Matter
July 2, 2025God began to be a problem soon after Tommy Ericson turned fourteen, when Sister Larson, his old primary teacher who lived down the street, accidentally killed her youngest daughter Callie while backing into the garage…
DiaBLOGue
Volume Art
July 2, 2025
Enos Encoded: Narrative Structure in the Small Plates
July 2, 2025If the Book of Mormon possesses, in the words of the late Elder Neal A. Maxwell, “divine architecture,” then it follows that one task of theology ought to be to seek God in the structure of the book. In this vein, Adam Miller argues that “theological readings aim to develop a text’s latent images of Christ.” Given that the Book of Mormon is, whatever else it may be, a narrative, then those searching for God in it would do well to pay attention to the ways the text’s narrative structure (i.e., its “divine architecture”) develops “latent images of Christ.” Miller gestures toward a methodology for divining Christ in texts when he writes that the power of theology “derives from its freedom to pose hypothetical questions: if such and such were the case, then what meaningful pattern would the text produce in response?” In what follows I offer such a theological reading of the small plates of Nephi, paying particular attention to the book of Enos.
A Book of Mormon for the Ages | Grant Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon
July 2, 2025For intellectually inclined, scripture-studying Mormons of a particular age, the path of Book of Mormon scholarship has been fairly straightforward. In the second half of the twentieth century, there was the work of Hugh Nibley,…
Devotional Approaches to the Academic Study of the Bible and Book of Mormon | Charles Swift and Nicholas J. Frederick, eds., They Shall Grow Together: The Bible in the Book of Mormon
July 2, 2025This collection of essays is the fourth volume in the Book of Mormon Academy Series from the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University. Earlier volumes focused on Abinadi, Ether and the Jaredite records, and…
The Wisdom of Fools | James Goldberg, Nicole Wilkes Goldberg, and Mattathias Singh, Tales of the Chelm First Ward
July 2, 2025Picking up Tales of the Chelm First Ward is rather like picking up a chunky, beaded necklace that you might find at an esoteric gift shop that smells of incense and sells various crystals, tarot…
Transcending Both Orthodoxy and Disbelief | David G. Pace, American Trinity: And Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor
July 2, 2025American Trinity: And Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor is a collection of short stories that grapples with the inescapable loneliness of disillusionment, while offering a glimmer of hope in a conviction that “transcends both…
Opening Hearts and Minds and Chapels | Kerry Spencer Pray and Jenn Lee Smith, eds., I Spoke to You with Silence: Essays from Queer Mormons of Marginalized Genders
July 2, 2025Kerry Spencer Pray and Jenn Lee Smith have given an invaluable gift to the Latter-day Saint community in gathering and editing this impressive collection of stories by and about LGBTQ+ Mormons. These stories open closets…
In Sacred Rebellion: Joseph White Musser | Cristina Rosetti, Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist
July 2, 2025Cristina Rosetti’s Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist provides a comprehensive and analytically rich examination of Musser’s life and theology, delving into his influential role in one of the more schismatic periods of Mormon history.…
Joseph Smith’s Spiritual Language: The Presence of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon
July 2, 2025The question of whether or not Joseph Smith participated in the translation of the Book of Mormon as an actual translator, or merely as a transcriber, remains a point of debate in Mormon studies. Did Joseph receive spiritual impressions and visionary experiences by means of a translation device (seer stone, interpreters, and/or Urim and Thummim) and then articulate them into English by tapping into his own mental storehouse of English vocabulary, phraseology, and conceptualizations (the theory of “loose control”)? Or did Joseph simply read the words of a preexisting translation that appeared to him on the surface of the translation device, without any significant contributions of his own (the theory of “tight control”)? As Richard Bushman aptly observes, “Latter-day Saints themselves cannot agree on how the writings engraved on the gold surfaces relate to Joseph Smith’s oral dictation to his secretaries.”