As a small constituent part of a long-term project that I’m working on, I’ll be extracting notes over the next several weeks or (more likely) months from John W. Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon: A Decade of New Research (Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book, 1992), and intermittently sharing them here. They represent the state of the questions as of the early 1990s and, in many cases, they will need to be fleshed out with whatever developments... Read more
We’re drawing ever nearer to Easter season or, as Claudia Bushman prefers to call the holiday itself, to “Resurrection Day.” I have long wished that Americans and/or Latter-day Saints paid more serious and sustained attention to this holiday. So I may make some efforts here, in my inescapably limited way, toward encouraging such attention. I was pleased, recently, to see this article: “See which new hymns to use for Easter worship: Find out more about 3 new Easter-specific hymns and... Read more
I’m several days late in calling attention to something that I recently published in Meridian Magazine. I can only offer as my defense that I’ve been very busy elsewhere and that I’ve been off of my customary routine: “Things Deserving of “Awesome Wonder”” Up today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship is an exchange about the process of translation by which the English Book of Mormon was produced. It occurs in three parts: “Joseph and... Read more
Our three core movie makers — Russ Richins, James Jordan, and Mark Goodman — filmed Camrey Bagley Fox and John Donovan Wilson and me today at various locations, mainly at the Smith Family Homestead, in front of the John and Elizabeth Browning Home and Gun Shop (where I wanted to announce the formation of the new Interpreter Foundation paramilitary wing, dedicated to a more effective defense of the Kingdom, but didn’t), and in a grove of large trees behind... Read more
Camrey Bagley Fox and I spent the first part of the day being filmed in conversation together down at the Mansion House, mostly inside, and then on the grounds of the Smith Homestead, across from the Bidamon Stable and, much more importantly, the adjacent Nauvoo House. Joseph and Emma lived in the Mansion House with their family and with his widowed mother — in part of it, anyway, since the front portion of the building was managed as a... Read more
We were up early and spent most of the first part of the day filming in and around Carthage Jail, a place of deeply tragic significance in the story of the Church. It was the longest time that I’ve ever spent at the site in Carthage, and it was pleasant to be there with very few others around. I’m glad that tourists come to the place in mass quantities — most of them Latter-day Saints but, I’m told, about... Read more
My wife and I headed out this morning, Monday morning, over the Mississippi River and into Illinois, to the Cahokia Mounds, which are both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an Illinois State Historic Site. I’ve wanted to visit Cahokia for many years but, somehow, we’ve always been in a hurry and unable to spare the time. On this occasion, though, we arrived early for precisely that reason, and we were able to spend much of the morning on... Read more
The flight today from Salt Lake City to St. Louis took something on the order of two and a half hours. O, the suffering that I endure for my art! I couldn’t help but associate myself in my mind with the discomforts and hardships undergone by nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint pioneers, who often traveled roughly the same route, albeit in reverse. (They commonly came through St. Louis for supplies as they began their journey across the plains and over the... Read more
I have a number of linguistic pet peeves. Not all of them are related to Latter-day Saint usage — e.g., “she advocates for x” rather than, simply, the perfectly adequate “she advocates x” is not — but some of them are. Here is one of them that is: Back in the General Conference of April 2018, I was very pleased to hear President Dallin H. Oaks ask us not to use the word priesthood to refer to the body... Read more
These two articles were posted today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “The Lamb of God: A Note on the Significance of Meir Bar-Ilan’s Paper for Latter-day Saints,” written by Jeff Lindsay Abstract: Dr. Meir Bar-Ilan’s paper, “The Heavenly Lamb, Sacrifices on the Heavenly Altar, and the Song of the Lamb,” appearing concurrently in Interpreter, is a welcome contribution from a noted Jewish scholar. Bar-Ilan has called the world’s attention to a remarkable Hebrew manuscript... Read more
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