Richard Turley and William Slaughter Talk About Their New Book, “How We Got the Book of Mormon.”

Assistant Church Historian and Recorder Richard E. Turley and coauthor William Slaughter of the LDS Church Historical Department were kind enough to answer a few questions about their new book, How We Got the Book of Mormon. Deseret Book, 2011. Cloth, ISBN13: 978-1-60908-062-4. $34.99. We’ll be posting a review of the book shortly.

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Growth of the Church in 100 years

What is the future growth of the Church? We get many scriptural paintings of it: the stone cut out of the mountain, the leaven in the lump, the people of God are small compared to the world, etc., etc. The Stark predictions of hundreds of millions in this century are not panning out, and as Richard Bushman noted in Blair Hodges recent podcast, perhaps Mormons will always remain a very small fraction of world population.

Ramblings about Stones, Expectations and Faith

We (sane?) humans have a well-known tendency to systematize our thought-environs. We desire to not only have reality match expectation, but many of us desire that our sincere beliefs not be paradoxical and furthermore have no gaping rational holes. Perhaps such tendencies, assuming they exist, arise from the paradigms of science or perhaps from an inherent desire to have things make sense—to have deductive logic connect the pieces. Do these tendencies motivate us to make and hold to seemingly rational conclusions about faith (theology?), even when empirical evidence “proves” they don’t match reality? When logician Kurt Godel was asked if (based on a cosmology which includes time-travel ) one could go back in time and kill their own great-grand parents, he replied that this would create a paradox, and so could not happen because “logic is powerful.”