This summer, when I posted on X about my lifelong conviction that the god of Mormonism is a moral monster, someone told me, very helpfully and completely accurately, that I would love God’s Monsters by Esther Hamori. God’s Monsters is the first work of religious scholarship that has made me…
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Is This What Joseph Smith Really Looked Like?
A daguerreotype has been found that may well be an image of Joseph Smith. Joseph was 38 years old when he died; I suppose the photo looks like someone about that age, if they’d had a hard life. The man in the photo doesn’t look all that charismatic or appealing…
Joseph Smith as Peeping Tom
by “Faraday” This essay hopes to solve a great mystery: the origins of the naked part of the endowment. The mystery Most people know that the signs and tokens of the temple come from Freemasons. And the Adam and Eve part comes from the book of Genesis. But where do…
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Delicious magic rocks edition!
The news of the Seerstone has been out for more than a week, and it has led to quite a bit of reflection and information on seerstones and church history. Also some fun stuff, like old-timey temple recommend questions and a glimpse into the future. Someone even found an old…
General Authority Bullsh*t: A category on my Blog
From Benson’s crazy commie-hatin’ days, to Paul H. Dunn’s deep diving lies, to little discrepancies in Monson’s talks, this category of posts on my blog, “Exploring Mormonism” reveals how much these men speak as men. Hopefully the in-depth fact checking of some of the more influential leaders, conference talks, Ensign articles, and…
Help? Do I belong here?
How do we help “new bloggers” find their voice? Are we really a community that does? I believe we are, or at least can be. Main Street Plaza is an Internet home for people who care about their thoughts and ideas, eventhough weoften disagree. Wedon’t have the same world view,but…
Mormonism: a “Native American” faith?
With Mitt Romney’s nomination closer and closer, there’s a lot of talk about whether Mormonism has made it…whether it’s succeeded, been accepted by American society… I was watching a Morning Joe episode that featured Matthew Bowman, author of a new book The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith,…
My place in Mormon history
A lot of people — upon leaving the CoJCoL-dS — are amazed to discover how fascinating LDS church history really is. It’s not just that the whitewashed history in Sunday School is incomplete and inaccurate. It’s that you’re force-fed this watery-porridge version of church history that inoculates many people from…
Connected Mormonism
It has become a platitude among journalists to refer to Internet communities as echo chambers that induce confirmation bias. In the good old days, goes the reasoning, everybody had to watch the same three network news and we were all on the same page, at least, with regard to the…
RE: I left the church because I found out all the history that they never taught.
This post, by Ardis E. Parshall, has gotten some play recently, here at MSP and elsewhere. Since numerous people linked to it, I thought I’d stop by to see what all the fuss was. Basically she talks about her awful mission experience and then concludes that there is nothing that…