At the beginning of 2023, the historic sites of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints featured twenty-five toured historic homes.1 That’s a lot of old houses. And the number recently increased by one. On August 29, 2023, the … Continued
“Was not Jo Smith a money digger?” It’s a legitimate, frequently asked question from Joseph Smith’s day to ours. An early Latter-day Saint newspaper, the Elders’ Journal, asked and then answered that question in a pair of articles published in … Continued
The First Vision has been a center of both faith and controversy. While millions of Latter-day Saints affirm it as the beginning of the Restoration,1 others see it as an ever-growing fish tale. The multiple accounts of the First Vision … Continued
In Joseph Smith for President, Spencer McBride provides an illuminating and reader-friendly account of Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign. McBride, who is a scholar of American religious and political history and an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, … Continued
Considering how central the concept of authority is in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is somewhat surprising that so few scholarly examinations of this topic have been attempted, which makes this book by Michael Hubbard MacKay … Continued
Samuel Morris Brown’s Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism announces a sweeping objective: to place all of Joseph Smith’s prophetic projects under a single heading: translation. The thesis of the book is that “translation as a … Continued
Joseph Smith did not offer many details about the translation process for the Book of Mormon, other than affirming that it was done through “the gift and power of God.”1 In 1831, at a Church conference where he was invited … Continued
For millennia, Christians of every variety have puzzled over the meaning of biblical prophecies that seemed at odds with one another. Passages in Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation spoke of impending disaster and doom at the end of the world. God … Continued
Recent studies describing the restoration of the priesthood have noted and demonstrated that we have been anachronistically shaping our 1829 restoration narrative around twentieth-century notions that the Melchizedek Priesthood represents a separate “authority” or “power” that is distinctly independent from … Continued
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints revere the Book of Mormon as a sacred text that was translated “by the gift and power of God” (D&C 135:3) by Joseph Smith and first published in 1830. Since … Continued
