, I wanted them to teach the doctrine. Second, I wanted them to teach it so that whoever their students were and whatever their situation, they would feel welcome and accepted. Then as the teacher of a youth Sunday School class, this is what I said.

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From the Desk Co-posts, Joseph Smith

The White Horse Prophecy

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There are a few high-profile apocalyptic prophecies in Latter-day Saint history that have pretty shaky provenances. Perhaps foremost among them is the White Horse Prophecy. This complicated document was recently discussed at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. What follows here is a co-post to the full discussion.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

“A Little Hippyish”

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I got M and J’s permission to share this on the blog and M read it before I published it though she made me take out the best line. :( “So are they pretty straight arrows, all good with them?” SP2 asked me when he called a little less than a year before my release to get some info on the J&M who he was thinking of asking to perform a musical number at the adult session of stake conference. He’d called to ask about their musical aptitude, but included the above question as well. To me J&M, a late 20s couple, were all good, but I felt that they didn’t really fit SP2’s definition of “straight arrow”/orthodox member and thus saying yes to that question felt a touch misleading. M (wife) had ruffled feathers from the get go, calling out people in casual settings for uncharitable speech in woke ways, her husband J has shoulder length hair and a beard, and both had given the WILDEST talks I’d ever heard in church when we had them speak after moving to the ward. M talked about how the church had been a good place for her, but had struggled since the pandemic, had lots of LGBT+ friends and those sympatric who had struggled with and left the church. M said something like, “while the church has been a good place for me, I also acknowledge those whom I love that…

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Latter-day Saint Thought

How Big is Joseph Smith Polygamy Denialism in the Church? Insights from the B.H. Roberts Foundation’s Current and Former Latter-day Saint Survey

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Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.  The people who do believe that Joseph Smith did not practice polygamy fall into two camps. The first is those who simply do not know. Presumably because the practice wasn’t public until Brigham Young’s day, and because the Nauvoo practice is much more sparsely documented, Brigham Young, and not Joseph Smith, became the icon of polygamy. Although people more familiar with official Church history (or even a careful reading of D&C 132) would have also known about Joseph Smith’s plural wives, anecdotally there are cases of people simply not being aware because the emphasis was always on the better documented Utah-era polygamy. (And although the 20th century Church did not emphasize Joseph’s plural marriages, the Church did not hide it; and in the late 19th century it went out of its way to gather invaluable primary source, first-hand evidence of his plural marriages and publicize them in order to stick it to the RLDS during the Temple Lot trial.) And so while the Church is publishing more content on Joseph Smith’s plural marriages (and there’s just more content available now overall, with perhaps the summum of this being Brian Hales’ and Don Bradley’s excellent multi-volume work and website on…

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Transportation of Car-Less Members, Giving Rides, and Jesus Vans

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Yes, I know, the “Jesus” in the bottom-right hand corner has a t, at the end, but still, it’s almost there.  I typically like to avoid making too many posts that take the form of  “what I think the Church should do,” in part because the gospel of the almighty God, creator of heaven and earth, is so much bigger than this or that policy from North Temple Street; also, a lot of my thoughts on that topic have typically already been said by others in some place or another, sometimes more elegantly than I could have, so I don’t have a lot to add.   Still, occasionally something comes up where I haven’t seen much discussion and I might have something unique to add, so here I’m discussing–Jesus Vans.  If you live in a more urban area with a lot of churches you’ll see these zipping around on Sunday to pick up parishioners (I get the sense that Korean Christian churches have a lot of these, but that’s just anecdotal). Also if you have been a member in a high-needs, urban area you know that transportation is the bane of the Church’s existence in those places. Many of the members are immigrants that do not have their own vehicles. If you’re lucky your urban area has good transportation (e.g. my ward in Philadelphia), and if not they don’t (e.g. my current ward outside of DC).  I’m convinced that for high…

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Latter-day Saint Thought

“Who Do We Want at Church?”

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As I was brainstorming about starting the safe-space group that I mentioned in a previous post, it was December 2021, and I started seeing people commenting online about the upcoming final (or nearly final) lesson in gospel doctrine that would cover the two official declarations. Since those cover what are generally considered controversial topics—polygamy and Blacks and priesthood—lots of people were interested in whether their wards would cover those topics, and if so how they would approach it. So since I was thinking about how to talk about hard issues, the morning of that lesson, I pitched the idea to my wife— who was then the gospel doctrine teacher—that I teach a lesson on “how do we talk about difficult issues related to church history?” for the GD lesson. She was a bit apprehensive, but said okay, and I started brainstorming ideas. But as I did so, I felt the strong impression, “Run the idea by the ward council first.”

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Book Reviews

Sins of Christendom: A Review

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Anti-Mormon literature is always a touchy subject, but Sins of Christendom: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Evangelicalism by Nathaniel Wiewora handles it deftly, putting it in a broader context of change and debate within Evangelical Christianity. 

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Latter-day Saint Thought

My Testimony of an Imperfect Church (But the Best One in My Opinion)

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So in previous posts, I made it clear I’m unconventional and disagree with some policies. A process I would describe as coming to a testimony of an imperfect church. I’ve expressed a few disagreements, but also wanted to share some of the reasons why I believe very strongly that the church is where I should be, where I should try to help others to stay, and a good place to expend my efforts. The biggest reason is simply “because God told me so,” or spiritual experiences. As a middle-aged dude, this had been a journey and a process, and “study and faith” (my series on the other blog) has been both enlightening and challenging.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

BYU is # 1 in the Nation for Number of Foreign Languages Offered–By Far

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Fellow blogger Jonathan and I were talking on the back-end about Modern Language Association statistics (as one does in the bloggernacle), and he drew my attention to a dataset kept by the MLA that records the different foreign language classes taught in the US, so I ran some simple summary statistics to see where BYU ranked in terms of how many languages they offered in 2021 (see charts at the end). While I always knew that BYU was a foreign language powerhouse because of the missionary angle, I was still surprised by what I saw. BYU is not only one of the top universities for diversity of language offerings, it is the top university. And not only is it the top university, but #2 (Harvard) is a quite distant #2. Heck, BYU offers classes in Kiribati a Pacific Island language with 120,000 speakers. As long as BYU is run by a more traditional religious organization it is probably never going to be the top place for the more ideologically loaded metrics and fields, but there are more objective, less ideologically loaded metrics that BYU can dominate in, and foreign language offerings is one of those. Number of Unique Languages Offered by University University # Distinct Languages Offered BRIGHAM YOUNG U (UT) 96 HARVARD U 78 U OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 59 CORNELL U (NY) 58 U OF WASHINGTON 58 INDIANA U, BLOOMINGTON 57 U OF PENNSYLVANIA 53 U OF GEORGIA 52 STANFORD U 51 U OF CHICAGO 51 COLUMBIA U (NY) 50 U OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 49 U OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR 48 YALE U 45 U OF WISCONSIN, MADISON 44 NEW YORK U 41 U OF MINNESOTA, TWIN CITIES 41…

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Book Reviews, Church History

American Zion: A Review

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If I were to ever write a single-volume history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I hope that it would turn out like Benjamin E. Park’s American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (Liveright, 2024). It is a very nuanced, insightful, and well-written take on Latter-day Saint history in the United States. It takes into account viewpoints from many different groups that have been a part of the Latter-day Saint movement over the years or who have split from the Church into their own faith communities. American Zion also builds upon a lot of important research that has happened since Matthew Bowman published The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith in 2012 (the previous reigning academic history of the Church). Five stars out of five, as far as I’m concerned.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

The Church as the Knights Templar and #MakeItATrillion

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I tried to get it to show a missionary swimming in a pool of coins like Scrooge McDuck, but it wouldn’t let me produce images that it deemed to be satirical of religious beliefs. Once upon a time there was a devout, hard-working, highly efficient religious organization that started stockpiling and investing money for the glory of God. Because of their business acumen and scrupulosity, the pile grew fabulously large until… King Phillip (the French King in Braveheart) and the Pope collaborated to steal their money and had the leaders arrested, tortured, and executed.  Given the title of this post, you can see where I’m going with this. Now, I don’t think the Church leaders will get burned at the stake or arrested, but it’s a truism that the larger the amount of money you have the bigger the target you have on your back for people to just take your money. Because you really can buy (almost) everything in this world with money and money can make people weird and unscrupulous, with the unscrupulousity increasing with the amount of money at stake.  It’s why super rich people have bodyguards and have to deal with a constant stream of lawsuits and bad-faith friends and relatives (and why I’m okay with Church security being more than a guy with a radio outside President Nelson’s apartment). For the Church I don’t know what the actual mechanism might be, maybe some out of…

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Church Concerns and the Command to Mourn with Those That Mourn

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Responses to my last post reminding me of something I’ve been thinking recently: the fact that individuals can have quite different experiences with the church. The most extreme form of differences would be the extreme faith crises and a couple of examples serve to illustrate the pain these can cause. Alma 7 says Christ “will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people … that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people,” which I see as linked to the command to mourn with those that mourn. Those in faith crises are clearly mourning. The examples in the links are of the more extreme type, but I think we also know that struggling with concerns at a less extreme level is also common, and can also be quite painful as well. For instance, just a few months ago, the new bishop’s wife gave her first talk in the ward as bishop’s wife, saying she’d been assigned testimony. She took the opportunity to give a talk I’ve rarely ever heard and NEVER from a bishop’s wife: how she has been struggling with the church, how she would appreciate people being kind to her during her struggles, and how we all ought to be kind generally to those who struggle. The only other time I’d heard anything like that was about a year earlier from another young couple recently moved into the ward, who addresses…

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20th Century History, From the Desk Co-posts

Diné Latter-day Saints

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One often-overlooked aspect of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the interactions of the institution with the Diné (Navajo) peoples in the western United States. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Farina King (an expert in colonial and post-colonial Indigenous studies) discussed some of the fraught history of Diné Latter-day Saints. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Griping about Church Leaders and Policies in Front of My Kids

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Griping about religion First of all, I don’t have a lot to gripe about when it comes to the Church or its leaders. This isn’t a holier-than-thou attitude, I’m sure that if I looked hard enough I’d find plenty with an organization as large and with as many moving pieces as the Church, just that with all the demands for my big family I’m saving my gripe energy for the elite charter school that wantonly discriminates against homeschool applicants (ahem). Plus on a local level my bishopric probably puts in 20+ hours of uncompensated work every week, largely to help my children’s religious formation, so I have no desire to look the gift horse in the mouth.  Still, of course, sometimes things come up. I don’t really work for the Church in any significant capacity and I’m engaged with it of my own free will and choice; If they want me to drive out an hour to undergo a multi-hour training that would completely wipe out my precious and rare weekend time with my family, I just tell them no. If Elder so-and-so only seems capable of speaking in cliches, platitudes, and quotes from his superiors I’ll internally roll my eyes and maybe mention something to my wife but will move on; the little gripes are more of an intellectual exercise than anything at this point, and they don’t really affect me personally if I don’t let them.  Still, kids pay…

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Latter-day Saint Thought

The Demographic and Financial Future of the Community of Christ

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A fun personal anecdote. When I was doing my postdoc at Baylor I was made aware that there was a dataset at the Kirtland Visitor’s Center that had information on early converts that would be useful. After back-and-forthing it with the missionaries there it became clear that it would be much more feasible for me to just go there in person and download the materials myself, so I scraped together some funding and flew out. During my time there I had the opportunity to stay as a guest of Karl Anderson, who is a local Kirtland legend, essentially the Church’s man in Kirtland for decades. He had one of those homes that feels like a temple and makes you want to be a seminary teacher with 20 kids. He graciously drove me around to the different sites, and somehow we started talking about Wallace B. Smith, the last Smith prophet of the Community of Christ who effected its change to a more Mainline Protestant model, and who Brother Anderson personally knew.  As a fellow Brighamite, I was expecting at least a nod to the problems and complications that arose from them de-emphasizing the Book of Mormon and other restorationist claims, but I got none of that. Instead, it was clear that his main emotion was love for the man as a friend, and empathy and sadness of him being in a situation that he clearly did not want to be…

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From the Desk Co-posts, Old Testament

National Treasure – Israel Style

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We read in the Hebrew Bible that King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and “carried off all the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house” (2 Kings 24:13). The question of what happened to those treasures afterwards has been a subject of fascination ever since. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Elena Dugan discussed the Jerusalem temple treasure. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

The Refiner’s Fire

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“Was the refiner’s fire hot?” my stake president (SP2) asked me on the night he came over to give me my release a little less than a year ago. This was a bit of a surprise since it was at 4.5 years, but SP2 explained that they were reworking the boundaries. His question was in reference to the hard time he knew I’d had as bishop, and I appreciated his acknowledgement of that. Lots of reasons why and I consider an instance I’d had a couple of months before my release to be most indicative of the experience. My wife (Lee) and I were on a date and had stopped to do some grocery shopping. As we sat in the car, Lee cried and expressed how difficult and emotionally exhausting my time as bishop had been and how she couldn’t wait for it to be over. My radiantly positive and confident wife doesn’t do much crying in the car, but was that evening.* SP1, who called me, told me that he hoped my time as bishop would be the very best time for my family; that goal didn’t seem to have been achieved.

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Temples

The Church Now Owns the Kirtland Temple

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As I’m sure everybody is now aware, the Church now owns the Kirtland temple. A few drive-by-thoughts. I looked at the Community of Christ’s financials and posted about what I saw as the inevitable result of their situation (selling off additional properties, perhaps including the Kirtland temple) back in September of 2021, and that was shortly followed by a Salt Lake Tribune piece on the issue. Unbeknownst to either of us, apparently negotiations had started several months earlier in June of 2021.     I questioned whether they were going to rededicate it as a functioning temple or dedicate it as a historical site, seeing it as a sticky issue. It appears they have chosen the latter, which I think is a smart move. The fact is that the temple ceremony was not completely revealed at that point, and architecturally it was not designed as a functioning Nauvoo-era temple. In order to make it one, it would require gutting a lot of historically significant elements.   Besides the basic revisions, keeping it as a historical site and not a temple will help assure that the 19th century workmanship won’t be gutted later down the line (cough, Logan and Salt Lake, cough).   Besides, the Cleveland Temple is nearby, so I doubt there’s a geographic need for a temple in that location.   Anecdotally in the past it seems like the CoC sites were struggling with manpower, and you had to hit them…

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Latter-day Saint Thought

Not Really Bishop Material

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So Jonathan invited me to come do some guest posting over here, and we talked a bit about some matters related to the series I’d started over at the JI. When Jonathan invited me to share some of the material here, I had a whole lot of ideas. We’ll see where this goes, but by way of introduction to my guest posting here, I wanted to start by sharing some of my experience with having been bishop from which I was released a little less than a year ago. I got some heads up that I could be called as the next bishop very quickly after we moved to the new ward. “You know we’re going to need a new bishop this January,” the bishop’s counselor said to me when he gave me my first calling in July. He said so in a way that he was clearly referring to me. Such a statement was pretty new to me. I was not really bishop material.

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Mexico Mission Hymns

“La Obra Ya Empieza”

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“La Obra Ya Empieza” was one of the original hymns included in the 1907 Himnario Mormón (the first Spanish-language hymnbook in the Church). Written by the prolific hymn-writing colonist Edmund Richardson, it was originally a text with no tune specified for singing. In the 1940s red hymnbook, it appeared with an unidentified tune for the first time. When the current hymnbook came out in 1992, this hymn was not included.

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Latter-day Saint Thought

My Religious-Themed Required Reading List, Part III

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The Price We Paid, by Andrew Olsen For how legendary (in both a good and bad sense) the Willy and Martin handcart companies are in our collective consciousness, it was good to read a scholarly work on the subject.  Oxford Translation of the Bible Everybody should read a solid non-KJV translation (and one that doesn’t lean towards word-for-word literalism like the KJV). Passage by Faith. Exploring the Inspirational Art of James Christensen Maybe my tastes are kitschy and lowbrow, but I find James Christensen’s art to be some of the most straightforwardly inspiring out there.  Gospel Principles I know we don’t have a gospel principles class anymore, but when you’re raising your own kids it’s easy to just think that gospel basics will just be absorbed via osmosis. Embarrassing but fun personal anecdote, despite having been born of goodly parents and having a solid religious upbringing I somehow got to junior high without knowing that Jesus was the literal biological son of God and not just the spiritual son from Joseph and Mary; I wasn’t informed about this fact until my brother started talking about how schmaltzy the conceived-by-the-power-of-the-force Christian reference was in Star Wars, Episode I.  It’s surprising what random holes some people have in their religious education. It’s useful to literally have a list of the basics published by the Church to teach your kids to make sure nothing gets missed.   Life After Death: The Evidence, by…

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