Just before Joseph Smith made a brief escape from Nauvoo over the Mississippi River into Iowa, he made a strange request. He asked his followers to take up their glue guns, their knitting needles, and their macrame rings to make a giant craft project—namely a sixteen-foot-long flag. He wanted to carry this “flag for the …
By Rick Jepson Or, right-click here to download the audio file: Godwrestling: Physicality, Conflict, and Redemption in Mormon Doctrine Click here to read the article in PDF format.
By Ryan Stuart Bingham Nearly forty years ago, Jan Shipps challenged Joseph Smith’s biographers to reconcile “the charlatan-true prophet dichotomy which has plagued Mormon history from the beginning.”1 While biographers have presented evidence with increasing rigor and have offered broader interpretations of Joseph Smith, the alternate distractions of devotion and incredulity have maintained the old …
By Paul Swenson Called to hold the keys of mysteries. Yet both, at 34, were locked away; Joseph jailed at Liberty, dropped through a hole in prison floor into the pit. In Birmingham, Martin declared: Where there is injustice, I am there, and it would not be fair of me to spurn …
Philip L. Barlow is Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. Earlier this year, Oxford University Press published an updated version of his classic book, Mormons and the Bible. The following excerpt is from its new preface. IN RECENT YEARS I have come to judge [Joseph Smith’s] project as …
One of the highlights of the 2012 Sunstone Symposium was a unique performance of “Praise to the Man” as arranged by Kim McCall and performed by the Sunstone Ward Choir. Listen to it here: Praise to the Man
Continued from Part II In May 1842, Joseph Smith reassembled a cadre of bodyguards, selecting primarily those with experience as Danites in Missouri. Former Danites such as Dimick B. Huntington, Daniel Carn, and Albert P. Rockwood began serving as Nauvoo’s “Night Watch.”[i]Previously a Danite captain, Rockwood had already been serving as “commander of my [Smith’s] …
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 …
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 …
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