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FAIR Conference Podcast #78 – Kirk Magleby, “Unforgettable Hugh Nibley”

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This podcast series features past FAIR Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2021 conference. If you would like to watch all the presentations from that conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

Kirk Magleby, Unforgettable Hugh Nibley

Hugh Nibley Observed is available from the FAIR Bookstore.

Kirk Alder Magleby is the Executive Director of Book of Mormon Central. Kirk was born in Salzburg, Austria, and raised in Utah and Arizona. He served a mission for the Church in Peru. Kirk has a degree in economics from BYU and has spent his life in entrepreneurial as well as religious and humanitarian pursuits. Kirk is currently the Executive Director of Book of Mormon Central. He and his wife, Shannon, have 4 children and 10 grandchildren.

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 51

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Part 51: CES Letter Witnesses Questions [Section G]

by Sarah Allen

 

In this entry, I’d like to get through as much of the next few pages of the CES Letter as possible, so that we can wrap up the Witnesses section soon and move on to the next topic. There are a lot of different accusations to go through, many of which we’ve already covered, so I’m just going to dive right in.

The Letter picks up, again in big, red, capital letters: [Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 51

Come, Follow Me Week 11 – Genesis 37–41

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“The Lord Was with Joseph”: A Scriptural Case Study in Why the Lord Allows Bad Things to Happen to Good People

by Matthew L. Bowen

Bad things happen to good people, of course. What’s more, sometimes terrible things happen to the best people even when they are striving with the utmost diligence to do what is right. The entire book of Job is “the paradigmatic literary case of the innocent sufferer, afflicted by the Deity through no fault of his own, and forever kept in the dark concerning the actual cause of his misery.”[1] Nobody ever suffered more for doing so much good for so many than Jesus Christ himself, who never once committed sin.[2] Like Job, Joseph in Egypt represents an antetype or foreshadowing of the Savior with respect to unmerited suffering. As with Jesus and his atoning sacrifice, what happens to Joseph ultimately sets up the divine means of saving the house of Israel alive. This short study will explore the typology of Joseph as the life-saving sufferer (as opposed to a hapless victim of suffering) and the far-reaching impact of the divine deliverance accomplished through him. [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 11 – Genesis 37–41

FREE BOOK CHAPTER: “‘Translating’ Restoration Scripture”

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Can the Book of Mormon be the Word of God and inspired fiction? Did Joseph Smith’s cultural worldview influence the way he understood the relationship between New World people and the 10 Lost Tribes? How might have Joseph’s worldview influenced his understanding of both the Nephite Interpreters and his own seer stone? What did the Nephite Interpreters look like and how did they resemble “spectacles”? Did Joseph use a seer stone, Interpreters, or the Urim and Thummim to translate the Nephite records? Discussions on these issues begin (to a great degree) in Chapter 23 of my book, Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture: A Prophet’s Role as Creative Co-Author.

Chapter 23 is entitled, “‘Translating’ Restoration Scripture,” and is currently available as a FREE pdf file to download here (for a limited time). Meanwhile, my book, Rethinking Revelation, is available in print in the FAIR bookstore, or in print and Kindle format from Amazon. [Read more…] about FREE BOOK CHAPTER: “‘Translating’ Restoration Scripture”

Book Review: The Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translations Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon (Facsimile Edition)

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Available from the FAIR Bookstore

This is one of the larger (a little over 9 inches by 12 inches) facsimile editions in the Joseph Smith Papers series. Weighing nearly 10 pounds, with 800 pages, I believe it is the largest single book in the series. It may fit better on a table than a shelf, and is certainly easiest to peruse that way. But it is a fitting presentation of the extant pieces of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon.

Unfortunately, only around 28 percent of the original manuscript still exists, and most of it is in very poor condition. It was stored for safekeeping in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House in 1841, but when it was found over 40 years later during a remodel by Lewis Bidamon, it had been badly damaged due to the cornerstone apparently not being weatherproof despite precautions that had been taken. Bidamon gradually gave bits and pieces of it away over the years to visitors, but most of what remains is thought to now be at the Church History Library, the Wilford Wood Museum, and the University of Utah. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translations Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon (Facsimile Edition)

Come, Follow Me Thoughts to Keep in Mind – The Covenant

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The Abrahamic Covenant, Its Influence on Scriptures, and What that Has to Do with Us

by Kerry Muhlestein, author of God Will Prevail: Ancient Covenants, Modern Blessings, and the Gathering of Israel

The Abrahamic covenant is a central theme of the Old Testament, and really of all scripture. Every prophetic writer, whether in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Pearl of Great Price, the Book of Mormon, or the Doctrine and Covenants, assumes that you know and understand the Abrahamic covenant, and writes based on that assumption. As a result, when we are not familiar with this covenant, there are a number of things in every book of scripture that we miss. We lose some of the message and the rich power in the scriptures without even realizing it. Studying the Old Testament is an excellent time to rectify this situation. This year we are afforded the opportunity to read about the establishment of the covenant and to study some of the places where it is most fully explained. This will allow us to start to understand the covenant the way President Nelson has been asking us to. President Nelson certainly realizes the significance of the covenant, and has been energetically teaching about it throughout his apostolic career, and has even asked us to study the blessings promised to Israel in the covenant.[1] There is no better time than this Come Follow Me year to come to more fully share President Nelson’s desires for us to better recognize, understand, and appreciate what it means to be heirs to the Abrahamic covenant. [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Thoughts to Keep in Mind – The Covenant

FAIR Conference Podcast #74 – Jenny Reeder, “First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith”

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This podcast series features past FAIR Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2021 conference held in August. If you would like to watch all the presentations from the conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

Jenny Reeder, First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith

Jenny Reader’s books are for sale in the FAIR bookstore.

Jenny Reeder is the nineteenth-century women’s history specialist at the Church History Department for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She has a PhD in American history from George Mason University, and an MA from New York University in history, archival management, and documentary editing. Jenny is on the Church Historian’s Press Editorial Board, the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts Advisory Board, the Mormon History Association’s book awards committee, and the editorial board of Mormon Historical Studies. She has taught at BYU Education Week and has been a featured speaker at BYU Women’s Conference, the BYU Easter Conference, and Time Out for Women. She recently published First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith with Deseret Book, and past publications include At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women and Witness of Women: Firsthand Experiences and Testimonies of the Restoration. She leads the “Discourses of Eliza R. Snow” project, collecting and publishing all of Snow’s sermons on the Church Historian’s Press website and a selection of discourses in an upcoming print volume.

FAIR Conference Podcast #72 – Dan Peterson, “The Book of Mormon Witnesses: Sincerity and Reality”

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This podcast series features past FAIR Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2021 conference held in August. If you would like to watch all the presentations from the conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

Dan Peterson, The Book of Mormon Witnesses: Sincerity and Reality

The Witnesses film and books by Dan Peterson are available from the FAIR Bookstore.

Daniel C. Peterson (PhD, UCLA) is a professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University and founder of the university’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. He has published and spoken extensively on both Islamic and Mormon subjects. Formerly chairman of the board of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and an officer, editor, and author for its successor organization, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, his professional work as an Arabist focuses on the Qur’an and on Islamic philosophical theology. He is the author, among other things, of a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God (Eerdmans, 2007). Dan currently serves as the president of the Interpreter Foundation.

Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture

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Available in the FAIR Bookstore

by Michael R. Ash

Those who have read any of my writings in the past several decades will know that I’ve been a volunteer for FAIR for more than twenty years. I’m an active Latter-day Saint who accepts prophets as the divinely called and authorized agents of Christ’s church on earth. And, like many other believing members, scholars, and LDS-scientists, I also try to think rationally and logically, and I embrace the general conclusions of secular science and “objective” history.

Faith-Crisis

In the more than forty years that I’ve been reading and writing about LDS scholarly issues (including the twenty years I’ve been volunteering for FAIR), I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the intellectual reasons people leave the faith. Obviously, there are many reasons that people leave the Church, but I’ve always been interested in the historical and scientific issues that unseat some LDS testimonies. [Read more…] about Rethinking Revelation and the Human Element in Scripture

Inspiration, Intellect, and Rethinking Revelation

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by Michael R. Ash

for FAIR Newsletter 2021 1211

Inspiration and Intellect are two sides of the same coin in how Latter-day Saints believe that God communicates with His children. We know that the Spirit testifies to eternal truths, but we often forget (or neglect) the role that intellect plays in uncovering truth. The late Apostle Hugh B. Brown said, “revelation does not come only through the prophet of God nor only directly from heaven in visions or dreams. Revelation may come in the laboratory, out of the test tube, out of the thinking mind and the inquiring soul, out of search and research and prayer and inspiration.”[i] Likewise, the Lord instructed the Saints to “seek learning… by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118). This counsel was repeated several more times in modern revelations (see D&C 11:22, 90:15, 93:53; and 109: 7, 14), and the admonition led Joseph to establish the “School of the Prophets” (D&C 88:127).

The dual-nature or dual-sources for discovering truth presents some challenges, however. The first challenge is that neither source—neither inspiration nor intellect—can provide infallible and inerrant data.

The Challenge of Inspiration [Read more…] about Inspiration, Intellect, and Rethinking Revelation