I’m here at the Mormon History Association Conference, and Ugo Perego has revealed his results regarding the paternity of Josephine. Josephine is not the biological daughter of Joseph Smith. Continue reading →

Join the live stream as Mike McCurry (former White House Press Secretary), David Gregory (CNN), and Reverend Ginger Gaines-Cirelli talk about faith in public life.

https://www.wesleyseminary.edu/support/faith-in-a-public-vocation/?bblinkid=18305467&bbemailid=1486059&bbejrid=97920914

If you have a question, comment – I have access to index cards and am sitting in the front.

From the time Pluto was discovered in 1930, we had only the fuzziest images of the fascinating celestial body. The highest resolution images came from the Hubble telescope (image on far left). As the New Horizons space probe sent back images, space enthusiasts were excited to see hints of details that explained the asymmetries seen with the Hubble telescope. When New Horizons passed within 8,000 miles of Pluto in July 2015, the clarity with which we could now see Pluto was absolutely thrilling.

I’ve felt that same kind of Eureka! moment as I come to better understand Joseph Smith and the details of his actions and teachings regarding Celestial marriage. In the past I was blogging about things every week, and so you would hear what I was learning. Then I stepped back to write it up as a book, and have since been preparing for the June edition I’ll push out right before the Mormon History Association Conference.

As I’ve sifted through and polished, I can now see some clear patterns that were obscured even as recently as last year. Continue reading →

The origin of individuals, as perceived by Mormons, is radically different from any other religion. I realized this anew this past week, when searching for the term that would correspond to eschatology (from the Greek for “last study”). Eschatology is the study of the end of life, whether the end of an individual life, the end of the age, or the end of the world and our entrance into the Kingdom of God.

I wanted to use a recognizable religious term for the study of man’s beginnings.

I could not find such a term.

The term should be protatology (from the Greek for “first study”). The word protatology doesn’t exist. [Turns out the term is protology – Thanks gundek! You have to be careful though, because auto spell functions will always turn protology into proctology. So it’s obviously still an obscure word.] The closest common term for the study of origins is cosmology, which discusses the origin of the universe for different belief systems.

Joseph Smith’s teachings regarding our existence before birth are truly radical. And I mean this in the best possible way. Continue reading →

Are we property or precious children?

[This post is a collaboration between Meg Stout and Lucinda Hancock. The illustration is courtesy of Pat Chiu.]

Bottom Line Up Front: This is not about what has happened in the past for those who are now parents. It is about what individuals who wish to become parents do in their future, and how current parents who used non-traditional methods of becoming a parent treat their child.

Last year Lucinda Hancock wrote  Paradoxical Patriarchy. Lucinda explored the way marriage channels human desire for the good of children.

Recently Lucinda shared an article with Meg about a reckless fertility clinic where a sperm donor (father of 36 children born to 26 women) was discovered to be not the PhD candidate in neuroscience engineering as advertised, but a schizophrenic college drop-out and jailbird who is usually unemployed.

Responding to that article, Lucinda complained that much that afflicts society boils down to how we regard children, with many anti-traditionalists seeing parents as having a right to children, rather than children having a right to their parents. Continue reading →