At least by the time I was in graduate school, evangelical Protestant anti-Mormonism was clearly the single most obvious overt challenger to the claims of the Restoration and to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — as distinct, of course, from the usual tugs of worldly temptation and sheer burn-out. It was the day of The God Makers and of Ex-Mormons for Jesus. There was an actual anti-Mormon visitor center in greater Los Angeles — Todd... Read more
If you’re an anti-vaxxer in general or someone who just refuses to receive vaccination against the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, you plainly won’t find much support for your position among the senior leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “The First Presidency and Apostles Over Age 70 Receive the COVID-19 Vaccine: The Church has helped immunize nearly 117 million people since 2002” Here’s an official statement from the Church, issued today, Tuesday, 19... Read more
My stay in St. George over this long holiday weekend has been a nostalgic one, in some ways. Although she grew up here, my mother left for Los Angeles as soon as she graduated from high school. But I always had maternal relatives here, and we would visit them at least once or twice a year, often proceeding to the greater Salt Lake area, where other relatives lived. In such cases, St. George marked the overnight stop en... Read more
A few days ago, somebody — I meant to mark it, but I didn’t; I think it was from Tracy Hall, but I haven’t been able to find it in order to be certain of that — kindly shared a little joke with me. I hope that nobody will be too angry with me for sharing it; my point is actually not at all political: It seems that two extremely ardent devotees of Mr. Donald J. Trump... Read more
But the return of the Jews to Palestine is an astonishing thing, something that manifestly cannot be disconnected from the events that will ultimately occur in that area. Indeed, we need only think for a moment about the sheer improbability of the whole thing to begin to see its miraculous character. What other nation has ever come back into existence as a sovereign state more than two thousand years after its disappearance? The empire of the pharaohs is... Read more
Latter-day Saints are often criticized for their conviction that faith is a gift of God that one should seek. (See Moroni 10:3-5.) Anti-theists dismiss it as woo-woo irrationality, as if their own belief system were the self-evidently true default position regarding God and immortality or as if, rather than being itself a faith position arrived at in the absence of decisive evidence, it had been fully demonstrated by clear proof and indubitable syllogistic reasoning. Evangelical anti-Mormons fault us... Read more
Just up, in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, by Amanda Colleen Brown: “Subtle Hebraic Features in the Book of Mormon” Review of Donald W. Parry, Preserved in Translation: Hebrew and Other Ancient Literary Forms in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2020). 171 pages. Hardback, $19.99. Abstract: Donald W. Parry combines a lifetime of insights about the Old Testament and Book of Mormon into one volume. Written for a non- academic audience, this book will provide a glimpse into some of the Book of Mormon’s literary... Read more
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) was a Swiss-American physician and psychiatrist and the author of, among several other things, the pioneering 1969 book On Death and Dying. Dr. Kübler-Ross was very well-known and quite influential during her lifetime — not so much for her views on life after death as for her study of the dying process, which led to revolutionary rethinking in the health care professions about how to treat terminally ill patients. But, as a collateral result of... Read more
Later estimates of the weight of the gold plates of the Book of Mormon (by those who had briefly held them, such as the official witness Martin Harris and the unofficial witness William Smith) put that weight at somewhere in the range of forty to sixty pounds. Some critics, accordingly, have contended that Joseph Smith could not have carried them for any significant distance, let alone run with them through the woods. The plates — if they actually... Read more
I’m just back from a rather long day devoted to three interviews with scholars, to be used in the docudrama that will accompany our Witnesses theatrical film. In my judgment, the interviews went extremely well. I’m grateful to the three scholars who participated, to the family who put their beautiful home at our disposal for the day, and to the film crew. *** Another article — this one by Royal Skousen — appeared today in Interpreter:... Read more
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