A small crowd at the BYU Studies Symposium yesterday was on hand to receive Richard Holzapfel’s self-proclaimed Mormon history “bombshell.” He presented the morning plenary session on Wilford Woodruff’s 1897 recorded testimony, the first sound recording made of an LDS General Authority. The audience was treated to hearing parts of this recording, which is also available at the BYU Studies website. Continue reading…
Archive for the 'history' Category
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According to Arrington and Bitton, “most individual responses of modern Mormons involve a kind of tie with the past”[1] . Hist
ory is central to the Latter-day Saint faith. Stories from Latter-day Saint history reverberate out from their local settings and have a global impact in the lives of many, for both good and ill. How and/or why does this happen? Continue reading…
Squaring the Circle is a geometry problem and a spiritual puzzle. It dates back at least 4,000 years. All of the great cultures that expressed advanced mathematics and philosophy approached this problem and had a mythology to give it meaning. On one hand, it is a practical, geometric exercise exploring approximations of PI and Phi. On the other hand, it is a philosophical puzzle to combine opposites and find the perfect balance. Can a human find their way through the maze of different extremes that we encounter in our mortal experience? We must navigate between light and darkness, health and sickness, pleasure and pain, life and death, good and evil. The greatest minds in history have expressed pleasure and enlightenment from this geometry exercise. A famous Greek philosopher included a statement in his work “On Exile” referring to one of his fellow countrymen who worked the squaring problem:
“There is no place that can take away the happiness of a man, nor yet his virtue or wisdom. Anaxagoras, indeed, wrote on the squaring of the circle while in prison.”
-Plutarch
Over the past year or so, I’ve become blogging buddies with FireTag, a member of the Community of Christ. He has his own blog at The Fire Still Burning. Many of you should recognize FireTag, as he frequently comments here at Mormon Matters. He was part of my panel for the Interview with the Community of Christ.
As some of you may know, the Community of Christ (formerly known as RLDS), canonizes revelations in their edition of the Doctrine and Covenants much more frequently than the LDS church does. There is an upcoming World Conference (similar to General Conference) coming up in April, where they will discuss canonizing a new revelation. I asked FireTag to write a series of guest posts discussing this process, and he has graciously agreed to do so. Without further ado, here is his tourist guide to canonizing modern revelation:
Many lament that Christmas has turned into a commercial gift-giving holiday. However, the Bible shows that gift-giving happened right after the birth of Christ. The Book of Matthew tells of 3 gifts the Wise Men gave: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Prof Deirdre Good of the General Theological Seminary in New York tells us the meaning of these particular gifts in Mystery of the 3 Kings: “The gift of gold is for royalty. The gift of frankincense is for divinity. The gift of myrrh is for death.”
Everyone is familiar with the Twelve Days of Christmas. It’s a funny song where the gift-giver gives strange gifts of “lords a leaping”, and various birds, including turtledoves and a “partridge in a pear tree.” (Really, who would want all those birds?) With the 12 days of Christmas, it seems the gifts are given the 12 days before Christmas. The Bible tells us of the first gifts given in celebration of Christ’s birth by the Wise Men, and one tradition holds that the Wise Men visited 12 days after Christ’s birth. January 6 is celebrated in some parts of the world as 3 Kings Day.
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There are many within Mormonism who struggle daily with their faith. They have been exposed to historical information they were not aware of, they were torn in political battle, they dislike the culture, or in some other way awoke to a “reality” they had not known before. It can be a lonely place in a tight knit community with such strong beliefs. And when a person is in that frame of mind, it often feels like the solution is to crawl in a hole and disappear. To further throw salt in the wound, the church doesn’t have any sort of official support group, or weeknight class, or specially trained individuals to handle such a dilemma. They are alone, and desperate, as they watch the foundation of their life get blown apart like a bomb in the basement of a skyscraper! They are often told to have more faith, to wait, read the scriptures, fast, pray, etc. But these answers now feel empty and unpromising. My heart goes out to these people. I have been there, and sometimes revisit (though I try to make the visit short). Continue reading…
*Note–This was posted this morning. Due to a technical glitch, it was erased. Some comments may have been erased from this morning as well. I am re-posting it this evening.
As you search across the bloggernacle, sometimes you’ll find antagonists who take great issue with the fact that a gun was smuggled to Joseph Smith at the Carthage Jail. These antagonists often act as if the church is covering up this fact. For years I’ve known a gun was smuggled to Joseph from personal visits to the Carthage Jail in Illinois. Tour guides do not try to hide this fact. Some antagonists love to quote that John Taylor believed that Joseph may have killed one or two of the assailants with this gun. However, this is inaccurate. Elder Dallin Oaks wrote a book called Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith which goes into great detail about the events surrounding Joseph Smith, as well as the trial of Joseph’s accused assassins.
If one searches around the bloggernacle, you’ll find a snarky comment about how the church traded polygamy for statehood, or that the church just wimped-out on polygamy. Such comments don’t seem to take into account how much pressure the US government was putting on the church–it was literally trying to snuff it out if the church didn’t back down from polygamy.
I’d like to get into some of these details leading up to the Manifesto. (This is a shorter version–more details are found here.) I talked about the Manifesto previously in the context of whether the prophet would ever lead the church astray. It should be noted that the church had been fighting federal anti-polygamy legislation for nearly 30 years, so I think it should be noted that the Manifesto banning polygamy in 1890 was not a spur-of-the-moment quick capitulation. I’ll be taking my quotes from 2 books: Forgotten Kingdom by David Bigler, and Great Basin Kingdom, by Leonard Arrington.
A few years ago, John Dehlin did a few podcasts about the Priesthood Ban. I wrote up a post which combined about 3 of John’s podcasts (and was nominated for a Niblet), which specifically addressed many of the historical aspects of slavery and the priesthood ban. I was quite surprised to learn that the Territory of Utah legalized slavery. In the podcasts, it was mentioned that one of the reasons was likely due to some of the slaveholding apostles. However, there is more to the slavery issue than just black slaves. Indian slavery was also legal, and I think that the church’s position on Indian slavery was actually a morally acceptable practice.
I’m not even sure how I got it, surprisingly, but in the short time I lived in Idaho, I received an interesting gem. It’s a book called Religions of the World: A Latter-day Saint Perspective, by Spencer J. Palmer.
I’ve always enjoyed books about world religions, especially the obscure and forgotten, but I was expecting something rather bland, or apologetic, or dismissive. I was pleasantly surprised. This one was actually very unbiased, concise, and interesting. It didn’t break any new ground, necessarily, except that it offered interesting comparisons and contrasts with other major world religions.
I found that book packed in an anonymous box last week and decided to give it another read. As I read about Guru Nanak I was struck by one tiny thing: how comparatively little we really know about him or his life. How can anyone believe in a prophet whose life we can’t relentlessly scrutinize?
David W. Bercot, a Texas attorney and Evangelical Christian, embarked on a quest to discover what Christians believed and practiced before the Nicene Creed. What he learned caused him to seriously re-evaluate his beliefs, to eventually change his religious affiliation, and to present his findings and analysis in his book Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up. Although the book represents a critique of mainstream Evangelical Christianity in light of the teachings of the Early Church Fathers, Bercot’s analysis has surprising and thought-provoking application to Mormonism as well. While some may see Will the Real Heretics Stand Up as evidence that Joseph Smith successfully restored many Early Christian doctrines and practices, others may see the overlap between Early Christians and Mormons as the predictable result of Mormonism’s historical connection to the Campbellite Restorationist movement.
I don’t know why, but I love to learn about archaeology, especially religious archaeology. A few years ago, Simcha Jacobovici came out with a documentary and book called The Jesus Tomb. In it, he makes a claim that the bones of Jesus may have been located in a tomb unearthed in Jerusalem. Of course, the Da Vinci Code, while fiction, makes a claim that Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene were actually buried in France. A few months ago, I watched a documentary called Bloodline, which actually goes further, and makes the case that yes, indeed, the bones of Christ and Mary are found in France. (You can learn more at the official website.) I just came across a third source, which claims that Christ’s bones are actually located in India. See this website.
There have been several attempts over the years to categorize Mormon “belief-styles”: Orthodox Mormon versus Liberal Mormon, Iron Rod Mormon versus Liahona Mormon, and so on. In the online world of LDS blogs commonly called “the Bloggernacle”, Mormons are often categorized as being TBMs (True Believing Mormons) or NOMs (New Order Mormons).
One evening when my wife and I had the opportunity to reflect on the timeless story of Adam and Eve, it struck me that their different responses to God’s commandments, and to Lucifer’s “temptation”, perfectly exemplified the different mindsets of TBMs and NOMs, and symbolically portrayed the age-old struggle between Orthodox and Liberal in any faith. And as I meditated on their dramatic dialog with Lucifer, with each other, and with God, it donned on me that Adam and Eve were the perfect TBM-NOM couple.
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