I served for almost a decade on the Gospel Doctrine Writing Committee of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  For those who may be unaware, that’s the committee that generates at least the first drafts for the adult Sunday School curriculum of the Church.  I would need to look up the exact dates, but my service lasted from just after the middle of the 1980s to the mid-1990s.   When I was first called to serve... Read more

    I would like to call your attention to an article whose lead author, Dr. Ugo Perego, is a personal friend who has also appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scripture:   Ugo A. Perego, Martin Bodner, Alessandro Raveane, Scott R. Woodward, Francesco Montinarod, Walther Parson, and Alessandro Achilli, “Resolving a 150-year-old paternity case in Mormon history using DTC autosomal DNA testing of distant relatives,” FSI Genetics 42 (September 2019): 1-7.   Highlights We propose... Read more

    I’ve seen a number of comments in two or three places, and have received several emails, pronouncing me a liar, a shameless and deliberate deceiver, because of my position regarding Joseph Smith’s 1832 account of the First Vision.  (For that position, see my recent posts “On the supposed scandal of multiple First Vision accounts” and “Once more, on the First Vision.”)   Such accusations may or may not speak eloquently about those leveling them.  They say nothing whatever... Read more

    I just arrived this afternoon from Tel Aviv and Paris, and have, frankly, spent too much time since then in a state of profound but very pleasant unconsciousness.  But it seems that I’m under vigorous attack somewhere as having lied (in the 31 May 2018 Deseret News column that I just now reposted) about accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision.   In the demonology of certain critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — especially... Read more

    I published the following article in the Deseret News just slightly more than a year ago, on 31 May 2018:   Certain critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gleefully point out that at least four different first-person accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision are known to exist. This, they argue, demonstrates that Joseph simply couldn’t get his story straight — which, in their minds, suggests that he was just making it up on the fly. Moreover,... Read more

    I pass on a little story that, among other places, I’ve seen in D. Michael Quinn’s The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power.  I mention that particular source in order to win some credibility for the story.  For some, Dr. Quinn (perhaps alongside the late Grant Palmer) is the only honest historian of Mormonism — at least, he was, until he published his The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth & Corporate Power in 2017 — and his works have attained something like canonical status... Read more

    “The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship... Read more

    I published this column in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News on 17 January 2018:   No version of the “design argument” for God’s existence is more famous than a passage from the Rev. William Paley’s 1802 book “Natural Theology”: “In crossing a heath suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone comes to be there: I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for... Read more