Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

People often misuse the Parable of the Lost Sheep, where the Lord leaves the 99 to go after the 1, and draw analogies and connections that don’t make a lot of sense given the premises of the Parable, so I thought I’d make a set of guidelines for logically using the Parable. Note: I have wanted to do this post for a while, and it is in no way a critique or analysis of the Church’s recent 99+1 initiative. The motivation for this came from non-Church sources.  If you self-identify as “the lost sheep” the logical corollary is that you should return and join the 99 crowd instead of making the Shepherd come after you.    There is also the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” parable. Sometimes people have to be isolated for the good of the flock, this is part of what Church discipline is for. Jesus didn’t leave the 99 to find the one wolf in sheep’s clothing.   On that note, the point of the parable isn’t that the one lost sheep is in fact in the right and all of the others are in the wrong. The lost sheep is, in fact, lost, and the point is not that they are going to co-opt the role of the shepherd and lead them somewhere else.   Jesus doesn’t leave the 99 to find the lost sheep to only find out that the lost sheep was where everybody should…

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I asked Dalle-3 to “Create two images side-by-side, one representing Utah in a good light and one representing Utah in a bad light. Show me images that show bad things particular to Utah and good things particular to Utah, instead of just generic bad and good things.”  In the image it generated “the left side highlights Utah’s natural beauty and outdoor activities, while the right side depicts issues like smog from the Salt Lake City inversion, a dried-up Great Salt Lake, and urban congestion.” For my family living in Utah is the eternal question (“next year in Utah”). Like a lot of members, we have a lot of ties leading back to our homeland. For my children Utah is the land of milk and honey, a Willy Wonka-esque existence of eternal grandparent candy and attention, where the urinals flow with ambrosia and nobody ever raises their voice. They talk about “those East Coasters” with a lilt of disdain despite the fact that they themselves are, in fact, born and raised East Coasters (kind of the flip side of those lifelong Utahns who say they’re “from” the cool state they lived in for a few years as a kid while their parents were in graduate school). As of now we feel that we are where we need to be right now, but we’ve thought through the pros and cons many times.  Con: Housing Affordability Dear Utahns, this is insane. You can’t…

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Murderer, Ex-Mormon (according to Wikipedia) James Earl Ray A recent project of mine has been to figure out a way to generate a list of all Wikipedia articles that mention the word “Mormon” or “Latter-day Saint” so that we can generate the comprehensive compendium of all things Latter-day Saint/Mormon on Wikipedia.  This project was inspired in part by an episode of the Omnibus podcast by Ken Jennings and Jon Roderick (incidentally, IMHO the wittiest podcast out there) about a prison breakout by James Earl Ray, the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr. Ken Jennings, who as most of us know is a member, bemusedly noted that the Wikipedia article on Ray indicated that he had been raised a Mormon. After preliminarily digging into the cited reference, however, Jennings seemed skeptical, and when I checked the page myself that little bit had been removed. (As an aside, given the sensitivities around racial issues given our history, I’m 1000% sure we would all know if the killer of Dr. King was raised Mormon).  Still, it made me curious about other less-known tidbits, plus I thought it would be fun to have a variety of other comprehensive lists: a complete list of all celebrities raised Mormon, a complete listing of all organisms named after Mormons (more than you’d think), etc., which could easily be generated by scraping the meta-tags on the ur-list.   To create such a list I…

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Due to some things I’m involved in, I recently attended a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). For the uninitiated, after Vatican II the Catholic Mass was changed to be more user-friendly. It was conducted in the vernacular instead of Latin and was shortened. While in the past the priest traditionally faced towards the East as he was blessing the Eucharist, facing towards God and the coming of Christ, gradually it became more standard for priests to face the congregation. 

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Sorrow, a Van Gogh drawing of a pregnant Sien Hoornik Selling only one painting during his lifetime, Vincent Van Gogh has become the archetype of the tortured genius not appreciated until after his death. His long-running mental health problems have been the subject of movies and ballads (with one moving example being Don McLean and later Josh Groban’s Vincent). There’s something about the narrative that tickles at our Jungian senses. Somebody who is dealt a bad hand all throughout their life has a deus ex machina glory thrust upon them, sort of a posthumous version of the classic folklore motif of the peasant who finds out that they’re royalty. Much less well known is Van Gogh’s muse during his time in The Hague whose life paralleled his in some ways. Sien Hoornik was a single mother prostitute born into abject poverty who gave birth to four children (two of whom died), and who was wracked by venereal diseases throughout her life. Van Gogh took her and her children in while she worked for him as a model in what some consider to be his only romantic relationship. They considered marriage, but due to pressure from Van Gogh’s family about marrying beneath his social status he eventually turned her out, after which time she probably went back to working as a prostitute to feed her family. She took her own life about twenty years later.  Now that she belongs to the…

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I’ve attended my fair share of Latter-day Saint weddings in Utah and there is one common element that has puzzled me.

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While Saul/Paul and Alma the Younger were arguably committing the worst kind of sins by fighting against God, in both narratives they were sincere and possibly even well-meaning, albeit theologically wrong. They weren’t, say, torturing or killing people en masse as far as we know, and it seems like if there is a textbook case for something you could do that crosses the line into never being able to achieve forgiveness in this life, that’s what it would involve. (In the excellent Latter-day Saint film Brigham City *spoiler alert* the person you later find out is the killer asks the protagonist whether he thinks people can be forgiven for committing horrendous murders, with the bishop/detective character simply stating that he doesn’t know. *End spoiler alert*.) In the course of some other reading I’ve been doing, I stumbled across the story of Angulimala (sorry, WordPress is awful at rendering accent marks, so apologies to the spelling purists), a sort of Buddhist Saul figure with a touch of Hannibal Lecter. While well-known in Asia, with several movies made about him in Buddhist countries, to the West he is much less familiar. In a modern moral paradigm where we would see the torturing murderer as being darker and more beyond hope than somebody who has a sincere theological disagreement a la Saul (not to downplay his culpability in throwing people in jail for their sincere theological disagreements), the message of redemption becomes all…

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Distribution of Equus fossils in the Americas from the Quaternary, Paleobiology Database The fossil record for horses in the Quaternary in the Americas, a very niche topic, has had particular interest to Latter-day Saints for well-known reasons. At the outset I should lay my cards on the table and state that I hold to a loose translation model of the Book of Mormon production and simply think that horses and maybe even at times the very 19th century Christian language and themes in the Book of Mormon come from that daylight between what was inscribed on the plates and how it came out of Joseph Smith’s mouth after he “studied it out in [his] mind.”  Still, the Pre-Columbian horses idea is intriguing, but I haven’t really seen much in way of a very systematic take on the chance of a false negative: what are the confidence intervals for species extinction in the fossil record? Obviously the farther back you go the broader they are, so this is a very particular niche within a niche. I won’t claim to resolve that question here, but I dove into the Paleaobiology Database to get a sense of the distribution across time and space for fossils from Equus during the Quaternary Era in the Americas.  Huge caveat, this is not my area and while I think my assumptions are valid given the detail given in the documentation, I might have something fundamentally wrong, so…

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  Fun fact: One of the most prominent movies about the life of Muhammad (who, out of respect for Sunni Muslim sensitivities, is never actually shown onscreen) was produced and directed by Latter-day Saint Richard Rich, who has also done some Book of Mormon films, and whose aesthetic you might recognize from movies like the Swan Princess.   Muhammed occupies an interesting place in Latter-day Saint thought. On one hand, Joseph Smith was often compared to Muhammad in the 19th century, and there are a lot of points of similarity with the idea of a true faith being restored to an unlearned prophet visited by angelic messengers who was able to create an extensive work of religious literature (or oral recitation that eventually became literature in there case of Muhammad).   On the pro-Muhammad side, there a variety of GA quotes that make the case that Muhammad was inspired by God. Of course, the Church and Islam are theologically incompatible on various important points, so while interfaith dialogue, support, and outreach is important (I’ve been particularly moved by accounts of the Church offering meetinghouse space to Muslims), at the end of the day the two faiths are obviously not going to merge any time soon, so for a TBM to believe Muhammad was inspired would require also believing that there is some slippage between the historical Muhammad and what eventually became Islam. This is a valid perspective (and one that Islam…

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This post is full of spoilers. Don’t read it until you’ve read the book, which is very much worth reading and has become one of my favorites by Sanderson.

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Worlds Without End in the style of Van Gogh How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. -Carl Sagan One of the unique characteristics of the restored gospel is the expansiveness of its cosmological vision. Traditional religion held a Ptolemaic worldview in terms of existential importance if not astronomical reality. This world was the creation that mattered, and all discoveries beyond its horizon landed in the realm of speculative theology, whereas almost from the beginning and long before infrared space telescopes the restored gospel preached a very fundamental premise that is radically distinct: this world and its inhabitants are only a small part of God’s creations. However, we were only ever given little precious glimpses into this broader scheme. Even the one line from the temple: “I have only been doing that which has been done on other worlds” has a sort of understated power. It’s said in passing, so quickly that you could miss it if you weren’t paying…

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The website “Court Listener” is a publicly available source for looking up cases around the country. By searching for the term “Latter-day” I looked for all cases involving the Church that were filed sometime during 2024. Of course, I am no lawyer (unlike By Common Consent, our bench is quite shallow on the legal side of things), so I uploaded the court PDFs to ChatGPT to explain the role of the Church in the respective case. I did not include one divorce case that was picked up or any case that simply cited a case that the Church was involved in. As seen, most of the Church’s involvement is with amicus briefs, or briefs filed by parties who are not directly involved in the case, but who want to make their perspective on the case known.   People In Interest of C.M.W.R., 22CA0925 (Colo. Ct. App. 2024) Colorado Court of Appeals In the case referenced, the role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is central to the incident under examination. Here are the key points: Incident Location: The fire occurred at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Meetinghouse in Fruita, Colorado. Damage: The fire resulted in more than one million dollars in damage to the church building. Connection to the Juvenile: The juvenile, identified in the case as C.M.W.R., was arrested in connection with this fire and subsequently charged with criminal mischief, first-degree arson, and second-degree burglary. The…

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Christopher James Blythe. Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-019-7695159. Terrible Revolution traces the central place of apocalypticism in LDS history and belief along multiple axes. Chronologically, the book traces the varieties of apocalypticism from the American religious context of Joseph Smith’s earliest activity through the Church’s Utah period and into the 21st century.

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Latter-day Saint homeschooling families living outside the Mormon belt face a conundrum. For the uninitiated, many if not most homeschoolers actually do quite a bit of organized educational activities with other homeschoolers in what are called “homeschool co-ops.” Sometimes this is limited to activities while in other cases one of the parents will volunteer to teach. (So yes, contrary to popular stereotypes, homeschool kids do actually get quite a bit of socialization.) However, again outside of the Mormon Belt it seems that homeschool families basically fall into two camps: purple haired, hippie, atheist types or super religious, often fundamentalist protestant types who don’t want their kids to learn about evolution. (And yes, there are others, but I’m slightly exaggerating for effect here).  In some areas there aren’t enough homeschoolers to allow differentiation, and people simply can’t afford to be picky; this was the case when we lived in Texas, and it leads to some fun circumstances where the purple haired atheist kids play with the fundamentalists.  However, in places where there is a critical mass of homeschoolers they tend to differentiate.  And in these cases the Latter-day Saint families tend to join the secular homeschoolers, because the religious ones often require one of those faith statements that we Latter-day Saints are adept at legalistically parsing to see if we can in fact sign them in good faith. Of course, often the faith statement has some kind of trinitarian, creedal formula,…

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Stephen Cranney and Josh Coates This is one of a series of posts discussing results from a recent survey of current and former Latter-day Saints conducted by the BH Roberts Foundation. The technical details are in the full methodology report here.  Occasionally in Latter-day Saint discourse people that have lost their testimonies of the Church’s truth claims float the idea that perhaps they could salvage their belief in the Church if it was made to be more allegorical and less literal. At the outset we admit our own perspective that, while we respect people’s different beliefs and ways of making the Church work for them, this wouldn’t really work at scale, and that for the Church to actual continuing functioning as a living, breathing, growing faith, and not just a cultural relic of a bygone sociocultural movement of a kind of “descendents of the Mormon pioneers” lineage-based service organization, it has to not only hold to its literal truth claims, but to actively promote and defend them. The Community of Christ, for example, does not have a position on the historicity of the Book of Mormon (or of many historical questions in general). The ambivalence of leadership towards actively promoting literal truth claims is undoubtedly sensed by the membership, who follow suit. (And as an aside, contrary to widespread missionary folklore, they did not “renounce” the Book of Mormon to be accepted by mainstream Protestants.) Of course, how common the…

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