- Andrew Jensen on What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2: “I have watched the fear and “prepperism” that Visions of Glory has in many of its readers. This issue should be addressed. I have good friends who are now cashing out their 401k’s to hunker down in preparation for the Second Coming. Others have moved away from Utah, which apparently will be the epicenter of destruction, leaving their friends and family behind. I have some serious concerns about this book.” Feb 1, 14:34
- on What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2: “That’s super interesting, Jonathan, thanks. The more concrete the prophecy, the riskier. I hadn’t thought about the impact that recency has on risk as well.” Feb 1, 13:41
- on What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2: “Kendall, I’m just thinking about the visionary texts and popular prophecies from my research. It’s common to talk about how a text constructs its own authority, but with this kind of material, another strategy is to diminish their own authority. A text that successfully claims to record a vision of urgent importance for the whole world can contribute to the author getting canonized, but if it fails, the text gets suppressed or declared heretical and potentially multiple people end up in trouble. So raising the stakes is a high-risk strategy that often doesn’t pay off. On the other hand, a text can instead claim to have been recorded long ago in a distant land or make other moves to lower the stakes of its authenticity. It might still seem interesting and relevant to the current situation, but represent less of a potential challenge to whoever certifies textual acceptability. It’s never going to get mass distribution as canonical literature, but it has a better chance of avoiding censure. And to get back to your question, I think it’s a lot harder for a living human being to pull off the low-stakes strategy. It’s hard to say you’re seeing visions of the afterlife without implicitly making the claim that you have extremely valuable information that everyone should listen to. It’s hard to avoid raising all the concerns RLD mentions. I haven’t read VoG so I can’t say much about it specifically, but if it had claimed to have been recorded in the 19th century and to have been discovered only recently, my guess is that it probably could have avoided a good amount of controversy.” Feb 1, 12:14
- on What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2: “bhbardo, your questioning the universal applicability of a person’s revelation rings for me. Strange religious experiences are foundational to many people’s connections to God, and being flexible as you’re arguing takes pressure off us for demanding authenticity. RLD, thanks for the comments. Aliens and the gospel _does_ sound fun! The truth is Church members and leaders *alike* wrestle with revelation and uncertainty. Joseph Smith exhibits this throughout D&C (e.g. 46:7). Wilford Woodruff felt inspired to enact the 1890 manifesto, while simultaneously doubting it as a revelation. Jonathan, can you say more about the difference between the urgency of a personal encounter vs. a recorded manifestation?” Feb 1, 09:58
- on What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2: “I suspect that most revelations and visions, including canonized ones, including the first vision, only give us an infinitesimal glimpse. And the light from that sliver, we necessarily perceive it according to our own understandings and dispositions. It may feel so real, that we assume it must be universal and want to proclaim it far and wide, when really it’s tailored to us, to help us learn our next line or precept. I can believe that none of the descriptions in D&C 130 are literal, while still believing that they are true and finding meaning and learning. Sometimes, to our peril, we forget the nature of symbolism.” Feb 1, 00:03
- on What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2: “Translatio imperii culminating in Deseret. Great stuff. RLD, I’d qualify that a bit. If a person is claiming to receive revelation, then it does present an urgent problem of authenticity. But if some form of media claims to record revelation, people are pretty capable of treating it as interesting, while deferring any decision about its authenticity.” Jan 31, 23:36
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, January 2025: “It’s not just this time. There are usually at least a few articles of this type each month. The pattern is pretty noticeable. It’s a real problem that a substantial segment of academic research (and not just about the Church and related topics) is motivated by disdain or even disgust for its subject.” Jan 31, 23:32
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, January 2025: “Yeah, there’s definitely a defect/cooperate game theory dynamic going in some disciplines. In order to advance in those disciplines you have to do that dance, but on the whole the more those disciplines essentially become seminaries for a particular ideological worldview the less relevant they are to the real world, so they’re sort of in a doom spiral.” Jan 31, 15:32
- on Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, January 2025: “Gonna agree with Mark, this batch is not very impressive. I’m just going off the abstracts here, so take it with a grain of salt, but it just seems like…renamings. No new data is being given, things are just being renamed, a new frame imposed. The church is being translated and its attack surfaces made legible to the academic left. Take the first one for instance. The late Elder Holland’s speech backfired, in the author’s interpretation, in part from an “abuse of the power differential”, but I don’t know how any preaching that does not explictly affirm its subject could be distinguished from that. Preaching invariably involves a power differential insofar as the preacher has some degree of authority stemming from institutional or doctrinal structure. Preaching is just getting renamed as a target for deconstruction. The same is true of the “garments also function as a tool of social control that shapes behavior and reinforces conformity around sexuality.” Yes…the garments are explicitly a didactic tool, a reminder of promises made and principles to be kept. Their purpose is to shape behavior and reinforce adherence to a standard, or “conformity” as the authors put it. There isn’t any new content here, just the imposition of a new frame. The authors have renamed the function of garments, using phrasing that marks it as a target for deconstruction. Somehow I don’t think “redefine and disassemble our internal social structures” is what most taxpaying citizens think they’re getting out of the funding deal between academia and the state.” Jan 31, 14:14
- on What Can We Learn from Visions of Glory? Part 2: “Stephen and I must have been writing at the same time and my final parenthetical was not meant to dismiss his question about boundaries. I do think it’s pretty straightforward though. I’m always down to discuss what the gospel tells us about aliens. I could imagine writing a fictional story based on my speculation. You could then evaluate whether you think I got it right. I could even publish it. If told you to keep it quiet, but I’d received a revelation about aliens, you should be skeptical. But it might be true. If you asked me if you could publish my revelation about aliens to the Church and I said yes, you should think “Uh oh, this person either doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept how revelation actually works. I’ll bet his revelation isn’t real anyway.” Real revelation to the Church comes through established channels and follows established procedures. If you think the Holy Ghost is telling you to publish my revelation to the Church, you’re wrong. If I claim a General Authority told me I could publish it to the Church, I’m wrong. Maybe it was a misunderstanding, or maybe I’m being deceptive. In the unlikely event a General Authority actually said it, he didn’t have the authority to do so and it’s still meaningless. Every member of the Church knows, or ought to know, 1) who they can receive revelation for, and 2) who can receive revelation for them. Any purported revelation that breaks those rules, whether it’s personal or something like Visions of Glory, is a mistake. We all make mistakes, even about revelation we receive, and those rules limit the consequences of our mistakes.” Jan 31, 12:01
