Brigham Young’s St. George Sermon, May 1876

Mormon cosmology is an interest of mine, and a sermon of President Young’s in St. George, Utah shows us something of his ideas about the cosmos, the relation of science to religion, sex in heaven, and even a little about Adam:

A Merry Christmas to All

Have a great holiday season everyone, and best wishes for a great new year.

Polygamy 101

I don’t really have anything new here, just pointing out my series of posts on D&C 132, starting here. Links to successor posts are in the headers. Have fun.

The Errorists

When the Mormons embarked on the business of publishing God’s new revelation to the world, the Book of Mormon, they joined an already teeming effort by American Protestants of various stripes to convert the New World to Christian belief (and practice). The largest efforts involved the American Bible Society (ABS) and the related but different American Tract Society (ATS). By the time the Mormons came on the scene, their combined efforts resulted in billions of pages each year.

Release of Joseph Smith Papers Documents Volume 2 –Liveblog

In about 15 minutes, the JSPP crew will be introducing volume 2 of the Documents Series of the Joseph Smith Papers. Volume 1 was released to the public a few weeks ago. I’ve read some of it, and it appears on its face to be of the same high quality as the previous volumes in other series. Eventually, I’ll put up reviews of these two volumes.

Much of the content of these volumes, at least in volume one, consists of extractions from early collations of history and revelation items. For example, when early revelations from 1828-1831 were collected and copied into manuscript books (multiple entry documents), the autographical documents were discarded, perhaps reused, but eventually lost apparently. It remains to be seen of course if such documents might resurface in private hands, family collections or unexplored archival stores.