Utahns and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be aware of the fact that today, 24 July, is Pioneer Day. It commemorates the 1847 entry into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake of Brigham Young and the vanguard company of the “Mormon pioneers.” Not coincidentally, the Interpreter Foundation released the trailer for its forthcoming theatrical film Six Days in August today, on Pioneer Day. I hope that you will enjoy it and that,... Read more
The Interpreter Foundation has published yet another short video feature that has been drawn from its 2022 docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. This one, featuring Professor Steven C. Harper, bears the title “Eyewitness Testimony Regarding Book of Mormon Translation”: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVPlJB4s8O8 I invite you to watch it and to share it (along with the rest of the video shorts that have been created and that will be created in the series) with others. Newly posted on the... Read more
The former president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, slightly more than a year out of office, delivered perhaps his most famous speech at the Sorbonne in Paris on 23 April 1910. Although its formal title is “Citizenship in a Republic,” it is probably more widely known as “The Man in the Arena.” His statements at the Sorbonne were part of a larger European trip that also included visits to Vienna, Budapest, and Oslo, where on 5 May 1910,... Read more
We attended the middle of three English-language sacrament meetings today in the stake center located adjacent to the Newport Beach California Temple. It was absolutely packed, and traffic directors had been posted out in the parking lot to help with the crush. I can only assume, since I’m reliably informed by anonymous online anti-Mormons that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint is shrinking, collapsing, in free fall, that the stake center must have been reduced in size.... Read more
I share here two more of the Interpreter Foundation’s super-short videos about the witnesses to the Book of Mormon plates. As with the previous short features that I have called to your attention, they have been drawn from the Foundation’s two-part docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. The first of them (“Cumulative Evidence of the Plates”) features Paul Warner, who is a retired federal judge. The second that I will share today is focused on the question... Read more
Two new articles went up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation today, although — I’ve been on the road all day — I’m somewhat late in calling your attention to them: ““I Shall Gather In”: The Name Joseph, Iterative Divine Action, and the Latter-day Harvest Ingathering of Israel as Themes in 3 Nephi,” written by Matthew L. Bowen Abstract: The identity of “the people of Nephi who were spared, and also those who had been called Lamanites, who... Read more
I’m falling behind in calling these new short Interpreter Foundation videos to your attention, so I will be highlighting not one but two of them today. The first (“A Witness in High Demand”) features Richard Lambert, the former Assistant United States Attorney who recruited me to serveas an expert witness in the federal prosecution of Brian David Mitchell (the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart). He is also a serious student of Latter-day Saint history, and has been deeply involved in... Read more
A new column of mine went up this morning in Meridian Magazine: “He Was “All He Professed to Be”: How Brigham Young Remembered Joseph” In 1854, to mark the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, a portion of the annual April general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was adjourned until 27 June. That fact, in and of itself, should be enough to indicate the great respect that the Church’s leaders... Read more
In the western tradition of historiography or historical writing, there has often been a tendency to focus on outsize individuals, to write history effectively as biography — and not merely in such obvious cases as Plutarch’s famous Parallel Lives of the noble Greeks and Romans and his “lives” of twelve Roman emperors and his Life of Alexander, or Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars, or Eusebius’s cloyingly hagiographic Vita Constantini. Historians still commonly speak of “the Augustan Age,” and “Elizabethan England,”... Read more
Since the first geological and then archaeological expeditions entered the region known as “Six Grandfathers” (in the original Lakota, Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe) in early March of 4742 CE, heated debates have raged about the three “macrocephalic” rock formations on the mountain’s southeastern face. And not merely among academics. In fact, controversy surrounds every aspect of the discovery, including the number of head-like stone features. The most commonly-held position is that there are three, but some claim to see a partial... Read more
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