Posts Tagged ‘ History ’

There are many on the internet publishing information about our faith, often not very flattering.  Some of that information is faith-shaking.  But where does it cross the line into being “anti-Mormon”?  Some would say that anyone who says anything that is not uplifting or faith promoting is anti-Mormon, but that seems like a pretty low [...]

I have been personally (and later professionally) interested in the extent to which mathematics could help forecast historical trends ever since I read the fiction of Isaac Asimov way back in the 1960′s. When I shared my first office at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory with a staff meteorologist working on air quality dispersion [...]

Community of Christ does not follow its LDS cousins in having secret temple rituals. So I read last week’s post by Bored in Vernal, on the “Sacred Embrace As Five Points of Fellowship” with the curiosity of one who has never even been inside an LDS Temple. Much of the terminology was unfamiliar to me [...]

I may be a historian, and I may align with feminist thinking, but I am not a feminist historian. Feminist history usually involves digging up forgotten people (women) from the past, and then holding them up to show how they were oppressed, subjected by male patriachy, or silenced. In some cases it is important to [...]

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 [...]

Over the New Year holiday, a comment by Stephen Marsh in his own post on rent seeking reminded me of something John Dominic Crossan had talked about in his book The Historical Jesus — the parallelism between the concepts of an earthly patron in the development of the Roman Empire, and heavenly patronage as it [...]

“A number of interesting parallels can be seen between the church and some of the ideas and policies of the National Socialists [Nazis].” Deseret News, 1933

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 [...]

Something a little different from Bishop Bill this week: The other day I was thinking about all the “inactive” Mormons I’ve talked to over the past 30 years. In that time, I’ve been an Elders Quorum President twice, a bishop’s counselor twice, and a bishop. By inactive, I mean people that haven’t been to church [...]

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 [...]

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” That’s a somewhat simplistic, but nevertheless effective way to teach the law of conservation of momentum, and I think there’s actually some metaphorical version of that law which applies to churches. When someone leaves a church, his/her absence allows/pushes the church that remains to go [...]

Newell Bringhurst’s book Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism is a fascinating look at the church’s relationship to black people from 1830 to 1980.  I wanted to share some impressions from the first few chapters. Some people have incorrectly asserted that early Mormons were abolitionists.  Abolitionists were seen as radicals back [...]

New York is a city composed of five Boroughs that include dozens of neighborhoods with histories often unrecognized by their modern residents. As the city grew from its origins on the southern tip of Manhattan Island over several centuries, it enveloped and altered what had been separate communities and erased the reasons for their original [...]

I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Mormon History Association meetings in St George this weekend.  For those who enjoy Mormon history, this is a truly refreshing, wonderful conference.  I can’t recommend it enough.  I gave a longer version of highlights from Days 1, 2, and 3 from my blog, but thought I would [...]

“Bring a miracle and request a table. Those you heal must accept you into their homes….The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal,  miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality,  was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations,…but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations…. [...]