Old Timey Blessings

An ancestor, James Whitehead Taylor, converted to Mormonism in Britain during the initial Mormon mission in 1837. He stayed in Britain for well over a decade following that, acting as a missionary himself and finally emigrating to Utah in the 1850s. Taylor was a stalwart, though never a polygamist. After coming to Utah, he received a Patriarchal Blessing. Like so many at the time, it seems cut from the same cloth as those early revelations to the Whitmer boys: they all said basically the same thing (no, Whitehead Taylor’s blessing wasn’t a copy of the Whitmer revelations–but it was very like the others in that particular blessing book kept by the church historian’s office). The Historian was charged with keeping copies of the blessings and the church considered them official documents from the beginning. Joseph Smith Sr.’s earliest blessings were kept and preserved.

From the Archives: Purity of Thought

This is an old post from BCC. But it still holds some lingering questions for me.

Russian Mathematician Grisha Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal in 2006 for completing Richard Hamilton’s program (Ricci flow-Poincaré Conjecture) in 2002-2003. Poincare posed his conjecture in 1904.[1] Science named it the breakthrough of the year, but that was a sort of miraculous understatement, even though it was the first time a mathematical proof received that title. For the Poincaré proof, Perelman was also awarded the first Clay Millennium Prize (one million dollars) in March 2010. Perelman did not publish his results in the usual sense. He posted the proofs online.[2]

From BoAP Archives: Who is Iscah?

This originally appeared a few years ago at BCC. Since it’s Old Testament times in Sunday School, I thought this curiosity might be fun for you.

Abraham’s family life is the stuff of Jew, Gentile, and Mormon legend. But, I’m not going to break into that territory much. It’s too complex and I don’t have the mental space for it now. But, who is Iscah? The name appears once in the Hebrew Bible, just after the genealogy of Abram: