Welcome to the oft delayed sixth chapter of the once weekly reading club for Adam Miller’s Future Mormon. Hopefully we’ll get back to weekly again. For general links related to the book along with links for all the chapter discussions please…
Messianism as Ethical Futurism – Reading Nephi – 19:7-17
Nephi’s eclectic messianism can be read as prophesying an ethical futurism.
The Death of the Newspaper
I know the travails of the Salt Lake Tribune and then smaller papers like the Daily Herald in Provo and the Ogden Examiner don’t seem directly LDS related. However all these papers, along with the Deseret News, tend to cover…
To Every Man is Given a Free Gift
In D&C 46:11 we read, “there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God.” I’ve long taken that to mean that literally every person on earth has a spiritual gift, if they’ll…
Review Essay: “The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology”: Materiality and Performance
Like a paring knife to a grapefruit, Jonathan Stapley’s new book on the history of Mormon cosmology is slim, sharp, and swift to carve through pith, serving up elegant wedges of history. The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology…
Bridewealth and gospel: an African quandary?
In his recent world tour President Russell Nelson visited Kenya and spoke about a specific cultural custom in Kenya, the bridewealth or bride price. President Nelson called it ‘dowry’, which is technically incorrect, but that is not the issue I…
Starting With Faith…
Over at Faith Promoting Rumor G Wesley has up a post critiquing BYU’s scholarship. The main bone of contention was a talk by Elder Bednar regarding scholarship at LDS schools. Wesley responds that BYU should “first and foremost places set…
Engraving a Record, Engraving a People – Reading Nephi – 19:1-6
All my life I’ve imagined the Book of Lehi—those tragically lost 116 pages—as having been written by Lehi. But the Book of Lehi was engraven on plates
The Bread of Life, with Chocolate Chips
Today I am pleased to present a guest post from a good friend of the blog, Samuel Morris Brown. I learned to cook when my wife was recovering from cancer surgery. There’s a hollowness, kindred to cancer, hungry to swallow…
What’s in a Name? – Reading Nephi – 18:23-19:1
This post is part of a series of reflections on I Nephi. If you’re interested, the introduction to the series is here. To peruse earlier entries, click the authors tab at the top of the page and then click on my name.…
Where is the wedding?
This post is about ritual, not doctrine, so it is about the form of worship, not its theology. I will use the word ‘ritual’ for all formalized forms of worship, Mormon and other, even if we use ‘ordinances’ in our…
Loving my Prosperity Gospel
The term “prosperity gospel” describes an execrable set of ideas in American Christianity, chiefly that wealth is a marker of righteousness, and that believers can ensure material wealth and prosperity through spiritual practices. But “prosperity gospel” is often applied to…
A Simple Religion
You’ve probably noticed I’ve not been around much of late. I was fighting off a case of the flu which seemed to be persisting a tad long. I figured it might be a secondary lung infection as I was also…
10 Questions with Spencer Fluhman
Continuing our work with the 10 Questions team, we are pleased to present Kurt Manwaring’s interview with Spencer Fluhman, Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU and an editor of “To Be Learned is Good: Essays on…
That time President Nelson released me from the pulpit
One week before general conference I got up in High Priest Group and conducted the meeting for the first time. We’d moved into the ward six months ago and I’d just been called as the new group leader. Sunday the…
10 Questions with Jonathan Stapley
As part of our work with the 10 Questions team, we will be posting later this week on Kurt Manwaring’s upcoming interview with the Maxwell Institute’s Spencer Fluhman. In the meantime, however, we thought we would highlight a great interview…
Fusion
Meeting with my ward high priests group has been one of my favorite parts of the week for several years.
Maxwell Institute Giveaway
To promote #10questions interviews about “To Be Learned is Good” with Richard Bushman, @spencerfluhman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and @patrickqmason, @MI_BYU is sponsoring a book giveaway. FOLLOW & RT on Twitter by April 5 for a chance to WIN A FREE…
Easter Conference
Based on a talk given this Sunday in sacrament meeting. This year, Easter and General Conference are on the same day, which illustrates how we measure time in multiple ways.
Failed Revolutions and Failed Patriarchs – Reading Nephi – 18:17-22
This post is part of a series of reflections on I Nephi. If you’re interested, the introduction to the series is here. To peruse earlier entries, click the authors tab at the top of the page and then click on my name.…
Flourishing Amidst the Storm – Reading Nephi – 18:9-16
Murmuring undermines one’s relationship with God and one’s ability to cope either with the storms of the cosmos or the wounds inflicted by our family members.
Stating the Obvious: The World
In the current unhappy state of online Mormon discourse, stating the obvious is sometimes controversial, and for that reason all the more necessary.
SMPT at Utah State Univ. Next Weekend: The Exaltation Revelations
The Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology will be meeting at Utah State on Friday-Saturday, March 16-17, with a focus on “The Exaltation Revelations,” D&C 76, 84, 88, and 93. The program includes talks on divine justice, the potentially universal…
Review: William V. Smith’s ‘Textual Studies of the Doctrine & Covenants’
In October 2007, I returned home to Texas from my mission in Nevada. In April of the following year, the raid on the YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, TX, occurred. I didn’t think much about it at the time because, you…
Driven Towards the Promised Land – Reading Nephi – 18:1-8
“And they did worship the Lord”—that’s the conclusion to the whole row. I wonder at it. What was the change?
Call for Papers: 2018 Book of Mormon Studies Conference
10 Questions with Grow and Smith
As part of our work with the 10 Questions team I’m proud to announce their interview with Matthew J. Grow and R. Eric Smith, editors of The Council of Fifty. The council of 50 is one of the more mysterious…
Some Thoughts on WordPrint
Just a quick post on the current kerfuffle over wordprint studies. Wordprint studies are a type of stylometry that look at certain connective words that aren’t main words in a sentence. The claim is that they can determine the authorship…
Win the Battle, Lose the War – Reading Nephi – 17:48-55
The eternal cosmological drama in which we’re embedded demands that we work to reflect the divinity of our enemies back to them if we wish them to join with us in our Zionic alliance of apotheosis. And whether we do, that is what we ought to wish.
Hell Part 2: Lake of Fire and Brimstone
Back when I first was invited to join T&S I started doing a series on Hell in the Book of Mormon. This is the long delayed follow up. Last time I discussed the three broad categories of how hell has…