By Wade Greenwood Or download the audio file here: Why Korihor Needed a Good Physical Therapist In April 2021, during a lengthy Twitter exchange about belief and membership in the LDS Church, an assistant professor at BYU with a high-profile social media presence posted a one-word rebuke to a BYU student who …
Tag: Book of Mormon
Own Your Religion
By Gregory A. Prince Gregory A. Prince is the author of Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (University of Utah, 2016), David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (University of Utah, 2005), and Power from on High: The Development of the Mormon Priesthood (Signature, 1995). For two years, …
Creating in the Borderlands
By Stephen Carter Eight years ago, while working on my third issue of Sunstone, I edited an article by John-Charles Duffy titled, “Mapping Mormon Historicity Debates—Part II: Perspectives from the Sociology of Knowledge.”1 Not the most exciting of titles, but the article itself upended my worldview and sent me on an eight-year journey that …
Ancient Fairy Tales: Written for this Generation
By H. Parker Blount Or, right-click here to download the audio file: Ancient Fairytales Written for This Generation I HAVE BEEN reading fairy tales lately. They are generally thought of as stories meant to entertain and teach the young, but that is selling fairy tales short. They have the capacity …
The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism–Part II
Continued from Part I One 24 September 1835, notwithstanding the absence of an external threat, Joseph Smith organized militarily in Kirtland. He proposed “by the voice of the Spirit of the Lord” to raise another Mormon army “to live or die on our own lands, which we have purchased in Jackson County, Missouri.” His manuscript …
The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism–Part I
By D. Michael Quinn D. Michael Quinn is an independent scholar in Rancho Cucamonga, Southern California. His first ancestral Mormon mother, Lydia Bilyeu Workman, died in Nauvoo on 30 September 1845, just days after she was burned out of her farmhouse by mobs. Her five youngest children were aged six to eighteen. It is extremely …
Mapping Book of Mormon Historicity Debates: A Guide for the Overwhelmed–Part II
Continued from Part I III. Mapping the Positions Thus far this article has summarized the historicity question as if it were a two-party debate: arguments for versus arguments against. But in fact, writers have adopted a wide array of positions around this issue. William Hamblin (1994) organizes views on historicity into five categories: evangelical, …
Mapping Book of Mormon Historicity Debates: A Guide for the Overwhelmed–Part I
By John-Charles Duffy Art by Jeanette Atwood Book of Mormon “historicity” refers to the claim that the Book of Mormon is an authentic translation of an ancient volume of scripture. Whether or not one believes the Book of Mormon to be historical in this sense is maybe the most fundamental question affecting one’s relationship to …
Written by the Finger of God?: Claims and Controversies of Book of Mormon Translation
By Don Bradley The accuracy of the Book of Mormon’s rendering into English was so important for Mormonism’s founding claims that—like the divine Sonship of Jesus in the biblical narratives of the Baptism and the Transfiguration—it needed to be declared from heaven (Matthew 3:13–17; 17:1–5; D&C 5:11–13).1 In June 1829, the Three Witnesses to the …
ON THE VERGE: WILL MORMONISM BECOME CHRISTIAN?
Complications from recent developments in Book of Mormon studies and new views of Joseph Smith have placed the LDS Church in a familiar position. Not one familiar to it, per se, but one that strongly parallels the developmental paths of Seventh-day Adventism, the Worldwide Church of God, and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of …