Three months before his assassination in 1844, Joseph Smith gave a speech that is referred to today as the King Follett discourse (named after an Elder Follett). In that speech, Smith laid out the idea that God was once a man and that all human beings have the potential to…
Category: Joseph Smith
The Book of Mormon: The Musical
God loves Mormons and He wants some More Trey Parker & Matt Stone discuss Mormonism at TAM5: “When you read the beginnings of Mormonism, when you read the Joseph Smith story, you’re just like ‘Wow … wow, really?’ The idea of anybody like Joseph Smith, who can get people to…
hand shake based reality
Another fun tidbit from my conference conversations is worth noting here as well. I don’t remember how this one came up, but some how we got on the topic of things Mormon prophets had taught. The ever-mos in the group, in an effort to outdo one another, started dropping some…
Studying the Original
I recently saw the documentary “Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock” about Teri Horton, a woman who may have purchased a Jackson Pollock painting at a thrift store for $5. It was a fascinating documentary, with a clear perspective. The crux of the film is that Teri cannot prove that…
The Day I Sang about the Latter-Day Glory with the C of C and with the Polygamists
Wherever people talk about Mormonism, you always hear about the fundamentalist Mormons: the polygamists. On the LDS-interest Internet there’s tons of discussion of modern-day polygamy usually in a hand-wringing what should be done about them kind of way. Naturally, I was glad when I finally got the opportunity to meet…
Battlestar Galactica and the Lost Ten Tribes
The re-imagined Battlestar series ended last year, and the DVD came out this past summer. But I was thinking of it the other day when someone mentioned the lost ten tribes of Israel. How did I get from Battlestar Galatica (BSG) to the lost ten tribes?
So much for dualism, try googlism…
In reading through my morning dose of tech news, I caught this story about the medical and health ramifications of humans having over 1 trillion bacteria inside us (more bacteria than there are human cells). The health ramifications are fascinating, but because I relate everything back to religion I immediately…
Your Sunday School Lesson: The First Vision
According to the philosopher Mircea Eliade, of whose work I learned at BYU, every community, tribe, or nation requires an origin myth. The account of a community’s or practice’s origin has far reaching consequences because it implies how they relate to the cosmos, which is necessary for human beings to…
Thoughts of Nancy
It’s kind of a strange family history claim to fame: My great-great-great-great aunt, Nancy Winchester, was one of Joseph Smith’s youngest teen brides. She was fourteen or fifteen years old in 1842(3?) when she married the prophet; he was in his late thirties and was killed a year or so…
Slashdotting www.ImagesoftheRestoration.org
Any fans of slashdot here? No? Anyone ever heard of the Slashdot effect? Basically it’s when a website is hammered by visitors when a widely popular site links to it and it isn’t ramped up to handle that kind of traffic. In the latest issue of Sunstone there is a…