The Sunstone session memorializing the Cambridge, MA LDS Chapel featured Claudia Bushman, Phil Barlow, Mary Webster, me, and audience participants (including Morris and Dawn Thurston, Charlotte England, Richard Bushman, and a variety of others). The session was a wonderful time of remembering, with important contributions from all participants. Because I have severe limits on my time right now, I’m unable to summarize much the fascinating content of the panel, but I will post the text of my talk here. (Claudia’s lively reminisces are slated for print publications, and Phil’s and Mary’s thoughtful and engaging talks were not written.)
(more…)

John Taylor, in the canonized eulogy, brought the blood of the Mormon martyrs through each of the rhetorical phases, ending with the Apocalypse.

their innocent blood on the floor of Carthage jail is a broad seal affixed to “Mormonism” that cannot be rejected by any court on earth, and their innocent blood on the escutcheon of the State of Illinois, with the broken faith of the State as pledged by the governor, is a witness to the truth of the everlasting gospel that all the world cannot impeach; and their innocent blood on the banner of liberty, and on the magna charta of the United States, is an ambassador for the religion of Jesus Christ, that will touch the hearts of honest men among all nations; and their innocent blood, with the innocent blood of all the martyrs under the altar that John saw, will cry unto the Lord of Hosts till he avenges that blood on the earth.[1]

(from 2009)
Last week I discovered that my grandfather had given my family one final gift. My aunt has been settling his estate, and despite the many outflows that accumulated over the years, there was enough left in my grandfather’s estate to patch a few roofs, repair a few cars, and replace lost furniture (or a rug), kindnesses spread across the lives of my siblings and their families. My grandfather died just after August ended this year, in the drug-induced stupefaction that American hospice workers seem to favor (we didn’t get the call that he was terminally declining until they had already knocked him out with lorazepam and morphine). In the haziness of his last week or two, there were two overarching themes in his conversations with my aunt. He worried that he had not lived up to his family name (he was the son of a mid-twentieth-century church leader), and he worried about his namesake son, my father.
(more…)

In this groundbreaking and important volume, Brown . . . delves deeply into the many streams of thought that informed Smith’s formulation of the life hereafter. . . . a masterful look at this intriguing aspect of the Mormon worldview. This is must reading for students of the American religious tradition.

Publishers Weekly .

I spent the weekend analyzing John Harris’s diatribe against the poignancy of mortality (Enhancing Evolution) and caring for patients at a remote hospital in northern Idaho. Harris, in arguing for the moral necessity of medical immortality, is adamant that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that the fact of our mortality is central to our identity as humans, openly mocking the emotional language of various ethicists and philosophers. Harris’s rebuttal, both flippant and vitriolic, is that only puritanical dimwits find beauty in the rich transience of physical life. His harangue, balanced against millennia of religion, literature, and folklore placed these questions squarely in my view. (more…)

I have just completed a sabbatical from blogging related to pressing professional obligations. In the time away I have made good progress on a variety of work projects such that I think I can once again contribute at BCC. I have decided to return with a monthly post on Fast Sunday at least initially including meditations on fasting.

Fasting means a lot to me. It was 20 years ago this August that I engaged in a fast that changed the course of my life. (More about that this August.) (more…)

Several of Smith’s closest colleagues had become frustrated with his clandestine practice of polygamy and his divergence from the main streams of Christian primitivism (along with objections to his business, political, and ecclesiastical practices). The subterfuge required to hide aberrant sexual and political practices tended to contribute to dissension and turmoil, as did occasional marriage proposals to followers’ wives (see Chapter 8). Followers alienated by his Nauvoo Mormonism rejected the attempt to unite secular and religious life in pursuit of Smith’s Zion. A group of disaffected Mormons—including some from the highest ranks of the ecclesial hierarchy—published an ill-fated newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor. (more…)