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This week’s interview on the Mormon FAIRCast is with is with Dr. Louis C. Midgley. He was born and raised near Salt Lake City. He received a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the University of Utah, and, after teaching for a year at Weber State University, he and his wife moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he received his Ph.D. from Brown University in the political science department. He taught the history of political and legal philosophy for thirty-six years at Brigham Young University, from which he retired in 1996.
Dr. Midgley has had an abiding interest in the history of Christian theology. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Paul Tillich, the then-famous German-American Protestant theologian and political theorist/religious-socialist activist. Midgley also studied the writings of other influential Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth. Eventually he took an interest in contemporary Roman Catholic theology, and was also impacted by the work of important Jewish philosophers, including especially Leo Strauss and his disciples.
Beginning with its first issue in 1989, he was a regular contributor to the FARMS Review, which soon became the flagship publication of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He eventually also had the pleasure of serving as one of its associate editors until it was cancelled in 2011. He then began serving as a contributing editor for Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture in 2012.
Dr. Midgley served two missions to New Zealand—the first in 1950-52 and the second, with his wife, in 1999-2000, during which they directed the Lorne Street Institute of Religion, in Auckland.
He is married to the former Ireta Troth, of Bountiful, Utah. They are the parents of two sons and a daughter.
Dr. Midgley’s wife passed away on 3 February 2014 from an unexpected catastrophic event following successful surgery at the Huntsman Cancer Hospital. He is now without the immediate companionship of his beautiful wife. He lives with a firm hope that he will eventually be reunited with her.
Dr. Midgley’s testimony can be found at Mormon Scholars Testify.
Any member who has undergone a faith crisis knows that there are many critics on the Internet who are happy to share a Big List of Mormon Problems to help facilitate one’s exit from the Church. These lists can serve as the catalyst for the initial testimony damage, or contribute the final straw in a “death by a thousand cuts” (the “Big List of Mormon Problems” is not the real name of any list but designates features which all of these lists have in common).
The most sacred structure to Latter-day Saints is the Temple. Of course, what makes the Temple sacred has nothing to do with the building; it is because of the holy ordinances that are performed inside. The Church teaches that only through those ordinances are the greatest blessings available through the Atonement to be had1. The Church also teaches that Temple ordinances have been around since the time of Adam2. By contrast, most anti-Mormons believe that they are a modern invention, a mixture of Joseph Smiths imagination and plagiarized Freemason ritual. This is simply not true. Although not a comprehensive analysis, I hope to give throughout this post a glimpse of the plentiful evidences that these ordinances were practiced anciently, and that divine revelation to Joseph Smith is a much better explanation for their genesis than pretending he made it up.
