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Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 22: The Early Church – Blacks and the Church [C]

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I was hoping to get this done before the FAIR Conference this past week, but life got in the way so I’m a little late. It was absolutely lovely to meet so many of you in person! I finally got the chance to meet so many friends I’ve only ever met online before, and that was a real treat for me. I also picked up some new books, including one I’ve cited essays from on multiple occasions, so that makes me happy.

There were some fantastic presentations that I will 100% be citing in the future, and I learned a lot, which is always fun for me. Those of us sitting in the back right corner completely geeked out over a few of the presentations, and I can’t wait for the full transcripts and notes to be available. A friend called it “Nerdfest 2023” and he wasn’t wrong, but it was a great time.

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Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 21: The Early Church – Blacks and the Church [B]

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As we pick up with the difficult racial quotes this week, I want to start again with the disclaimer that neither I nor anyone else at FAIR agrees with or condones the words and attitudes on display in these comments. I am not defending their use. I am just putting some history and context back into them, so that we can all approach them with a little more knowledge than we may have previously held. That doesn’t make them easier to digest. Some of them are pretty awful, and it’s incredibly difficult for me to understand how someone can hold those views about other children of God.

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Asking Big Questions: How Can I Find and Evaluate Sources of Truth?

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By Craig Lindquist

The “Asking Big Questions” series is made in cooperation with the Wilford Woodruff Papers Project.

We live in a day of confusion, even chaos. The world over, people are searching for truth on a host of subjects—but how can anyone know? It is not an easy search. Who do we trust? Where do we look? How do we know if something is in fact true? If the subject we seek to verify is purely secular, such as historical or even mathematical information, the search for the truth can be fairly easy given today’s technology.

But what do we do when our search for truth goes beyond what can be googled or found in a science book? Where can we look, and who can we trust when we want to know of eternal truths?

CONTINUED HERE

Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 20: The Early Church – Blacks and the Church [A]

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We’re now moving into one of the most controversial topics in our church’s history, the Priesthood restriction for black members of African descent. Like plural marriage, this is a topic that comes with a lot of emotion behind it. People have very strong feelings about this part of our history, and for good reason. I’m no exception to that. I’ll be discussing quotes, attitudes, and beliefs that I personally find appalling.

But like I always say, history is messy. Expecting it to be easy is naïve.

There are two things that are absolutely imperative to understand when we’re talking about these things.

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By Study and Faith – Episode 2: Evaluating Sources

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by Zachary Wright

Introduction

In the last article in this series, we discussed some elementary ideas behind critical thinking. We showed how critical thinking skills like asking questions and evaluating worldviews may help deal with controversial topics behind LDS theology and history.  Now, those skills are essential for approaching a controversial topic.  Even so, we still have a long way to go to improve our critical thinking skills and achieve our goal to learn “by study and by faith.”  That prompts some questions though:  What should we be asking questions about?  What worldviews can we practice identifying?  The short answer to these questions is “You can use these skills on whatever you want,” but to do that, we need to first go over how to evaluate which sources are good and which ones are not.  We’ll be focusing on that topic today.  Specifically, I’ll be going over what makes a good source in general, what makes a good source from a historical perspective, and then give an example of how I would deal with a historical source.  Let’s get into it. [Read more…] about By Study and Faith – Episode 2: Evaluating Sources

Asking Big Questions: How Can I Find Answers to Gospel Questions on the Internet?

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By Maddie Christensen

The “Asking Big Questions” series is made in cooperation with the Wilford Woodruff Papers Project.

In today’s digital age, the Internet has become an indispensable tool for accessing information on any topic imaginable. With just a few keystrokes and a click of a button, one can easily find answers to any question that comes to mind. Googling questions has become a ubiquitous activity that many of us engage in on a daily basis. [Read more…] about Asking Big Questions: How Can I Find Answers to Gospel Questions on the Internet?

Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 19: The Early Church – Polygamy [D]

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One of the Church history topics I find the most fascinating is that of the Nauvoo Expositor and the lead-up to and aftermath of the martyrdom.

My first real exposure to the story of the Expositor was as a sophomore in high school in Utah. An anti-LDS substitute math teacher decided to take it upon himself to lecture us on the evil censorship of the church many of us in the class belonged to. Looking back now, I can see how wildly inappropriate it was for a substitute teacher to bring this up in order to harass and criticize the religious beliefs of a bunch of teenagers who were just trying to learn pre-calculus. But unfortunately, at the time it wasn’t that unusual for us to have teachers who didn’t like the church. It didn’t occur to us that these teachers were crossing way over the line by actually vocalizing that dislike in class.

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Letter For My Wife Rebuttal, Part 18: The Early Church – Polygamy [C]

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Sorry for taking so long to get this posted! I’ve been putting in more than 60 hours a week at work lately, and I just didn’t have time to properly research this post until now.

This week, the topic under discussion is Joseph’s wives and the way that he personally practiced plural marriage. It’s true that some of the circumstances a little unusual compared to how later members practiced it, and it’s also true that sealing practices in general were unusual compared to how we practice them today. The world was also very different in the 1840s than it is today in the 2020s.

All of that means that it can be very difficult for us to understand what was going on and why. I’m going to do my best to break this all down so that it makes sense, but just remember, it’s okay if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s okay if you don’t like the idea of plural marriage. It’s okay if you don’t ever want to practice it. I don’t, either.

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By Study and Faith – Episode 1: What is Critical Thinking?

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by Zachary Wright

Have you ever wanted to problem-solve better? Not just the daily issues we deal with, but the massive world-changing problems we deal with constantly? What about wanting to be more effective in your study? Have you ever wanted to learn to differentiate between what’s true and what’s not? Maybe you’re not as ambitious, but you want to be a better disciple of Jesus Christ and learn more about Him and His gospel. All these skills, and more, apply at least some form of critical thinking skills, and I’m here to help you learn how to be a more effective critical thinker. [Read more…] about By Study and Faith – Episode 1: What is Critical Thinking?