Posts Tagged ‘ Book of Mormon ’

I enjoyed my experiment with Mormonism and sexism so much that I decided to do the same with Mormonism and racism. The results were remarkably similar. One thing making this video got me thinking about was the light of Christ. In LDS scripture, the light of Christ is characterized not only as the force that [...]

I must admit, before my trip to New Zealand over the holidays I had never heard of the Mormon Maori prophecies.  I knew that there are many Polynesian church members.  I was aware that the most popular religion in the island of Molokai (the spiritual center of Hawaii) is Mormonism, and that there are many [...]

Christmas Eve represents an immovable endpoint to the busiest time of my wife’s year. As a piano studio director who also runs a charitable foundation, projects and performances crowd into December. So, it has become “traditional” in our family to stagger exhausted to the Christmas holidays and semi-hibernate until after New Year’s Day in order [...]

We all know the Primary song.  What’s your view on Nephi? Discuss.

John Dehlin and Richard Bushman spoke of the translation process in part 3 and part 4 of their interview back in 2007.  In the interview, Bushman says that the Church could do a better job in artwork of depicting the translation process, and Bushman states he does not know any evidence that states the Urim [...]

Seth Adam Smith, a private videographer who creates LDS-themed material and makes it available on YouTube, has written about the political and social connotations of being Nephite or Lamanite in a recent blog post. He makes some compelling connections to modern day with Christians and Muslims using the words of modern prophets, as depicted in [...]

The following comments were recorded at the 1993 Sunstone Symposium.  Bill Russell spoke on the recurring theme as Sunstone called “The Pillars of my Faith”. He is a past president of the Mormon History Association.  I don’t know who introduced him, but this is what the person said when he introduced Bill Russell. Introduction, “William [...]

“Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. It’s not fairness as equality of outcome. It’s fairness as karma — the idea that good deeds lead to good outcomes, and bad [...]

Science knows that the Norse (Vikings) colonized Greenland a millennium ago, but the colony didn’t stick when colder temperatures returned following the Medieval Warm Period. Average daily temperatures in Greenland warmed about 3 degrees F before the plunge back into a Little Ice Age (which itself only ended well into the 19th Century) that forced [...]

In his 1915 classic entitled Jesus the Christ, Elder James E. Talmage maintained that Jesus Christ was born on April 6 in the year 1 BC.1 Talmage was apparently the first LDS writer to propose this particular date.  Nearly a century has passed since his book appeared, and in that time it has become practically axiomatic [...]

Solomon Spaulding died in 1816, never knowing that some 14 years after his death, he would be linked to the Book of Mormon.  A copy of Spaulding’s manuscript can be downloaded from Oberlin College.  I posted a summary of  chapters 1-5 last week, and gave a very brief introduction to the Spaulding Theory.  Here is a [...]

As I was researching a post last summer on some of the organizations that have sprung up in the stead of the RLDS movement as fundamentalist alternatives to the Community of Christ, I discovered that a childhood friend had become one of the leading officials of one such organization, the Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of [...]

Soon after the publication of the Book of Mormon, critics believed that Joseph must have plagiarized it from another source.  One of the most prominent theories since the 1830’s is the Spaulding (or Spalding) Theory.  Briefly, the theory states that Joseph Smith plagiarized (or at least used as a source) an unpublished book written by [...]

Like many people who consider the Book of Mormon as scripture, I am fascinated by questions about where it has a setting in ancient historical events. I know, of course, that many other people hold it as Scripture, but are content to see it as having no origin prior to a set of 19th Century visionary [...]

Foreword This is the final post of a 4 part series.  Context for this post is provided in part 1, part 2 and part 3. Concluding Observations The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has wisely taken no official position on Book of Mormon geography,89 despite the clear presence of americentric sentiment throughout the Church as [...]

Foreword This is part 3 of a 4 part series.  Context for this post is provided in part 1 and part 2. Moroni and Cumorah Often the first protest directed at the Malay Hypothesis is the issue of Cumorah, New York, and the irreconcilable distances and settings it would require to get the plates from Asia [...]

Foreword This is part 2 of a 4 part series.  Context for this post is provided in part 1. Geographic Correspondence At first glance the Malay Hypothesis’ most striking strong point is the peninsula’s correspondence to geographic features mentioned in the Book of Mormon text. The size and relative distances between various points are commensurable [...]

Prologue In 1827, Christian missionaries travelled into the jungles of Burma to bring the gospel to an indigenous group known as the Karen people. As the missionaries began teaching the Karens from the Bible, they were astounded to discover that the Karens already worshipped a deity they called “Y’wa”, had a detailed creation story with [...]

At Feminist Mormon Housewives, nat kelly had a post regarding religious addiction and disaffection. And those were two topics I couldn’t resist.

It’s been quite some time since I blogged about Book of Mormon geography theories.  KC Kern runs a website called Book of Mormon Online, and has recently updated his website with satellite images with Google maps of some of the theories.  (Click here.)  I always post stuff on my blog first, but there have been [...]