We’re just back from participating in the Interpreter Foundation’s fifth birthday party.  About 85-90 volunteers, authors, donors, and members of our board gathered for a wonderful barbecue dinner created by board member Bruce Webster, who is a barbecue master.  Our neighbor Margaret Dayton did much of the rest of the food preparation.  Lots of people came beforehand to help with set-up, and many hands made light work of clean-up afterwards.   Our speaker for the evening, on Mormonism and the... Read more

    The latest iteration of the bi-weekly column by William Hamblin and Daniel Peterson has appeared in the Deseret News:   “Simony — buying and selling church offices — and the Reformation”   ***   For those who might be interested, a video of the final presentation at this year’s FairMormon annual conference is now available on the FairMormon Facebook page:   https://www.facebook.com/fairmormon/?hc_ref=ARTGE5Bn6YKl4Cbx9E-SzFboSz5AoWV65SLFw2O7y5vFcpWfwr60pjNijey04eYIm5c   This is the presentation against which a Facebook poster strenuously warned us all early yesterday... Read more

    The third and last installment of Duane Boyce’s essay has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture:   “A Lengthening Shadow: Is Quality of Thought Deteriorating in LDS Scholarly Discourse Regarding Prophets and Revelation? Part Three”   ***   Notwithstanding my earlier reservations, I decided to stay for the last presenter of 2017’s annual FairMormon conference.  But I talked all the way through his remarks, and I have absolutely nothing to say about them.   Those who... Read more

    Tyler Griffin gave an excellent presentation under the title “Book of Mormon Geographical References: Internal Consistency Taken to a New Level.”   Expressly without committing himself to a “Heartland” or Baja or Mesoamerican geographical model, Dr. Griffin laid out some basic but very significant internal geographical information derived from the text of the Book of Mormon.   He’s impressed by both the complexity of the Book of Mormon’s internal geography and by its consistency in detail.  As am... Read more

    I’m listening to Dr. Janiece Johnson right now, who is addressing the topic of “Restoring the Tapestry of the Restoration: Early Women’s Witness.”   It’s a good talk.   I posted a blog entry about a book that she was involved in some time back:   “The Witness of Women”   ***   Based on comments made by a poster on Facebook earlier today, I’m very worried about the conference’s concluding speaker, who is listed on the program for... Read more

    Coming to you, once more, from the floor of the 2017 FairMormon conference at the Utah Valley Convention Center in Provo.   Ben Spackman, in an excellent address titled “Truth, Scripture, and Interpretation: Some Precursors to Reading Genesis,” laid out a strong case, in effect, for the fallibility of scripture.  His argument is quite congenial to me.  I can’t recall ever having been a scriptural inerrantist.  I probably was as a child, to the very limited extent that I thought about it,... Read more

    Scott Petersen, executive director of the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology in BYU’s Marriott School of Management, took his audience through certain early Christian writings on issues such as the Trinity, human deification, and baptism for the dead that are of particular interest to Latter-day Saints.  His remarks were titled “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today and Forever: A Restoration of Primitive Christianity.”   ***   Scott Gordon, the long-time president of FairMormon, spoke on the ever-popular... Read more

    Every week, the Deseret News publishes a 736-to-739-word-long display of vicious ad hominem attacks, shameless lies, and mean-spirited personal insults from me.  (With those descriptions, I summarize the work of a number of my anonymous online chroniclers.)  Today’s iteration of this shameful series of columns has now appeared:   “King Mosiah and human equality”   ***   We had lunch with friends from Arizona at a nearby Mexican restaurant, and then returned for the afternoon sessions of today’s... Read more

    Elizabeth Kuehn, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine, who works with the Joseph Smith Papers project in the Church History Department of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offered a presentation on “Finances and Faith in the Kirtland Crisis of 1837.”  She provided a calm, informed, lucid, and empathetic treatment of both the faithful Saints and the dissenters embroiled in the rise and fall of the Kirtland Bank.... Read more

    I’m sitting at the opening session of the 2017 FairMormon conference.  Neil Rappleye is speaking.  His topic, as described in his PowerPoint slides, bears two distinct titles.  The first is “A Tale of Two Jerusalems.”  The second is the one also contained in the printed conference program:  “‘Put Away Childish Things’: Learning to Read the Book of Mormon Using Mature Historical Thought.”   I like his opening.  He describes the Amarna letters, which are a fourteenth-century BC archive,... Read more