Posts Tagged ‘ john dehlin ’

Maybe the idea that people will lose their morality when they lose their religions says more about the religion?

Dear Epistemologically Certain Emotionally/Developmentally Arrested TBM (ECEDATBM): Please sign an agreement now, that you won’t be a tool when you leave the church.

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 [...]

Scott Gordon invited the first non-Mormon to speak at the recent FAIR conference.  She spoke on the similarities between conversion and de-conversion stories in Mormonism.  Many active Mormons just don’t understand de-conversion stories, and it was Scott Gordon’s attempt to help active Mormons better understand why some people feel they can no longer believe.  Richard [...]

One topic I have not discussed in my 4 years of blogging is discrepancies in the First Vision accounts.  Basically, there are 4 accounts of the First Vision.  The account in the Pearl of Great Price is the last account, and comes from 1838.   John Dehlin and Richard Bushman discuss these variations in Part 2 [...]

Sunstone began on Wednesday, but unfortunately, I could only attend Friday. I thought I would give some impressions of the Friday sessions. Todd Compton started off the day with the polygamist ancestry of Mitt Romney. It was interesting to see that Parley P. Pratt is the great-great grandfather of Mitt Romney. Parley’s fourth wife, Mary [...]

The Church’s correlated manuals are narrowly focused on topics the Church wants to reinforce with members.  When members want to learn more about Church history, there really aren’t any resources availabe to Church members, and in the past, it seems the Church has tried to discourage participation in events like Sunstone Symposia, or reading Dialogue [...]

More than almost any other religion, Mormonism delves into its history.  We draw upon our history to teach lessons.  Yet sometimes, the Church doesn’t like to emphasize certain parts of history.  In the 1970s and 80s, New Mormon History started to make headway, and the Church hired a professional historian, Dr. Leonard Arrington to be [...]

When it comes to issues in church history and theology, we have the research. But how do we popularize that research?

Bonnie has written a really interesting post on whether regular people can have access to angels.  Denver Snuffer was interviewed by John Dehlin on Mormon Stories back in February, and Denver has written a book detailing the steps to go through to receive an angelic visit.  John introduces Denver as a “A Progressive, Fundamentalist, Non-Polygamist [...]

Last week I talked about the results of John Dehlin’s recent survey that showed that a leading cause of people leaving Mormonism has become the ready access to church history information on the internet.  Today I’d like to continue to evaluate the survey information. Oh Ye of Too Much Faith It seems that often those [...]

Recent articles in the media have pointed to the study of church history as being key to the loss of faith. What role does it actually play?

I transcribed a bit more of the Jana Riess interview from Mormon Stories.  There have been many posts on the bloggernacle (such as this one by Mike S) discussing the fact that the activity rates seem to be slowing for the LDS Church.  I thought it was interesting that John Dehlin acknowledged that atheists are [...]

This is the 2nd part of a multi-part series on the factions and fractures of Mormon Blogging. Please read Part 1 first here. Good Guys and Bad Guys? Up to this point, I’ve mostly focused on the Bloggernacle (particularly with respect to major personalities and metonyms like By Common Consent and Steve Evans) and its [...]

This post is the first in a series. Find the later parts 2, 3 and 4 in the coming weeks… My Naive Beginnings When I first started Mormon blogging, I thought the field was pretty simple. I thought the Mormon blogging world was summed up by one word: Bloggernacle. To be sure, from even my [...]

…if you wanted to make a TBM (true believing Mormon) cry you just tell him that the church is not true. If you want to make an uncorrelated Mormon cry tell him the church is not changing. ~Kiley, “The middle path…” We were going to be queens. The above quote was just part of an [...]

In recognizing that politics is a topic filled with too much strife and vitriol (and yet many of our permas continue to prod that hornet’s nest), I’ve decided to choose a different topic with which to incense people: the issue of new order, or liberal, or heterodox, or non-traditional, or unorthodox, or most recently monikered, [...]

It’s been nearly four months since Mormon Matters functionally disbanded and Wheat & Tares was created, and already, it feels like a new tenuous equilibrium has set. While I for one can’t help but feel that the transition has divided our tribe in a way that makes it difficult (if not impossible) for us ever [...]