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FairMormon Conference Podcast #50 – Matt Roper/Kirk Magleby, “Time Vindicates the Prophet”
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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2019 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.
Matt Roper/Kirk Magleby, Time Vindicates the Prophet
Transcript available here.
Matthew P. Roper (M.S. in Sociology, Brigham Young University) was a resident scholar and research assistant for the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Studies at Brigham Young University. He is now a Research Associate at Book of Mormon Central.
Kirk Alder Magleby is the Executive Director of Book of Mormon Central.
Audio Copyright © 2019 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.
FairMormon Conference Presentations to go with the “Introductory Pages of the Book of Mormon” Come Follow Me Lesson
This is a little late, but it came to me while sitting in Gospel Doctrine today that we have had several good FairMormon Conference presentations over the years that go along with today’s lesson. Perhaps they can still be of benefit to someone in their personal study. Here are the ones that came to mind:
- In 2004, the late historian Richard Lloyd Anderson gave a talk about the Book of Mormon witnesses, entitled “Explaining Away the Book of Mormon Witnesses.”
- In 2017, Keith Erekson, who is the director of the Church History Library, talked about “Witnessing the Book of Mormon: The Testimonies of Three, Eight, and Millions.”
- And in 2019, Daniel Peterson spoke about the little known women who were also witnesses of the Book of Mormon as part of his presentation on “‘Idle Tales’? The Witness of Women.”
Conclusions in Search of Evidence
Cross-posted from The Interpreter Foundation
Review of Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 312 pages. $29.95.
Abstract: Riess’s book surveying the beliefs and behaviors of younger members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was supposed to compare the attitudes of younger generations with those of older generations. Unfortunately, flaws in the design, execution, and analysis of the survey prevent it from being what it was supposed to be. Instead the book is Riess’s musings on how she would like the Church to change, supported by cherry-picked interviews and an occasional result from the survey. The book demonstrates confusion about basic sampling methods, a failure to understand the relevant literature pertaining to the sociology of religion, and potential breaches of professional ethics. Neither the survey results nor the interpretations can be used uncritically.
Oxford University Press has a number of excellent titles in sociology and the sociology of religion that I can recommend.1 Unfortunately, the volume under review is not one of those. On the bright side, this book did not come out of the division of Oxford University Press that deals with sociology but out of the division that deals with religious studies. The unfortunate flip side is that this book did not benefit from peer review by someone who actually does social science.
The author of the book, Jana Riess, is a journalist with a PhD in American religious history from Columbia University, where she studied under Richard Bushman. She has no training in social science or statistical analysis and outsourced the statistical work on her book to others. Her book is based on a survey she calls “The Next Mormons Survey.” She put more effort into this book than typically expected from a journalist, and it shows, but the result does not attain the level of top-quality social science work. Riess’s book is not horrible, but it is plagued with problems. As David Frankfurter, professor of religion at Boston University, once noted, “[M]any scholars in Religious Studies have had a certain aversion to the positivistic use of evidence, borne of post-modern critiques of scientific verifiability and a general relativism toward truth-claims.”2 They thus tend not to be well situated to evaluate or use evidence, which shows in the book under consideration. On a certain level, the book deserves to be taken seriously, seriously enough to go to the effort to dissect certain aspects and analyze them carefully. I will discuss the problems with the book in order of the steps taken to put the book together. [Read more…] about Conclusions in Search of Evidence
From Anglican Minister to Relief Society Sister – Interview with Jennifer Roach
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Early on in life, Jennifer Roach was raised in a broadly Evangelical Christian setting. Being taught the Bible early on, Jennifer has had a love for sacred scripture. Her inquisitive nature and her spiritual passion took her to Divinity School, where she earned a Masters Degree in Divinity. Through her studies, she became interested in the Anglican faith where she became an ordained Anglican Minister.
Through interactions with a Latter-day Saint reporter that was covering a story to which Jennifer was involved earlier in life, Jennifer would ask questions about the faith she was taught was evil and should be avoided. Her inquisitive nature brought her to ask several questions over email, and to begin a study of the Pearl of Great Price and Book of Mormon.
One day as she was driving to work, she stopped and saw some Sister Missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, walking the side of the road. She felt impressed to stop and connect with them. She took a selfie with the Sisters and sent it to her reporter friend, Garth Stapley, to show that she was actually going to talk with the missionaries.
Over the next 9 months Jennifer would go through some amazing experiences, address a number of questions both at Church and with the Missionaries, before being baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Listen to this episode of the Latter-day Saint MissionCast to hear the full story.
Jennifer would encounter a number of online sources about the Church, some positive, some negative, including the CES Letter. She would use sources, like FairMormon and the Gospel Topics essays to help her navigate the many questions she had. Her research brought her to a faithful position, and one that has helped her endure the challenges that have come to her life as a result of her decision.
This episode is the first time that Jennifer has told this story to the general public in a podcast. If you want to follow her blog and connect with Jennifer, visit her blog myconvertlife.com
This episode was produced and first released on the Latter-day Saint MissionCast. The Latter-day Saint MissionCast is not a production of FairMormon.
Book Review: The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture
Most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have probably never thought of the Pearl of Great Price as controversial. The Book of Mormon, yes—it has been under attack practically since the night Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith. Yet, Givens and Hauglid [1] use this book to argue that the Pearl of Great Price is even more so. Unfortunately, the majority of the effort goes into attempting to prove the point, and it leaves the book less than faith-promoting. It does have some bright spots, however.
The book begins with the assertion that “without the Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ would lose its principal evangelizing tool and its most conspicuous sign of Smith’s prophetic vocation but relatively little of its doctrine.… With the Doctrine and Covenants, the church would lose a good bit of its ecclesiology—organization templates and guidelines for church government and its offices—but would not suffer a devastating loss of the deeper theological underpinnings of its faith.” [2] I found these statements to be very surprising. The Book of Mormon has enough unique doctrine in it for Tad Callister to devote an entire chapter of his recent book to it, and in several places Givens admits that doctrine found in places like the Book of Moses was first taught in the Book of Mormon. In addition, the Doctrine and Covenants contains a great deal of unique doctrine, in spite of the removal of the Lectures on Faith (which the book points out is commonly thought to have been the Doctrine of the Doctrine and Covenants). A comparison of our edition with that of the Community of Christ shows some of what would be missing without it.
The book goes on to make its point: “Mormonism, in other words, is absolutely inconceivable apart from this collection of scriptural texts that provided the faith’s theological core from the beginning but only received canonical recognition in 1880. At the present moment, controversies regarding multiple accounts of Smith’s ‘First Vision,’ as well as the origins of the text of the Book of Abraham, have brought unprecedented attention to this hitherto largely neglected work. The consequence is that the Pearl of Great Price represents at one and the same time the greatest vulnerabilities and the greatest strengths of the Church of Jesus Christ.” [3] As I argue below, this is quite an overstatement. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture
Post-Mortem Analysis on this Year’s Exposé Stunt
Monday sometime, news reports made it clear that (at least for the opponents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Christmas had come a little early. In a post from the, um, Post, we read that, “In a declaration signed under penalty of perjury, Nielsen [a former employee and current whistleblower] urges the IRS to strip the nonprofit of its tax-exempt status and alleges that Ensign could owe billions in taxes. He is seeking a reward from the IRS, which offers whistleblowers a cut of unpaid taxes that it recovers.”
Though at first glance this might seem like a story about someone speaking truth to power, closer examination suggests it is an attempt by someone who doesn’t like the Church of Jesus Christ to tar its reputation. Accusations have been filed with the IRS, but that says nothing of the merit of those accusations. Due process is one of the wonderful ideas embodied in the American system. In news reporting, however, no such standard prevails, and there is often an advantage to be gained by making an accusation and tarring your opponent with it. A substantial first mover advantage exists when attacking an opponent through the news, because reporting accusations and scandal is much more exciting and consequently reaches a larger audience than reporting the resolution of those charges or their refutation.
So why do I think that this story reflects an attempt to attack the Church’s reputation rather than a more narrow desire to right wrongs with regard to the provisions of tax law and the Church’s compliance? One goes to the media when one wants the effect that the media will predictably produce, in this case frenzy leading to reputational damage. Now it’s plausible that the whistleblower is motivated by the prospect of money. As a whistleblower, he has essentially written himself a lottery ticket. In the (frankly improbable) event that the IRS finds that someone managing an investment erred in complying with tax regulations, he stands to receive a percentage of any taxes recovered. Nice work if you can get it. On the motivational end of things, however, there appears to be more to unpack. First of all, I don’t think this is going to pan out very well for him. I’m always open to being corrected by reality, but most of what he has actually claimed amounts to the Church operating frugally, living within their means and saving for a rainy day, consistent with their published statement. Though I can’t rule it out, I would actually be inclined to largely dismiss his financial motivation for doing this, and won’t cover it more in this post. Others have dealt with the claims about the actual financial transactions very capably, notably KSL, and made the case that this is, in essence, a nothing-burger. Beyond the improbable financial outcome, however, several aspects of what was actually published cause me to call into question whether this stunt had any real intent to do anything more than tar the Church for the duration of a news cycle. [Read more…] about Post-Mortem Analysis on this Year’s Exposé Stunt
FairMormon Conference Podcast #49 – Angela Hallstrom, “Women’s Voices in Saints Volume 2”
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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference held in August. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2019 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.
Angela Hallstrom, Women’s Voices in Saints Volume 2
Transcript available here.
Angela Hallstrom works for the Church History Department as a writer and literary editor for the four-volume history of the Church, Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. Prior to her work for the Church History Department, she taught writing at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She received an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and is the author of the novel Bound on Earth, editor of the short fiction collection Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction, and has served on the editorial boards of BYU Studies, Irreantum, and Segullah. She and her husband are the parents of four children, and recently moved back to Utah after spending sixteen years in Minnesota.
Audio Copyright © 2019 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.
FairMormon Conference Podcast #48 – Ben Spackman, “A Paradoxical Preservation of Faith: LDS Creation Accounts and the Composite Nature of Revelation”
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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference held in August. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2019 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.
Ben Spackman, A Paradoxical Preservation of Faith: LDS Creation Accounts and the Composite Nature of Revelation
Transcript available here.
Ben Spackman did ten years of undergraduate (BYU) and graduate work in ancient Near Eastern studies and Semitics (University of Chicago) before moving on to general science (City College of New York). Currently a PhD student in History of Christianity at Claremont Graduate University, Ben’s focus is the intertwined histories of religion, science, and scriptural interpretation; most specifically, he studies the intellectual history of fundamentalism, creationism, and religious opposition to evolution in connection with interpretations of Genesis.
Ben taught volunteer Institute and Seminary for a dozen years in the Midwest, New York, and California, taught Biblical Hebrew, Book of Mormon, and New Testament at BYU, and TA’d a course on “God, Darwin, and Design” at Claremont. He has contributed to BYU Studies, Religious Educator, the Maxwell Institute, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, Religion&Politics, the Salt Lake Tribune, and blogs at benspackman.com (previously at Timesandseasons) where he writes extensively about Gospel Doctrine, evolution, and Genesis, among other things. He has presented lectures, firesides, and papers at various conferences, including the Joseph Smith Papers, the Mormon History Association, the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, the Maxwell Institute Seminar on Mormon Culture, the Mormon Theology Seminar, Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, BYU’s Sperry Symposium, BYU Late Summer Honors (lecture on Genesis and evolution), and this year, Education Week (Aug 21-24), on Reading the Bible in Context. He is a contributor to BYU’s ecumenical Reconciling Evolution project.
Ben has appeared on various podcasts: LDS Perspectives (on genre in the Bible, and Genesis 1), LDS MissionCast (on missionaries, prooftexting, and the Bible), and GospelTangents (on evolution, scripture, and religious history).
He typically juggles half a dozen writing projects at once, currently including a book on Genesis 1 for an LDS audience, a dissertation on post-1970 creationism/evolution conflict in the LDS Church and its early 20th century roots, a chapter on the Cain/Abel story in Genesis, and a paper on the intellectual background of early 20th-century LDS attempts to reconcile science with scripture (fossils, dinosaurs, pre-adamites, evolution, age of the earth, etc.) He recently received a grant from the Redd Center for research on LDS understandings of dinosaurs and the establishment of BYU’s two museums.
Audio Copyright © 2019 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.
FairMormon Conference Podcast #47 – Richard Terry, “The Dirt on the Ancient Inhabitants of Mesoamerica”
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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2019 conference held in August. If you would like to watch the presentations from our 2019 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.
Richard Terry, The Dirt on the Ancient Inhabitants of Mesoamerica
Transcript available here.
Richard E. Terry is Professor Emeritus of Soil Science at Brigham Young University. He received his B.S. degree from Brigham Young University in Agronomy and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University in Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry. He was Assistant Professor of Soil Science at the University of Florida, Everglades Experiment Station, from 1977 through 1980. While in Florida he conducted research in the microbial decomposition and subsidence of the organic soils of the Everglades.
Richard joined the faculty of the Agronomy and Horticulture Department at Brigham Young University in 1980. He taught soil science and environmental remediation courses for 36 years. In 1997 he was invited to the archaeological site of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, to assist in the development of a field laboratory and protocols for field measurement of phosphorus in soils and floors that resulted from many years of food processing, consumption, and food waste disposal activities by the ancient Maya. The follow year he collaborated with Dr. Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan on the chemical analysis of palace floors at the rapidly abandoned site of Aguateca. For the past 22 years, Dr. Terry and his students have collected soil and floor samples for chemical analysis and data interpretation. During that time, they have collaborated with more than 44 archaeologists at 26 ancient Mesoamerican sites. The ancient sites have extended from Northern Yucatan, Mexico, to Southern El Salvador. The period of occupation of those cities and villages ranged from the Middle Preclassic (1000 to 600 B.C.) to the Postclassic (1000 to 1400 A.D.). Over the years, his geochemical analyses of Mesoamerican soils have expanded to the stable carbon isotope signatures of ancient corn crops that remain within the soil humus and to the biochemical markers of modern and ancient cacao orchards. Dr. Terry has gained insights to the lives of ancient Mesoamericans by collaborating with many of the professional Mayanists, who study a variety of archaeological sites that extend across the Maya region and include the full time-line of ancient occupation. The range of inorganic chemical, stable isotope, and biomarker data he has obtained from ancient floors, fields, and orchards allow him, his students and collaborators to interpret many aspects of ancient lives and activities.
Dr. Terry and his wife Vicki live in Orem, Utah. They are the parents of four children and the grandparents of ten grandchildren. Both have been active in various volunteer callings in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Audio Copyright © 2019 The Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, Inc. Any reproduction or transcription of this material without prior express written permission is prohibited.
