Well, it’s going to be a heck of a semester.

My wife and I will be on BYU campus for most of fall, doing research and writing intensively. I’m scheduled to do a number of talks at BYU and elsewhere, with some still in-process. Check back for details on my page here.

  • October 9-11, I’ll present as part of FAIR’s virtual Old Testament Conference (online only) about the strength of the Latter-day Position when it comes to the Old Testament; does accepting, e.g. the Book of Mormon as inspired and historical logically compel Latter-day Saints to young-earth creationism, a recent global flood, Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, a single Isaiah, etc.?
  • October 16 on BYU campus, I’ll speak in the Geology department on “Fault Lines within Faith: Geologists and the LDS Evolution/Creationism Controversy.”
    • A fault line, of course, is where two different landmasses meet. That lends itself easily to the ideas I’ll be illustrating in LDS history of 1) friction in a shared space (namely, LDS faith), 2) a dividing line into “camps” 3) demarcation (i.e. between science and religion, and between science and pseudoscience. I’ll be talking about the historical roles played by LDS geologists Frederick Pack, James (and Sterling) Talmage,  George D. Hansen, William D. Sill, and William D. Stokes, as well as pseudo-geologist (and Seventh-Day Adventist) George McCready Price.
  • Boston
    • November 22, a fireside in the Cambridge Stake on “Understanding the Old Testament and Genesis.” This will likely be a combination of my presentations on How to read the Old Testament (an updated version of this) and then apply it to the early chapters of Genesis (like this short one.)
    • November 23, a talk in a smaller venue on “Genesis, Evolution, the Fall, and Atonement.” This will be slightly more academic, providing an overview of Church history on evolution, and whether/how evolution undermines the Fall and Atonement.
      • The first part derives from my dissertation, the second in part from my article on “death before the fall” in this volume, and the third from my research on Robert Blatchford. Short version: evolution doesn’t necessarily undermine either the fall or atonement.
    • November 24th, I present at the Society of Biblical Literature conference in the LDS section on “Catastrophism and LDS Interpretations of Genesis 10:25: Pangea, Perspicuity, and Poetry.”
      • This is a 15-minute presentation on the intersection of historical LDS interpretations of Genesis 10:25, D&C 133, continental drift, and parallel developments in geology, catastrophism, and creationism. I argue that D&C 133 does not establish a supernatural division of Pangea into continents c. 3000BC.

There are likely to be some other public talks and presentations, so check back here occasionally.

As our Old Testament year is just around the corner, I want to call attention to a few things. I will indeed be putting up my usual post in six weeks or so about recommended resources, and then writing weekly.

First, I want to call attention to Church Resources. Come Follow Me 2026 and the Seminary manual are all out and available in the Library App. A replacement for the 1980 Old Testament manual was temporarily released and then disappeared, but should be back mid-September. This will be found under Scripture Helps (where the NT volume already exists). I highly recommend it, especially the footnotes. Similarly, note this interview with a professional Institute teacher, well worth your time.

There are many subtle— but significant!— changes and good approaches being modeled in these. I’ll highlight some in my FAIR talk and posts throughout the year.

Second, I’ve skimmed a review copy of BYU professor Joshua Sears forthcoming book, A Modern Guide to an Old Testament available for pre-order on Amazon. (Amazon affiliate link, for both kindle and paperback).  Prof. Sears has good training, has written some insightful articles on the LDS Spanish Bible, Deutero-isaiah in the Book of Mormon (podcast here), an LDS Introduction to Study Bibles, and a number of others for Latter-day Saints. He is also a friend, reader, and occasional commenter here.

Modern Guide is a wonderful reorientation to reading the Old Testament. It’s not a commentary, nor a book-by-book, but a very accessible expression of basics principles to keep in mind when reading, a calibration (and correction) of our common assumptions. I’m likely to do a longer write-up later, but still wanted to make sure this gets wide publication. Here’s the table of contents.

Third, I want to call attention to a different kind of book, Joel Baden’s Source Criticism. (Amazon Affiliate link) Baden, now a professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale, was a student in NW Semitics at the University of Chicago, before he transferred to Harvard for Hebrew Bible. We overlapped for a year, though I doubt he’d remember me.

Baden’s book is not an introduction to the status quo of source criticism, which is highly fragmented and disputed (see Baden’s other book on the topic). Rather, Baden treats the history of source criticism, a sub-field that began hundreds of years ago as close readers of Genesis through Deuteronomy noticed internal inconsistencies and contradictions. He writes, “source criticism (defined narrowly or broadly) didn’t begin with a desire to find sources in the biblical text. It began with a problem. The problem was that the Pentateuch didn’t seem to make great sense as a narrative.”

What I appreciate most is how he forcefully reveals the biases, assumptions, and motivations that drove different historical stages and approaches, including his own; “ideas do not emerge in a vacuum, and are often shaped by unconscious predispositions” and “the various theories of the Pentateuch’s composition are inseparable from the broader intellectual trends of their times.”

Changes in understanding of scripture were the result of shifting cultural and intellectual ideas; “The biblical text had of course not changed; it was the assumptions about how that text should be read that were different.”

The different positionality of those doing the analyzing also affected the analysis, and this is true today as well.

Scholars are always influenced by who they are and where, intellectually and culturally, they come from; their scholarship is always inflected by their context and background. While the academic study of the Bible has unquestionably moved the needle on how the text and its origins are understood, it is also the case that personal and communal faith commitments have continued to determine the shape of that study.

These intellectual shifts, trends, and biases  included Romanticism, the Enlightenment, Protestantism, anti-semitism, and even academic inertia and “survival” by “playing the game.”

It is almost as if, having learned that identifying sources was the accepted mode of analysis, scholars pursued sources even when the grounds for finding them were no longer present. Or, to put it another way, perhaps somewhat less charitably, scholars after Wellhausen who wanted to work on the question of pentateuchal composition needed something new to say, and as Wellhausen’s scheme was relatively simple, the most obvious move was to complicate it.

Though an accessible 156 pages, Source Criticism is not meant for the popular or lay audience, but neither is it highly-technical specialist literature. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in Genesis-Deuteronomy and its current academic understandings.

Very lastly, I want to plug this interview with Jonathan Stapley, from Faith Matters. With his graduate degrees in chemistry, Stapley is technically an amateur historian. However, he has published many academic historical book chapters and papers with the Journal of Mormon History, served on its board, and his second LDS history book with Oxford Press is forthcoming.

LDS temple history is the topic of interview and his forthcoming book Holiness to the Lord: Latter-day Saint Temple Worship. (Amazon affiliate link.) I greatly appreciated it, and look forward to the book. As a historian who straddles the ancient Near East and modern American religious history, I wish some further background had been provided so that certain aspects looked less ad hoc.

For example, on Masonry and penalties (and “borrowing”),  note both the well-established principle of Adaptation and ancient covenant patterns.  The Church has provided some notes on this as well, getting into the parallel idea of Accommodation. (I elucidate on accommodation at length here, as does the Liahona here.)

One of the sub-topics within the newish Answering Gospel Questions guidelines  is “Recognize that Revelation is a Process.” A bullet-point therein reads (my italics),

Remember that God speaks to us according to our understanding. All human beings are shaped by culture: the beliefs, customs, languages, and values we share. Cultures vary greatly from place to place and over time. God’s willingness to deliver revelation that speaks to us within our cultures and according to our understanding is a beautiful truth of the Restoration. Remembering this can help us approach the scriptures and the words of past prophets with humility. God spoke to the ancient Israelites according to their ancient near-Eastern understanding. He spoke to Joseph Smith using symbols and language from his 1800s American culture. And God communicates to us today according to our own limited capacity in ways we can understand.

Similarly, in the Church’s essay on Masonry, we find this.

There are different ways of understanding the relationship between Masonry and the temple. Some Latter-day Saints point to similarities between the format and symbols of both the endowment and Masonic rituals and those of many ancient religious ceremonies as evidencethat the endowment was a restoration of an ancient ordinance. Others note that the ideas and institutions in the culture that surrounded Joseph Smith frequently contributed to the process by which he obtained revelation. In any event, the endowment did not simply imitate the rituals of Freemasonry. Rather, Joseph’s encounter with Masonry evidently served as a catalyst for revelation.

I’m recording a counterpart interview soon on the temple, the Old Testament, and some of these principles. As President Nelson has said, the clearest guide to understanding the temple is the Old Testament, so it’s important that we look at it.

A lot to look forward to in fall.

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