I sometimes think that when we consider the visit of John the Baptist to Joseph and Oliver (the main event discussed in this lesson), we focus on the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood, but leave out the restoration of the ordinance of baptism. Yes, the ordinance can’t be performed without the priesthood, but then I think that in some ways the priesthood is defined by the ordinances that it can perform. Without baptism, wouldn’t the Aaronic Priesthood be different? Fortunately, the lesson does address both the priesthood and ordinances, putting both in the context of the restoration, the ‘g ..read more

A series I am going to occasionally come back to on my takes on early Church primary sources that I’m reading. We have a tendency to only read secondary takes, whether a talk, book, or commonly shared anecdote, but there are often insights buried in the primary sources that don’t make it into the collective consciousness. John Corrill’s A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints (Commonly Called Mormons) Text here.  John Corrill’s History is considered one of the most valuable first hand accounts of the Church in the Missouri era. An early convert who left in the afterma ..read more

A key moment in the Church’s establishment in different locations and cultures—including among countries like Brazil, where the Church officially has over one million members—is the translation of the Book of Mormon. Especially in earlier years, the effort was performed by missionaries with rudimentary knowledge of the language working with locals to create the translation, which meant that revisions and retranslations would later be necessary, once the Church had access to a higher level of expertise in translation. The story of the translation and retranslations of the Book of Mormon in Port ..read more

I mentioned previously that my big project for the year associated with Come, Follow Me is working on an annotated Doctrine and Covenants and closely related content. For this part of the project, I am going through the assigned reading each week and comparing every major edition of the text that I can find (including those available through the Joseph Smith Papers Project) to note differences, reading several notable commentaries, and making remarks about scholarship that I’ve read or intertextuality with other scriptures. I’m going to share some of it here and there as I go, though be a ..read more

So I’ve posted related to this topic, but I was thinking of putting up a few posts on this larger theme of Greek philosophy corrupting early Christianity. Like I said in this video, that was a common Protestant idea going back to the 1600s, very prominent in Smith’s day, and was even in a book he owned. Such an idea seemed to have gotten picked up by Mormon intellectuals around the turn of the 19th century and seems to still be fairly popular among a lot of Mormons. I’ve argued that it appears that Joseph Smith knew of such Protestant claims and rejected them. Instead of Christianity being cor ..read more

The adage that change happens “one funeral at a time” actually has a bit of sociological research to back it up. To get technical for a brief moment, there is a question as to whether cultural change happens by “settled disposition” or “active updating.” In other words whether: After an initial period of young people figuring things out, our attitudes settle down and are relatively stable from adulthood on, which means that change happens as older people die off and are replaced by younger people.   People significantly change across the lifecourse, so societal cultural shifts happen ..read more

Family. Isn’t it about … time? Yes, and so is the Gospel in general, according to Philip L. Barlow. The fifth out of the seven books in the Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series that I read is the one by Philip L. Barlow on time. It was one of the two books that I was most surprised to see in the list as a topic to explore in connection with the Doctrine and Covenants, since Time seemed a bit esoteric as a general topic. It made more sense as I dove in. On the one hand, Barlow has taught university-level courses about religious views on time. And, on the other, time-related topics like t ..read more

While the sections in this lesson address what to do after the loss of the 116 pages and what Hyrum Smith should do, elements of these sections and the lesson have a triumphalist element, pointing out that the Lord’s plans will not be thwarted because of opposition. However, this should not be read as some kind of competition that those who are on the Lord’s side are winning, but rather as something that will give us confidence to continue to follow Him despite trials and opposition. Yes, the Lord is many moves ahead in the chess game, but for the Lord, it’s not about the fight or about winnin ..read more

“We believe in all truth, no matter to what subject it may refer…. We are willing to receive all truth, from whatever source it may come.” Joseph F. Smith, April Conference 1909. [1] As I see it, whatever was influencing JS was “true” if we believe Joseph Smith’s revelations were true. I took that position in 2008 when I got accepted to a seminar with Richard Bushman. Bushman was feeling overwhelmed with members’ concerns about issues in Mormon history after publishing Rough Stone Rolling so he hoped there could be a better approach to tackling and discussing difficult issues within church edu ..read more

I’ve written about the implications of highly fertile, highly religious groups such as the Amish and Haredi Jewish community before. While Latter-day Saint fertility is higher than average, it’s not even close to those levels, and probably won’t ever be unless we revert back to Haredi-levels of communal insularity (or reinstate polygamy), which is a move I don’t think we should do for various reasons. Still, in some ways it’s inspiring seeing some groups buck the trend, and future, perhaps qualitative, work may shed some light on how to maintain large family sizes without having to go full Ami ..read more