My post a few days ago looked at whether members of the Church in the US reported a lower likelihood of identifying as “divorced” than non-members in Pew data. However, afterwards some friends raised valid concerns about the fact that remarried…
“All these things shall give thee experience and shall be for thy good”
For a long time, I underestimated the depth of the trauma experienced by the Latter-day Saints in Missouri and the impact that it had on their psyche. I think I started to grasp it more when I was researching for…
Are Latter-day Saint Marriages More Stable?
Various researchers have addressed this question with older (pre-2010 data), and have shown that in general Latter-day Saints have lower divorce rates, but what about more recent years? The largest (relatively) recent survey of Latter-day Saints is the 2014 Pew…
“Adam shall come to visit”
Charles Darwin’s niece once told her son (the famed British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) that: “The Bible says that God made the world in six days, Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it,…
A Summary of the Arrington Mormon History Lecture: “A Marvelous Work: Reading Mormonism in West Africa”
What does Mormonism look like when reconstructed from texts in a non-American cultural context? The self-styled Mormon Churches that developed in West Africa during the 1960s and 1970s (prior to the lifting of the priesthood and temple ban on individuals…
Is Church Growth Declining?
I’m a Church growth amateur; occasionally I enjoy dropping by Matt Martinich’s blog to look at the latest temple predictions, and I’ll often skim through headlines about the latest data point on Church growth and what it means. However, for…
“They saw the Lord”
What does Jesus look like? It’s a question that we can only guess the answer to or speculate about, but one that does come up in a religion that embraces using artistic depictions of members of the Godhead. In general,…
“To ordain and set in order all the other officers of the church”
Section 107 has one of the more complicated histories out of the documents presented in the Doctrine and Covenants. It is not a single revelation, but rather a few that were compiled together and expanded in significant ways, with the…
“I the Lord have suffered the affliction to come upon them”
During an episode of the popular British Sci-Fi show, Doctor Who, the titular character confronts a woman who has engaged in a series of witch hunts in seventeenth century Britain. The witch hunter explains her view that she is required…
Are We Going to Be Able to Buy the Kirtland Temple?
I’ve always been fascinated with sacred real estate disputes, and we certainly have our own. The most salient–the American “Temple Mount”–is probably the Temple Lot in Independence, the story of which makes for fascinating reading: a geographically precise, small plot…
Waiting For Saints 3
Three years ago this month, Saints, Volume 1: The Standard of Truth, 1815-1846 was published. Saints, Volume 2: No Unhallowed Hand, 1846-1893 followed about a year-and-a-half later in February 2020. If later volumes had followed the same cadence for releases,…
Terryl Givens on Eugene England
In general, the people who are in a position to be most influential in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been official Church leaders. That’s not always the case, however, since there are a number of members…
A plea for opacity
It’s the ecclesiology, stupid.
“The constitution of this Land”
The attitude of Latter-day Saints towards the United States government has historically been paradoxical. As Dale Morgan wrote: “The Mormons had a profound respect for government and governmental forms, but disrespect for and outright distrust of ‘the damned rascals who…
“Concerning the building of mine house”
The temples of the early Latter Day Saint movement were a place where several strands of Joseph Smith’s theology and doctrine were braided together. In the summer of 1833 (in the revelations we are studying this week for “Come, Follow…
The hundred billion dollar question
The stakes in the 2024 election couldn’t be higher.
Archeology, Ceramics, and the Smith Family in Tunbridge
In addition to written records, people leave behind traces of their material lives that can tell us much about who they were. In a recent interview with Kurt Manwaring, Mark Staker (a Master Curator for the Church History Department’s Historic…
“That you may understand and know”
“The world is changed. … Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. … And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and…
Ruf aus der Wüste 6: Appendix
Orson Hyde asks people to read his book. Or else.
“A word of wisdom for the benefit of the Saints”
One of the paradoxes about the Word of Wisdom is that the name (drawn from the opening line of the text from the 27 February 1833 revelation) indicates that it is good advice while it’s treated as a commandment in…
Is the Church Replacing Itself in the United States? Population Momentum and its Capacity to Hide Decline
The following is Stephen Cranny’s fourth guest post here at Times & Seasons. Stephen Cranney is a Washington DC-based data scientist and Non-Resident Fellow at Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. He has produced over 20 peer-reviewed articles and…
Historical Mindset for Mormons, 101
While studying in a scientific field, two major ideas were drilled into me that have been fairly helpful in interpreting history. First is the belief that nothing can ever truly be proved, only that things can be disproved. If something…
“This is the light of Christ“
As one of Joseph Smith’s largest revelations, Doctrine and Covenants, Section 88 (or, as Joseph Smith called it, “the Olieve leaf which we have plucked from the tree of Paradise”) has a lot of different talking points. As historian Richard…
Ruf aus der Wüste 5.5: Hyde’s police report
Orson Hyde might be protesting too much here.
So You Want to Talk About Polygamy?
I’ve long had an interest in understanding how and why my ancestors chose to practice polygamy. During my time at Utah State University, I spent most of my spare time reading Mormon Studies materials and went on a polygamy binge…
Joseph F. Merrill—Science, Religion, and Innovation
Joseph F. Merrill is an apostle who has largely been forgotten but who, nevertheless, left a major impact on the Church that remains a part of its DNA to this day. Kurt Manwaring recently sat down for an interview with…
“These two Priesthoods”
Words can be a bit slippery, particularly when we use them in different ways over time. Take, for example, the use of the word “ordinance” in the Church. In its most basic sense, an ordinance is an authoritative order; a…
Ruf aus der Wüste 5.4: Hyde on Illinois
For Hyde, Zion has been displaced, but not deferred.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign has been an area of interest for several years now (particularly since the release of the Council of Fifty minutes), and Spencer W. McBride’s recently-published Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight…
“This is Elias”
In both the Vision studied recently (D&C 76) and the first revelation studied this week (D&C 77) there is a mysterious figure referenced as Elias. Throughout the remainder of his ministry, Joseph Smith would use this name-title to refer to…