- Kent Larsen on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “In case it wasn’t clear, I mentioned the two journals I did because they are NOT in google scholar.” Sep 4, 15:47
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “To add to the anecdotes, the people I’m seeing struggle the most are in mental health fields, like psychology and social work. With the Joseph Fielding Smith/Bruce R. McConkie era firmly behind us, church members aren’t expected to believe anything about the world that’s contradicted by modern science. Yes, we believe in things for which there’s very little generally accepted evidence: Nephites, obviously, but also the resurrection and God himself. But that’s very different from being told your religion says the world is 7,000 years old while geology says it’s 4.5 billion years old, and you have to choose between them. A young member can now study biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. without ever being taught something that argues against their faith. Scientific fields that study people, individually or collectively, and then draw conclusions (as they should!) about how people should live or how society should function are another matter. The gap between what the church says and what the academy says isn’t as wide as some members suppose–the sociologists I work with generally agree that stable two-parent families are best for children and adults, for example–but LGBT issues and gender in general are huge areas of conflict. So it makes sense to me that while a university education in general does not reduce young members’ faithfulness, an education in certain fields has a good chance of doing so.” Sep 4, 14:51
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “Kent Larsen: It seems like the Google Scholar sieve is pretty fine; much of my time with these is spent filtering out essays, websites, non-peer reviewed dissertations, etc., so if you’re an actual journal (and as we’ve discussed I’m very loose with that term) and you’re *not* getting indexed by GS you could really go a long way by figuring that out. But yes, if anybody has a more efficient way to comprehensively catch the latest articles/books I’m open to it. Mark Ashurst-McGee: I’m thinking about it, but I’m a good enough friend of Walker’s I might need to recuse myself.” Sep 3, 11:54
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “Alex Bass crunched some numbers on the BYU/Not BYU retention split (except I’m seeing that now now it’s paywalled). https://mormonmetrics.com/p/the-byu-effect?utm_source=publication-search. I think he found that there was a positive BYU effect.” Sep 3, 11:43
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “The blog apparently interpreted my “unequal” symbols as question marks” Sep 3, 11:01
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “To mirror JTB, in my *extremely* annecdotal experience, I can’t think of any youth in my recent wards who have skipped college and gone directly into the workforce, so my observations pertain to college-bound youth. Of those, perhaps 75% went to a BYU campus. And of those, approximately 50% have chosen to outwardly disaffiliate with the faith after graduation. (Inward distancing occurred much earlier but often after the start of their college career.) Most who chose non-BYU schools are still active members. I haven’t attempted to quantify any of this or go through every youth name by name, but I’ve been frequently surprised by the number of BYU students I know who chose to leave. Usual caveats: anecdote ? data and correlation ? causation.” Sep 3, 10:58
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “I should point out that relying solely on Google Scholar is probably not a great practice — For example BYU’s Literature and Belief journal usually has an LDS-related article in it, but it is NOT indexed anywhere (for reasons that are beyond my understanding). I also wonder about journals like “Latter-day Saint Historical Studies” — I don’t know what’s in it (everything recent is behind a paywall) or even if there is a recent issue. My point is that we have some holes that need to be filled.” Sep 3, 10:28
- on Seeing Responsibility in our Meetings (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 8/30: “RLD, that’s wonderful. FWIW, my wife also taught a bootcamp for incoming grad students (medical sciences) recently. In her case it was 8 hours a day for 5 days. In contrast, in my grad program in English there was no bootcamp whatsoever. I could have used one. As for “who is responsible for us having a good experience at church”, I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression — I’m trying to say that everyone involved has responsibility. I want local leaders to “sweat bullets” over who is giving a talk or treaching a lesson. But I also want those in the audience to be responsible and find ways of making our meetings useful, instead of blaming everything on the speakers and the leaders.” Sep 3, 10:23
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2026: “Stephen, I’d love to see you review / get your take on that second book.” Sep 3, 10:08
- on The Kids are All Right: Church Activity, the Youth, and the Best and the Brightest: “A Southern department where 1/4 are LDS? Very different from my experience! But that’s really cool.” Sep 3, 07:53
