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Mordred Had a Good Point | Gary Topping, Leonard J. Arrington: A Historian’s Life

March 17, 2018

It is difficult not to like Leonard Arrington. By all accounts, he was an exceptionally generous and decent man. His Great Basin Kingdom was a kind of Big Bang of Mormon historiography, doing more than any other volume to create the New Mormon History. In addition, Arrington was an enormously productive researcher and scholarly entrepreneur, churning out articles and monographs at a prodigious rate and helping to found such institutions as the Mormon History Association and the Journal of Mormon History.

Prophet, Seer, Revelator, American Icon | Reid L. Neilson and Terryl L. Givens, eds., Joseph Smith Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries

March 17, 2018

First, a confession and a little context. I am not a scholar of Mormonism, just a Mormon who is also a scholar (of medieval mysticism, it so happens). I am interested in but mostly unfamiliar with the growing body of Joseph Smith scholarship. As a result, I am unable to reference that tradition in this review or to argue how these essays augment or contrast with other work, although it is worth noting that the essays themselves do a fine job of that. Rather, my role, as I see it, is to respond to these essays both as an educated non-specialist and, perhaps most importantly, as a member of the Church who seeks “greater knowledge” (Abr. 1:2) regarding our founding prophet. This collection is a compelling read on both fronts, and I expect to recommend it to my colleagues in religious studies and history and to friends and family in and out of the Church. 

Straight Home

March 17, 2018

Six cars pulled through the intersection, one after the other over the course of an hour, but none of them was hers. Barefoot, Bart waited on the slat bench outside his front door, picking away…

Undefined Borders

March 17, 2018

My husband Jake loves women’s fashions. A lot. One of his hobbies is spending time at the mall, looking for shoes, dresses, make-up, and jewelry, and he is an expert at finding clothes that are…

Violence in the Scriptures: Mormonism and the Cultural Theory of René Girard

March 17, 2018

Many who revere the scriptures as the inspired word of God are nonetheless disturbed by them. The scriptures contain inconsistencies and outright contradictions. Particularly disturbing for many are scriptural portrayals of God as wrathful, vengeful, and violent. This article will introduce these problems with several examples from the Old Testament, then present a succinct overview of René Girard’s theory of culture because of its unique value in helping us to interpret these difficult texts. The final portion of the paper will present selected texts from the LDS canon in light of Girard’s theory. 

A Price Far above Rubies versus Eight Cows: What’s a Virtuous Woman Worth?

March 17, 2018

Produced by Brigham Young University and presented by the Deseret Sunday School Union of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1969, the short film Johnny Lingo is among the best-known texts in the LDS Church, familiar even to people who never made it through more than a few pages of the Book of Mormon.

Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution

March 17, 2018

Dialogue 43.1 (Spring 2010): 1–36
And in fact, what might it mean that God “used” evolution tocreate life’s diversity? Was this a choice for God among other al-ternatives? Do Wildman’s pessimistic conclusions hold for Mor-monism? Does evolution imply a noninterventionist Deity? Arethere more optimistic views possible, some of which may actuallysuggest that evolution enhances and expands our view of God?

Formulas and Facts: A Response to John Gee

March 16, 2018

Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2012): 1–10
In Winter 2010, Chris Smith and I published an article in Dialogue demonstrating that no more than ~56 cm of papyrus can be missing from the interior of the scroll of Hôr—the papyrus Joseph Smith identified as the Book of Abraham. John Gee has responded by claiming that our method is “anything but accurate” and that it “glaringly underestimates the length of the scroll.” He states that “Two different formulas have been published for estimating the original length of a scroll,” then attempts to show that “Hoffmann’s formula approximates the actual length of the papyrus,” whereas “Cook and Smith’s formula predicts a highly inaccurate length.” The fact is, the two formulas are completely equivalent. They are both exact expressions of an Archimedean spiral and they yield precisely the same results, if correctly applied.