Page 5 of 42

My picture, from the Kidron Valley.

Come Follow Me: 3 Nephi 1-7

September 19, 2024 /

First, it’s that time of year wherein I start thinking about January, which means D&C/Church History… but mostly D&C. I always get excited when we hit D&C, because it means we’re almost to the Old Testament again. In the meantime, I have to figure out how to handle D&C here. This is the book I have read and taught the least, and I have virtually no notes to build from. Yes, I’m a historian of American religious history, but D&C focuses almost entirely on the 1830-1845 period… but my specialization is pre-332 B.C. and post 1900 AD. As for today, I want to focus almost entirely on 3Ne 6:12 today. Continue reading

War. Public domain

Come Follow Me: Alma 43-48 aka “The War Chapters” Part I

August 14, 2024 /

As I’ve pointed out previously, the Book of Mormon moves at different paces in different places. We’ve spent the last few weeks making a slow section even slower, and that means that with today’s chapters, we’ve likely forgotten some important history relevant to today’s readings. After six chapters of doctrinal exposition, we hit the famed “war chapters.” Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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