Author: benspackman

Big News and Upcoming Public Speaking Events

May 31, 2024 /

Lots of big announcements, lots of good things happening, some things… coming to an end.

I first started graduate school in September of 2001 at the University of Chicago, with courses in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian. Life gave me some real detours, and now 23 years later, in a completely different discipline, but drawing on my six years of training in the languages and literature of the ancient Near East, my doctoral dissertation is nearly complete.  I’m sending off final revisions to my advisor, to get approval to send it out to my doctoral committee, with a defense in late June or July.

I will graduate and become Doctor Spackman.

The dissertation title is “The Scientist is Wrong”: Joseph Fielding Smith, George McCready Price, and the Ascendency of Creationist Thought among Latter-day Saints in the Twentieth Century.

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Come Follow Me: Mosiah 18-24

May 26, 2024 /
My bookshelf

My bookshelf

Latter-day Saints have a thing about Doctrine, with a capital D. We try to define it, we argue about it, we prioritize it. We even misquote scripture which supposedly says “bearing down in pure doctrine” (Alma 4:19), when it actually says “pure testimony.” “Pure doctrine” is not a scriptural phrase, and I’m not even sure what it means. We tend to read scripture looking for doctrine. Sometimes, because of cultural expectations about how to identify doctrine, we can’t see it when it’s right in front of us. Continue reading

Come Follow Me: Mosiah 12-17

May 25, 2024 /

I want to plug Book of Mormon Central for collating published scholarship on lessons- See here for today’s links and summaries. (What they have is partly based on my own old work.) Most of today’s chapters involve Abinadi, his preaching, his words. We tend to read our scriptures without regard for where they came from, or how we got them, but that kind of context is often important. We tend to read direct speech (e.g. “And Abinadi said…”) as verbatim records, but should we? And what difference does it make? Continue reading

A candle inside the Holy Sepulcher. My pic.

Come Follow Me: Jacob 1-4

April 1, 2024 /
A candle inside the Holy Sepulcher

A candle inside Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher

Jacob marks a distinct and important break of sorts in the Book of Mormon. Why? Unlike Nephi, Jacob did not grow up in Jerusalem. Born in a wilderness, the first eight or so years of his life were spent… we don’t know. Maybe in captivity, maybe in the desert, definitely under duress and hardship. Point is, everything Jacob knows about and his attitudes towards Jerusalem, Jews, Hebrew, etc. he has learned directly from his family (and whatever peoples they have encountered along the way); he hasn’t seen any of it first hand. It’s a socio-cultural-linguistic founder effect.

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