April’s Ensign includes the following note at the end of the First Presidency message:
Monthly First Presidency Message to Be Discontinued
This message will be the last First Presidency Message published in the Ensign on a monthly basis. In the future, the First Presidency will share important messages as needed through the Church’s various channels, including Church magazines and LDS.org.
Thoughts?
Earlier this week, a guest post by Michael Davidson titled “The Givens Attack the First Vision” was published here at the Millennial Star.
You can read it here: https://www.millennialstar.org/guest-post-the-givens-attack-the-first-vision/
Michael’s post has attracted some attention, and I want to post a counterpoint response to what he has written that I hope will demonstrate why I think his post was inappropriately personal and accusatory, even though I sympathize with his concerns. Continue reading
Here is a chapter I’ve added to the draft of the 2018 version of Reluctant Polygamist, to help explain why the current narrative about Joseph Smith is what it is. Feel free to critique as you see fit.
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In 1962 noted philosopher Abraham Kaplan addressed the American Educational Research Association at UCLA. Kaplan urged scientists to exercise good judgment in the selection of appropriate methods for their research. To illustrate how inappropriate the instrument at hand could be for a job, Kaplan joked, “Give a boy a hammer and everything he meets has to be pounded.” [1]
Kaplan called this “The Law of the Instrument,” and it has also been known as a Birmingham screwdriver, Maslow’s hammer, or the golden hammer. Whatever the name, over-reliance on a familiar tool is considered a cognitive bias, a systematic pattern of irrational judgment.
When it comes to judging the actions of Joseph Smith, historians outside of the Church hierarchy have relied over-much on explaining “polygamy” as arising from Joseph Smith’s personal sexual obsession.
Meanwhile, both detractors and defenders of Joseph Smith have fallen into the trap of inattentional blindness, the inability to perceive conspicuous truths that are unexpected. [2] This blindness accounts for the fraught interactions between historians and the LDS Church in recent decades. Continue reading
This is a guest post by Michael Davidson, who is a not-quite-so-young man living in Highland, Utah with his wife and kids.
At the tender age of 14, Joseph Smith went into a grove of trees near his home in New York in order to seek knowledge from the Lord. In the vision that followed, Joseph was told by the Lord not to join any churches then extant, for “they were all wrong” and that “all their creeds were an abomination in His sight” and that the preachers of these religions and creeds were “all corrupt.” It was in this First Vision that the Lord introduced Joseph, along with the rest of us, to the need for a restoration of the Gospel. The Lord makes clear that a simple reformation of existing christianity would be insufficient, driving the point home with strong language as was and is His prerogative.
In a recently published excerpt from “The Crucible of Doubt,” Terryl and Fiona Givens note that this account causes “many readers” to “feel the sting of a wide-net rebuke” in this narrative. And yet the Givens don’t seem to believe that such a rebuke was warranted. They introduce the First Vision narrative with a disclaimer that “[t]he language of Mormon culture … is fraught with contradictions” and that the “wisest and best men and women can say uninspired, ridiculous, and even reprehensible things.”
The Givens then observe that the First Vision narrative is “harsh to modern ears,” but seeks to excuse “Smith’s language” by saying it “fits right into his cultural milieu.” Further driving home their point, the Givens later bemoan the “colorful language of condemnation” in the canonized First Vision account because of its supposed “tragic influence on Mormon thinking,” including the “notion that Mormonism has a monopoly on the truth, that other churches and traditions have nothing of value to contribute, and that the centuries between the death of the apostles and the events of 1820 were utterly blighted and devoid of truth.”
Even further, the Givens argue that at least some “Mormons claim a monopoly on salvation” as well. But to them, “it grows increasingly difficult to imagine that a body of a few million, in a world of seven billion, can really be God’s only chosen people and heirs of salvation.”
It is with these two “myths” in mind, myths of Mormon monopolies on truth and salvation, that the Givens began their attack on the canonized First Vision narrative. They fault this narrative, which they claim sets the stage for the flourishing of these myths.
What purpose is being served by this attack by the Givens? Continue reading
Kurt Manwaring was kind enough to share his interview with Daniel Peterson, part of his “10 Questions” series at FromTheDesk.org. Kurt has allowed us to cross-post a portion of that interview here.
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Peterson is the president of the Interpreter Foundation, a scholar of Islam, and the founding editor of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
Kurt Manwaring: Welcome! Before we begin, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your involvement with Islamic studies and Mormon apologetics?
Daniel Peterson: I was born in Pasadena, California, and raised in nearby San Gabriel. I attended Brigham Young University as an undergraduate, taking time off to serve in the Switzerland, Zürich Mission. Continue reading