Elder John Widtsoe expressed a very useful axiom about inspired writers.
Category: prophets
“And God answered out of the maelstrom”: Rethinking Revelation with Job, the Constitution, and President Eyring
One model of revelation we invoke often is “the still small voice,” which phrasing comes from Elijah in 1ki 19:12. But scripture and history often provide us with multiple models, and I think there’s another one we should consider.
Speaking announcements and also, why LDS unwittingly think like Protestants
First, as many wonder, I have successfully defended my dissertation. When and in what forms it will be available to the public, I can’t say yet, but I’m already in talks with academic presses to turn it into a book. The final title was “The Scientist is Wrong”: Joseph Fielding Smith, George McCready Price, and the Ascent of Creationist Thought among Latter-day Saints in the Twentieth Century.
Some other announcements of interest: Continue reading
The New “Answering Gospel Questions,” Part 1: Introduction
On Dec 18, the Church announced a new section, “Guiding Principles to Help Answer Gospel Questions.” This goes along with the updated “Topics and Questions” which include both the longer and older “Gospel Topics Essays” and the much shorter “Gospel Topics.” This is quite interesting.
“Acting as a Man” and Other Less-than-Useful Frameworks for Talking About Prophets
I tend not to use the words “fallible” or “speaking as a man” or “prophets aren’t perfect” when talking about the nature of prophethood.
Mormonism as Rough Stone Rolling: Towards an LDS Theology of Encountering “the World”
In 2017, I participated in the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar, with the theme Mormonism Encounters the World and run by Philip Barlow and Teryl Givens. The seminar involves an intense few weeks of researching, workshopping, and writing. The result is a public conference of papers. Unfortunately, the papers that year were never posted onto the MI website, but WVS provided a summary here.
My paper looked briefly at the vertical relationship between Latter-day Saints and God but primarily at the horizontal relationship between Latter-day Saints and “the world.” I proposed two historical and competing models, ways of thinking about our interactions with “the world:”
- The “infection” model, which presupposes that Latter-day Saints received a pure intellectual inheritance of doctrinal understanding through prophets and modern scripture, which must be zealously guarded against outside influence. This model also characterizes almost all truth as “old” and static.
- The “quest” model, which presupposes that more “truth is out there,” and Latter-day Saints must venture out to find it, carefully weighing and “testing all things” to find what is good (per 1Th 5:21)
My paper received some very kind and enthusiastic comments, and I post the unrevised working draft here. I hope, eventually, to revisit and revise for publication, but in the meantime, enjoy.
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Tales from the Archives: Premises, Genesis, and the Priesthood Ban
James E. Talmage, the Articles of Faith, and Progression between Kingdoms: New Light
A young and pugnacious James E. Talmage, per the picture in the BYU Geology Dept.
The idea of progression between kingdoms in the afterlife has long been debated, with Church leaders taking differing positions. One interesting and well-known point in this debate is textual differences between the first and later editions of Talmage’s The Articles of Faith.1See Dialogue 15:1 (Spring 1982) “Is there Progression Among the Eternal Kingdoms?” p. 181ff However, no one has ever explained why Talmage apparently changed his mind.
What I’m Doing Here, and What I Hope Others Will Do
I am not an “evolution apologist.” Although I suspect I have more scientific training than your average historian, I’m not a scientist. And more likely than not, neither is my average reader. For that reason, and because I don’t follow the specialized and technical literature, I don’t engage in scientific debate about evolution. Rather, in keeping with my own training and expertise, my approach is historical, scriptural, and theological. And historically, I understand how and why evolution has come to be the dominant way to make sense of mountains of data across multiple fields, and why 98% of scientists accept evolution as the best explanation of all that data. Continue reading
Tales from the Archives 4: Science, Interpretation, and Bad Feeling in 1965
In June 1965, the LDS Sunday School presidency informally began a new series on science and religion, written by LDS scientists. Continue reading
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