Author: Stephen C
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The Restored Gospel, the Great Apostasy, and the Didache
About a year ago I read and wrote a post on 1st Clement, arguably the earliest Christian document outside of the New Testament. I finally got around to reading the Didache, a Christian treatise that is also in the running for oldest authentic Christian document after the apostles (the confidence intervals for the documents coming…
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Sociology of Religion Terms and the Restored Gospel
Sacred Canopy Coined by sociologist of religion Peter Berger, a Sacred Canopy is a religiously-driven common worldview in a community. Where the very literal protective interdiction of St. Christopher on your daily drive, the daily calls to prayer, or a testimony of the Book of Mormon, are all part of a taken-for-granted worldview that seems…
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Latter-day Saint Book Review: The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley
Psychedelics are having quite the moment right now, with many people claiming, or at least implying that they can provide a chemical shortcut to the kind of numinous affect that has traditionally been the purview of conventional religious practice, whether it’s praying in the celestial room while fasting, focusing on the Eucharist in a perpetual…
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When We Are Proselytized by Others
About a year ago my oldest sons were invited by some of their classmates to play volleyball at one of the local Korean Christian churches. We got there…and there was no volleyball, just an eager-looking freshman sitting in front with a Bible. Of course, coming from a proselytizing faith ourselves, we knew exactly what was…
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Declining Confidence in Religion and Other Institutions
I’m increasingly appreciating that one of the side-benefits of being a TS permablogger is that it provides a nice place to park my graphs and insights that don’t make it through the editors with my other work. On that note, my draft of a recent Deseret News article of mine was built around this graph.…
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“It’s just Violence” Why I Think Sex Actually is Worse than Violence in Movies
When members of a certain stripe are discussing whether a movie is appropriate despite its R-rating it’s common to say “it’s just violence” (or another one: “there are a handful of F-bombs”). It’s also routine for members of a different stripe to bemoan the fact that sex is considered the be-all for appropriateness in movies…
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Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, November 2025
Griffin, Brenton. “‘Neutral in Matters of Party Politics’?: The Uneasy Place of The Mormon Church within Commonwealth Politics.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History(2025): 1-15. This current debate historicises and scrutinises the claim of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church, in regards to its stance…
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Black Hole Cosmology and the Book of Abraham
[Note: I know that in my last post I noted that, pursuant to Elder Gong’s counsel on this, I wouldn’t be posting any more AI depictions of deity, but this post was in the queue before I was aware of the Gong talk, so this will be my last AI depiction of deity.] One of…
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Latest AI Updates and the Church
There have been several big AI advancements since I last wrote on the subject. Gemini 3, the frontier model from Google, was just released. The coding and writing is noticeably, but incrementally better (since they’re releasing models quicker there aren’t any huge jumps anymore like there was from GPT 3.0 to 3.5), but where it…
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1860 Utah Had Fewer Skilled and Educated Workers than Almost Any Other State/Territory in the US
TLDR: The occasional art missionary to Europe or groundbreaking female doctor notwithstanding, a few years after the “Utah War” we were still pretty much a people of farmers and day-laborers with hardly any middle-class or educated professions. It’s hard to compare the relative economies of different states and territories in the 19th century, because the…
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Believing Blood is Probably a Real Thing
In Latter-day Saint thought and history the idea of “believing blood” has racial connotations. The traditional “believing blood” theological model that is (rightfully, in my view) criticized by thinkers such as Armand Mauss in his book All Abraham’s Children goes something like this: certain ethnicities and nations are more amenable to the gospel message because…
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Non-Member Callings and Part-Member Families
In my ward growing up one of the scoutmasters was a non-member father of one of the boys in the troop. This was one of the nice side-benefits of the Church’s involvement in the Boy Scouts: it was the perfect calling for the non-member husband of an interfaith couple who wanted to be involved with…
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Church Civil Wars, Liberalization, and Africa
I’ve already addressed at length, both here and elsewhere, the idea held in some “direction of history” circles that the Church will inevitably wholly embrace the gender and sexuality positions on the left, with all the up- and down-stream implications of that (in some versions, after so- and so- passes away, after Uchtdorf becomes President,…
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Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, October 2025
I usually don’t provide any additional commentary for these, but the Anderson et al., study below showing that Latter-day Saints didn’t receive the COVID vaccinations any more than average provides some support for my earlier conjecture that the President of the Church actually doesn’t have a lot of influence when it comes to member attitudes…
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Music of the Gods
Western music became much more rich when we moved from simple, monophonic Gregorian chants to multiple lines of melody (polyphony), allowing interplay among the different lines. Nowadays Gregorian chants are still admired by more traditionalist Catholics and Middle Age junkies, and if you listen to a Gregorian Chant channel on Spotify it’s kind of interesting…
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Nobody Likes Us
I ran across this post from the incomparable Ryan Burge the other day that confirmed something I’ve suspected: neither the left nor the right like us. Occasionally Latter-day Saint liberals love to point out that, despite our political alliance of convenience with the right, we’re not their favorite. They’ll hold their noses and take…
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Masculine Fidelity and Sexual Propriety in the Media
Often our cultural paradigms for fidelity and sexual propriety are, frankly, seemingly low-testosterone, low-sociosexuality cases. Of course Mr. Rogers is going to be faithful to his wife (although I don’t claim any knowledge of his T-count). Or all those skinny Mr. Darcy-type, regency period love interests that Mormon women are obsessed with (another post for…
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What Does Hollywood Think About Latter-day Saints?
How we’re perceived in popular culture is one of those questions that usually devolve into anecdote slinging, with all the biases inherent in what we remember or are in a position to experience. Recently I ran across a “corpus,” or a dataset, of scripts in movies. Specifically, the Baskin Lab at UC Santa Cruz keeps…
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The Ancient Greek Endowment
I’ve already written at great length about how the Latter-day Saint temple ceremonies tap into various primal archetypes, and how that might relate to its Masonic connections. Again, the point isn’t to score some kind of point in favor of the Church’s truth claims, but, in a sense more interestingly, to appreciate the universality and…
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Mormon Austins: Blue Islands and Swing Precincts Across the Mormon Corridor
VoteHub just came out with what is probably the best political data visualization dashboard I’ve seen. It allows you to dive into the precinct level results, and shades it by margins and not just who won, so we can literally see the geographic gradients as we shift from more Democrat areas to more Republican areas.…
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Bizarre Brain Conditions and What They Mean For the Gospel
When it comes to our sense of self some of the most, I won’t say problematizing, but let’s say nuancing phenomena are brain injuries and lesions that lead to bizarre neurological conditions (at least for us dualists who believe that there is a soul that is greater than the sum of our brain’s biomechanical parts). …
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Cutting Edge Latter-day Saint Research, September 2025
Gavin, Sherrie, and Jo Coghlan. “Mormon Barbie: A Critical Examination of the Male Gaze, Ideology, and Parallel Representations.” In The Barbie Phenomenon, Volume 1, pp. 131-141. Routledge, 2026.
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The Fifth Family
Like many I’ve been constantly refreshing news and Twitter feeds over the past couple of days, going back and forth between the deadening horror of it all. I don’t know if I have a lot to add to the other moving and profound takes that I’ve already seen, but one dimension to this that I…
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Will Immigration Save Religion in the US?
As some of you know, I occasionally write a column for the Deseret News. My recent one dropped right around the time of the Charlie Kirk shooting, so I doubt hardly anybody read it, but it actually has some interesting insights in regards to immigration and religiosity in the US. Among other things, I point…
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Missionary Numbers are Peaking and Will Start to Decline
There’s something comfortable and fun about the kind armchair predictions about the future that are either too vague to be falsifiable or too far in the future for anybody to hold you to account. It’s a little nervy to make a concrete, falsifiable prediction in the near future, so I do so with some trepidation,…
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Childless Church Members and the LDS Fertility Advantage
I kind of like the speculative theology that people who do not have the ability to raise children in this life, whether through death, accident, or lack of opportunity, will be able to in the next. The TLDR: Latter-day Saint women are less likely to be childless than non-Latter-day Saint women. Specifically, we’ve gone from…
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Promotion to High Priest by Age
Note: I tried to delay this post because of the Charlie Kirk shooting, but it’s somehow not shifting it for mobile devices and I don’t know how to fix that, so I’m leaving it up. On the shooting, I really don’t have anything to say that isn’t already being said all over the Internet. As…
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My Experience Fasting For a Week
A few weeks ago I finished a weeklong fast where I lived on water and a homemade electrolyte mixture (pinch of magnesium, salt, and potassium chloride) for a week (with the occasional diet sports drink). I had done a 48-hour fast before, but this was my first longer one. To address the obvious “why would…
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Are Latter-day Saint Women Happy, Healthy, and Thriving?
Originally published in SquareTwo, Vol. 18 No. 2 (Summer 2025) Note: After working on this piece I realized that Janet Erickson, Justin Dyer, and Barbara Morgan Gardner, all at BYU, did a similar piece for the the Deseret News using the PRLS to look at the happiness of LDS women here. Recently I posted a…
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Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, August 2025
Coltri, Marzia A. “Modest Fashion: Global Perspectives on Identity and Culture.” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review (2025). This article examines modest fashion as a dynamic cultural phenomenon spanning diverse religious traditions, including Islam, Judaism (with a specific focus on Hasidic women’s dress), Christianity, Mormonism, New Buddhist dress practices, New Religious Movements (NRMs), and Rastafari culture.…