- Chad Nielsen on Church Education Expansion Under Ernest Wilkinson: “These were major themes of the published journal, which is why it was the focus on this interview. We did one that covered broader topics with him last year, though.” Oct 28, 21:57
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “Sterling, I’ll see your “Nephite foreign dynasty” theory and raise you a “The book of Alma is largely a sanitized retelling of a Mulekite popular religious and political movement in opposition to the unpopular Nephite foreign dynasty.”” Oct 28, 20:03
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “Along with Sterling’s comment, I might add that the Jaredites are similarly enigmatic. On a surface reading, they would appear to have nearly no connection to the rest of the Book of Mormon narrative. But then you have these vague hints all over the place about records and engraved stones and piles of bones and even a contemporary survivor, and it raises unanswerable questions about how much more might be going on with them.” Oct 28, 18:54
- on Church Education Expansion Under Ernest Wilkinson: “I don’t quite get the point of this interview. Wilkinson was an extremely important person for the development of the Church’s universities and educational system, but the interview only talks about the parts of his plans that were thwarted.” Oct 28, 18:49
- on Church Education Expansion Under Ernest Wilkinson: “I’m not sure about books, even edited letters, that largely gloss over Wilkinson’s history at BYU. In my opinion, he did much harm to the University and CES. He had no concept of how to run a major university, or what a university should be. He was manipulative and condescending. He set up a system of spy’s on campus, encouraged tattletaling. He wanted the tithing records of staff members; he wanted their tithing deducted from their checks. The religion department was full rightwing extremist. He was also famous for manipulative lobbying with the Church President and G15. Wilkinson viewed higher education as an innoculator not a way to encourage independent thought. He was an autocrat, not a consensus builder.” Oct 28, 18:39
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “RLD: I think there may be even more political intrigue beneath Mormon’s narration than you’ve suggested, particularly involving the relationship between the Nephites and Mulekites. When Mosiah(1) arrived in Zarahemla, the Mulekites apparently constituted the majority population, yet the Nephites assumed control of both the monarchy and religious institutions. Mosiah 25:13 is especially revealing: the people of Zarahemla were numbered among the Nephites because “the kingdom had been conferred upon none but those who were descendants of Nephi.” This raises questions about how the descendants of Zarahemla, including those who may have traced their ancestry to the royal house of Judah through Mulek, regarded their political subordination. Ammon’s identification as a descendant of Zarahemla in Mosiah 7:3 might therefore be more significant than it initially appears. Was he a member of a surviving Mulekite aristocracy? If so, sending him to recover a lost Nephite colony could have served several political purposes simultaneously: accommodating Mulekite elites by entrusting one of their own with a prestigious mission, distancing a potential rival from Zarahemla, and perhaps avoiding the appearance that Mosiah was personally interested in restoring a competing Nephite monarchy. I also find Ammon’s reaction to his imprisonment intriguing. In Mosiah 7:13, he tells Limhi that had he known who Ammon was, he would never have placed him in bonds. Could this reflect a consciousness of elevated political or genealogical status? There is also a certain irony in a descendant of Zarahemla being dispatched to the ancestral homeland of the Nephites, only to encounter another monarchy whose legitimacy rested partly on popular selection (Mosiah 7:9). This raises a larger question about the subsequent abolition of monarchy under Mosiah(2). If Mulekite elites retained memories of their own royal ancestry, did the establishment of the reign of judges eliminate their remaining hopes of recovering kingship? Might some of the later movements to restore monarchy, particularly the king-men described in Alma 51, have drawn upon unresolved tensions between the descendants of Nephi and Zarahemla? The text never explicitly establishes such a connection, but its references to high birth, hereditary privilege, and competing claims to political authority make the possibility worth considering. Even the later identification of Coriantumr as a descendant of Zarahemla (Helaman 1:15) suggests that Mulekite ancestry remained sufficiently meaningful to warrant preservation in the narrative. None of this establishes that Ammon was a political rival or that the king-men represented a Mulekite faction. But it does raise the possibility that Mormon’s seemingly incidental genealogical details preserve traces of a much longer struggle over political legitimacy within a society whose majority population had been incorporated into a ruling Nephite identity. Your interpretation of Mosiah’s maneuvering may be one glimpse of that larger, largely untold history.” Oct 28, 17:13
- on Church Education Expansion Under Ernest Wilkinson: “In seminary in Rexburg in the late 60s/early 70’s, I was told that the reason we were so wicked was that our parents were being punished for fighting the move of Ricks College from Rexburg to Idaho Falls. Supposedly someone had prophesied that their vehement disagreement with Church authorities would result in their children going astray.” Oct 28, 11:17
- on Church Education Expansion Under Ernest Wilkinson: “Though the Junior College program didn’t work out, there was a silver lining to it. The land that the Church bought in Portland Oregon for a junior college in the Pacific Northwest proved to be the perfect place for the Portland Oregon Temple to be constructed on a few decades later.” Oct 28, 08:30
- on Reading the New Testament on Its Own Terms: A Review of Alex Douglas’s The New Testament for Latter-day Saints: “Well, I haven’t read this and I likely won’t but you won’t convince me by saying “Toward Understanding the New Testament” was a book that “laid essential groundwork.” That is one of the worst books on the NT I have ever had the misfortune to read. Even if you set aside it’s completely skeptical, non-believing stance (it spends way too much time explaining away the miracles), it’s scholarship was 30 years or more out of date when it came out. Despite a handful of references to recent (at the time) scholarship, it was basically a work of pre-1950s New Testament scholarship.” Oct 27, 18:28
- on Latter-day Saint Apologetics Tier List: “Under Book of Mormon complexity, one thing I find compelling is that the drivers of important plot points are sometimes never explained. Fiction writers don’t do that. Zeniff’s effort to recolonize the Land of Nephi was in defiance of the prophetic command given to King Mosiah(1) for the Nephites to leave that land. Nothing goes right for long, even for Alma’s repentant people, until they obey that commandment and return to Zarahemla. This would have been a classic place for some “And thus we see…” commentary from Mormon, but he never says it. Maybe he didn’t want to bring out that the Nephite Church was started among an apostate people. You have to look at the story as a whole and connect it back to previous history to see it. King Mosiah(2) strongly opposes sending anyone to the Land of Nephi to check on the people who went there. Apparently he fears that this will stir up the desire to return (even Captain Moroni is briefly tempted by it). The time when the people demand that he send an expedition is described as the end of a period of peace. When they finally force his hand, he very cleverly puts a descendent of Zarahemla in charge, not a Nephite, even though this is Nephite business. Ammon(1) has no emotional ties to the Land of Nephi and is not at all tempted to stay there. It wouldn’t surprise me if the whole expedition was made up of Mulekites. Mormon dutifully records that Ammon was chosen, but doesn’t say anything about the significance of the choice. Maybe he didn’t recognize it. For a fiction writer, this would have been one of the highlights of Mosiah’s story: how he outmaneuvered his opponents and helped bring all the Nephites home to Zarahemla where they belonged.” Oct 27, 09:50
