News and Politics

Some of my Best Friends Are…, or Representation in our Wards

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I thought it would be interesting to run some basic numbers on how many people from different groups we could expect in our wards and other associations if they were representative. There are a number of takeaways here. First, if there aren’t this many people in your ward, Elder’s Quorum, or what have you, then your Church experience is non-representative of the US and that should be acknowledged. Second, in the case of demographics that aren’t as easily visible or selective by religion these numbers give a reasonable estimate of how many of these different groups are in your wards and quorums, whether you’re aware of them or not. I’m looking at several tiers of associations. First, from cursory Googling around it looks like the average American has about four close friends. So for the “some of my best friends” line you have four shots on average. Second, the median number of Facebook friends is about 200, this is close to Dunbar’s Number, which speculative evolutionary psychology suggests is the standard number of people we have the cognitive bandwidth to maintain social associations with. Third, I’m assuming an average ward (again with wide variation, I might be off, I’ve never been a ward membership clerk) has about 100 consistent sacrament meeting attenders. I’m also looking at several tiers of probabilities. Of course, in putting, say, racial or sexual minorities next to people with mental health or crime histories I’m not…

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From the Desk Co-posts, Joseph Smith

Was it the Angel Moroni?

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Today marks the 200th anniversary of the day Joseph Smith said that he saw the golden plates, with last night being the anniversary of the evening that he recalled the Angel Moroni appearing to him. Yet, from time to time, there have been questions raised about whether Joseph Smith consistently said that it was Moroni who appeared to him. A couple of those questions have been addressed in posts from the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk about the Angel Moroni and the Salamander Letter. What follows here is a co-post, focusing on the question of who Joseph Smith claimed to have been visited by.

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From the Desk Co-posts, Pearl of Great Price

The ancient owner of the Book of Abraham papyri

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Joseph Smith claimed that the Book of Abraham was a translation of some of the papyri he purchased along with some mummies in Kirtland. It is difficult to ascertain the full nature of those papyri since a lot of them burned. But we can learn some about the history of those papyri from the fragments which remain. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Kerry Muhlestein discussed some of what we know about the ancient owner of the Book of Abraham papyri. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.

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News and Politics

OUR, Tim Ballard, and the Church

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Like many I’ve been recently drawn to the hard-to-look-away car crash that is the Tim Ballard/OUR saga. I am very disconnected from the conservative Utah zeitgeist that’s given rise to this debacle, and I haven’t done a deep dive into the particulars, but in a sense that makes my perspective not worthless on a meta-level in terms of messaging, since I think my experience mirrors that of most members on the street who only have a casual familiarity with what’s going on.   A few things can be true at once, as much as people try to pigeonhole these types of things into a grand confirmation of their ideological identities and repudiation of their enemies’. There are a handful of people who are so patently scheisters in the Mormon space that you don’t have to have a lot of discernment to see them for what they are, but evidently a lot of people don’t pass even that minimal bar. On the right there are certain former Utah politicians, and on the left there are certain thought leader types in the current and former Mormon communities. From the little bit that I have seen and heard of Tim Ballard there’s something off about him personally.   However, there is some validity to complaints about the Church spokesperson vaguely alluding to some sin without due process or concrete specifics, and I wonder if some among the Church professionals feel like they can take the…

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News and Politics

Ward capacity

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It seems like ‘church capacity’ would be a useful concept. In parallel to ‘state capacity,’ church capacity might describe the ability of a religious organization to carry out its missions, promote its doctrine, gain adherents, participate as an entity in broader society and accomplish its other purposes.

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News and Politics

Do People “Follow the Prophet” When it Goes Against Their Ideology? A Quantitative Analysis of Vaccines in Utah

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I’ve had a sense for a while now that people tend to exaggerate the influence of the Church on Latter-day Saint and Utah politics. Its influence is important to be sure, but some have this image that half of Utah is ready to jump when 50 North Temple Street says jump, and I’ve always thought it’s more complicated than that. Case in point, was there a discernible bump in vaccinations in Utah after the Church officially endorsed getting the COVID vaccine? I looked at the total number of vaccinations administered by state across time in Utah and nearby, non-LDS states (Colorado, Utah, Kansas, New Mexico, and Montana) from the CDC data. I looked at two dates in particular: when President Nelson received the vaccine and posted about it on Facebook (January 9, 2021), and when the First Presidency officially endorsed receiving the COVID vaccination (August 12, 2021). The first date was so close to the beginning of the data (and at a time when vaccinations were not very available anyway) that I’m not putting a lot of weight on that one. Also, I’m on the record as being very anti Utah=LDS, but in this case we simply don’t have vaccination status/affiliation time-trend data that I’m aware of, so the other half of Utah may be watering down an LDS effect. In the graph below (apologies for its size. For some reason the JPEG isn’t playing nice with WordPress so I had to…

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20th Century History, Book Reviews

Harold B. Lee: Life and Thought: A Review

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Harold B. Lee: Life and Thought by Newell G. Bringhurst (Signature Books, 2021) is a highly affordable and readable biography of one of the most influential figures in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although his tenure as president of the Church was short, Harold B. Lee had already reshaped much of the Church’s administration in the forms of Correlation, the Welfare Program and the mentoring of general authorities even before becoming the prophet-president. Bringhurst explores the life of this remarkable man in this volume of Signature Books’s Mormon Lives (or brief biographies) series.

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Music and Poetry

Top Gospel-Related Songs and Some Top Renditions

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Orchestra of Angels I’m not a musical person. I was started on the classical guitar quite early and became decently proficient at it by the time I was in Jr. High, but I just didn’t have the fire to practice for hours like many in the music world have. I enjoy a good tune, but I can’t tell the difference between, say, Mozart and something a graduate student would write (I actually wonder if musicologists couldn’t without pre-existing knowledge of Mozart’s musical corpus and it’s emperors with no clothes all the way down, but I digress).  However, there is some music whose greatness is self-evident, and you don’t need musical training to recognize and appreciate how spiritually moving it is. Below is my own list, along with examples of moving renditions Come Thou Font The classic rendition of this we always listened to growing up, which is still my favorite, is the version in the BYU Choir’s Thanksgiving of American Folk Hymns way back when. This was in the hymn book, but was taken out, and I hope the new one will have it in again.  Ode to Joy Piano Guys did a fun version of this, but it’s also worth listening to the full orchestral version. Hallelujah Chorus The Church put together the largest virtual Hallelujah Chorus of all time. Traditionally one stands for the Hallelujah Chorus. I heard it was because a king stood out of respect when it…

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From the Desk Co-posts, Scriptures

Discussion on Scripture with the Community of Christ

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The Community of Christ and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are sibling churches, both descending from the early Latter Day Saint movement. Since each group went their own way after the death of Joseph Smith in the 1840s, however, they have spent the last 170+ years growing and developing in different ways. In a recent interview over at the Latter-day Saint blog From the Desk, Kat Goheen (member of the Community of Christ) and Joshua Sears (Latter-day Saint) discussed how the two groups have developed differently in their approach to scriptures. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview (a shorter post with excerpts and some discussion). First off, what are the differences in canonized scriptures in each community? Both groups accept the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants in their canon. (The Pearl of Great Price was a later addition to the Latter-day Saint canon, so was never a thing in the Reorganization.) The Doctrine and Covenants is different. As Joshua Sears summarized about the differences between the Doctrine and Covenants: “The obvious difference is that we each include new revelations that the other church does not accept.” At the time that the two groups split, the Doctrine and Covenants consisted of most of the sections up through Section 107 in the Latter-day Saint version, along with Section 133 and 134. Most of the sections after 107 were added to…

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News and Politics

Latter-day Saint Book Review: Saqiyuq, Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women

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Saqiyuq is an oral history of three generations of Inuit women who lived on Baffin Island near Greenland. Of particular interest to me was the grandmother matriarch’s history, since, born in 1931, she provided a first-hand account of the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle where people starved or not depending on the ebb and flow of the caribou herds, all the way to snowmobiles and state schools. A few observations/excerpts apropos to this blog: 1) Apphia, the grandmother matriarch, provided an account of the competition between the Anglican and Catholic missionaries for Inuit converts, with nearly all the non-Inuit in their lives being missionaries.  One side effect of Latter-day Saint missionary work tending to go through the front door legally, and of always having so many more accessible people than we have missionaries for, is that for the most we haven’t been part of the race to find, contact, and convert indigenous peoples with no previous knowledge of Christianity. There’s a whole culture that grew up around missionary bushwacking with a machete in one hand and a bible in the other that we just haven’t been a part of. For the most part we haven’t been the first ones to introduce Christianity to a people, and there wasn’t much of a chance of a missionary companionship being assigned to Sentinel Island  or to The Man in the Hole. 2) How to be respectful of indigenous traditions while proselytizing is a…

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News and Politics

Meditation and the Gospel

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The Listener, by James Christensen Meditation is one of those practices with religious roots that has managed to become popular even in very secular, non-believing spaces, but I haven’t really caught the meditation bug. I’ve done a few guided meditations and have enjoyed them, but in terms of stress release I’d rather just get a massage or play soccer. On a recent podcast I listened to the guest mention that he had tried the floating tank fad and “just got bored.” It was one of those moments when you hear somebody confirm something you haven’t been able to admit to yourself or articulate and you realize that you’re not alone.   However, I realize I probably haven’t given real, substantive meditation a chance. In my comparative religion class at BYU, the great Roger Keller put the class through a guided meditation session, and his account of his own meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery where he spent days clearing his mind was intriguing. According to him and other accounts I’ve heard, because we’ve swum in a monkey-mind world for so long we don’t even understand what a calm, focused, composed mind feels like (and this was before Twitter), and it takes a lot of intentional meditation time to really do a thorough, Marie Kondo cognitive housecleaning.   Could I become more sensitive to the whisperings of the spirit if I cleared out the detritus in my mind? I’m open to it, and look…

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Latter-day Saint Literature Review

Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2023

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A monthly piece summarizing all recent, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and books published on Latter-day Saints.  Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History. Oxford University Press, 2023. The venerable Richard Bushman’s latest; a cultural history on the golden plates as artifacts. He’s been working on this for years. “Bushman examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and critics—and by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others—from Smith’s first encounter with them to the present. Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? And why do they remain objects of fascination to this day?” Fenton, Elizabeth. “The Book of Mormon and Book History.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 32 (2023): 74-96. It’s paywalled, so it’s hard to know what it’s about.  Oman, Nathan B. “Property and the Latter-day Saint Tradition.” William & Mary Law School Research Paper No. Forthcoming (2023). Theological and historical exploration of Mormon perceptions of property and their ambiguities.   Oman, Nathan B. “‘A Welding Link of Some Kind’: A Minimalist Theology of Same-Sex Marriage Sealings.” Nathan B. Oman, Law and the Restoration: Law and Latter-day Saint History, Thought, and Scripture (Salt Lake City, Utah: Kofford Books, Forthcoming) (2023). Theological exploration of the possibility of same-sex sealings. “This essay canvases the history of Latter-day Saint sealing rules and practices and argues that when viewed in their entirety, it is difficult to map these practices on to a particular model of…

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From the Desk Co-posts, Temples

The Law of the Gospel

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A couple years ago, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints included a list of the covenants made during the endowment session in their general handbook. It was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. Yet, I missed a part of the significance of the text presented until reading a recent interview with Samuel R. Weber over at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk—not only are the specific covenants included, but definitions were as well. In particular, the Law of the Gospel, had an official definition pinned down for the first time in recent history, which is the subject of the interview.

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News and Politics

Pascal’s Wager and the Restored Gospel

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Hell to Heaven We Latter-day Saints hold to a rather benign form of hell. I think this a feature, with traditional hell being the ultimate bug. However, one implication of our benign afterlife of second chances is that arguably this-worldly religious decisions have less “import.” If your decision to not be baptized leads to you burning in traditional hell for all eternity, that’s different then if you spend some time in spiritual prison while you are instructed and spiritually sensitized in preparation for receiving eternal ordinances.  While the Latter-day Saint framework makes more sense to me in terms of mercy and reason, it does attenuate Pascal’s Wager for us. (Pascal’s Wager is the idea that everybody should be a religious believer because the cost of being wrong [hell] is eternally greater than the cost of being wrong in a universe without God). Pascal’s Wager smells funny and smacks of spiritual blackmail, but logically it seems pretty airtight.  As a child I remember brooding on the issue before I ran across it formally (in saying this I’m not claiming I’m some Pascal–I’d wager many if not most thought experiments or theoretical concepts have been thought up by many random children before some 19th century white guy was the first one to put it in a book in a particular part of the world and have the concept forever attached to his name. Besides, Pascal is Pascal for much more than this…

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Book Reviews, Science

Let’s Talk about Science and Religion – A Review

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Back when I was studying biological engineering in college, I remember one Sunday where a stake high councilor came and spoke in our ward. He based his remarks on Elder Quentin L. Cook’s talk “Lamentations of Jeremiah: Beware of Bondage”. When he discussed how “Turning from the worship of the true and living God and worshipping false gods” results in forms of “spiritual, physical, and intellectual bondage,” the high councilor decided to add his own embellishments and examples of what those types of bondage looked like. His first example of intellectual bondage was the belief that organic evolution was real. Given my field of study and life experiences, that went over like a lead balloon. And yet, I at least understood where he came from. I can remember talking with an evangelical farmer at the edge of his property in rural Iowa on my mission and talking about evolution. The farmer was accusing Mormons of believing in evolution, which was a grievous sin in his eyes, and I was trying to convince him that because Bruce R. McConkie said that belief in evolution was wrong, Latter-day Saints were required to reject evolution (since he was sustained as a prophet, seer, and revelator), so the farmer didn’t need to feel concerned about that aspect of our religion. While I was very conflicted about rejecting evolution, at the time I was also in the camp that essentially believes that Bruce R. McConkie…

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From the Desk Co-posts, New Testament

Jesus’s Female Ancestors

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Jesus the Messiah was the son of a righteous and godly woman named Mary, through whom he had many ancestors discussed in the Hebrew Bible. Among those were several remarkable women. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Camille Fronk Olson discussed some of the women in the genealogy of Jesus. What follows here is a co-post to the full interview.

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News and Politics

Will Nobody Think of the Children! Hypocrisy and the November Policy

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Pearls Being Clutched I vaguely recall when I was younger learning about the special restrictions put in place in regards to Church membership for people from a polygamous background. I could think of a few narrow cases where I didn’t think the restrictions were necessary, but they would have been such a small portion of everything that goes on that I didn’t give it more than a passing thought.  Fast forward to November 2015. The Church very explicitly connected the November Policy of Consistency to the long-standing policy regarding polygamous children. Again, I had had some reservations about the latter, but if that was going to be the policy I didn’t see why the rationales wouldn’t have also applied to children of same-sex couples given the unique intersectional issues at play.  Now, some could argue that there are fundamental differences-in-kind vis-a-vis our 2023 doctrine between polygamous and same-sex couples, and there might be, but I just don’t care. They’re simply irrelevant to the argument that was being invoked by the policy’s detractors, which hinged on the idea that the children were being punished for the sins of their parents.  This argument always smelled a little of bad faith since a lot of the people making it clearly did not believe that the parents were, in fact, in a state of sin, but the bad faith became even more clear when the polygamy policy that the rule was based on seemed…

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Book Reviews, Church History

George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy: A Review

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George Q. Cannon: Politician, Publisher, Apostle of Polygamy by Kenneth L. Cannon II is an entry in the Signature Books brief biographies series focused on one of the most influential and best-known Latter-day Saints in the 19th century. As a missionary, publisher, representative for Utah Territory to the United States Congress, businessman, apostle, and long-term First Presidency member, he accomplished a lot during his lifetime. The brief biographies are essentially a Latter-day Saint version of the Penguin Lives series that was published by the Penguin Random House and Viking Press–short, accessible biographies of notable individuals. At 250 pages (plus index material), this George Q. Cannon biography pushes the bounds of “brief”, but the subject led such a big life and left so many records of his efforts and accomplishments that it is understandable why it didn’t fit into 100-150 pages.

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