I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book. (Joseph Smith, Documentary History of the Church 4:461)…
Category: Book of Mormon
Anything Good in the Book of Mormon
I’m going to ask a strange question of a bunch of exMos, but I hope you can help me out. I don’t know where I could ask this question on the Bloggernacle without it ending badly. I was reading James Kugel’s essay on biblical criticism’s strange relationship to apologetics (highly…
Studying the Original
I recently saw the documentary “Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock” about Teri Horton, a woman who may have purchased a Jackson Pollock painting at a thrift store for $5. It was a fascinating documentary, with a clear perspective. The crux of the film is that Teri cannot prove that…
BofM – the “new” new model
Anyone else catch this article in the SL Tribune noting that there is a movement among the apologentsia to suggest that the Book of Mormon took place exclusively in North America (east of the Mississippi)? According to the article, this movement is gaining some traction among Mormons. As if Mormons…
Oldies but Goodies: Testimony of a Dissident
A while back another blogger asked me to submit an essay about my Mormon experience. Probably, for good reasons he changed his mind and never published it. Since it is already written and might shed some light on my argument at Times and Seasons, I might as well publish it…
The Boiled Seed and Honesty
A while back, I heard a rather innocuous story about honesty at stake conference (ok, so it’s not as prestigious as general conference…). I didn’t care much about the choice of story he used, since it seemed trite (it was some Chinese feel-good fable), but as I read a passage…
Let’s present scriptures for our edification
I’m going to ask you to do something. Something you may not have done in a long time. Pull out a set of scriptures, wherever you can find them, and search for a scripture. This is my clever way of getting people to confront the scriptures. But don’t think I’ve…
A Convert’s Conscience
Although he appears to be a star professor at BYU, I have only become aware of Robert Millet’s efforts during the last two years. As a convert, I have to admit that his approach to investigators distresses me somewhat. I know that Millet means well when he suggests to side…
Your Sunday School Lesson: The First Vision
According to the philosopher Mircea Eliade, of whose work I learned at BYU, every community, tribe, or nation requires an origin myth. The account of a community’s or practice’s origin has far reaching consequences because it implies how they relate to the cosmos, which is necessary for human beings to…
Sidney Rigdon wrote the Book of Mormon?
So says a new computer-assisted authorship study out of Stanford: Jockers, Matthew L., Daniela M. Witten, and Craig S. Criddle. 2008. “Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification.†Literary and Linguistic Computing fqn040. I caught this as part of my HighWire Press…