By Miguel Barker-Valdez Miguel Barker-Valdez is a proprietor of the Rational Faiths blog. I have read online a number of people writing something to the effect of, “The Gospel Topics Essays are what led to my faith crisis.” What they had once seen as anti-Mormon literature is now being admitted as historical truth …
Category: Gospel Topics Essays
The Essays’ Effect on the International Church
By Gina Colvin Gina Colvin is the host of the A Thoughtful Faith podcast and blogs at KiwiMormon. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand where she is a lecturer at the University of Canterbury. The Gospel Topics Essays are making a huge splash in the United States, but it’s likely that they’ll barely make …
Late But Welcome: “Race and Priesthood” Essay
By Armand Mauss Armand Mauss is the author of All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage and The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation. The “Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topics essay has been a long time in coming. Like the others recently posted on the Church website, …
The Continuing Effects of the Priesthood Ban
By Mica McGriggs Mica McGriggs is a PhD candidate in counseling psychology at BYU. Her academic research is primarily in the area of multicultural sensitivity in psychology. I don’t remember the first time I learned about the priesthood ban, but I do have several vivid memories of my encounters with the issue. At my …
Keeping the Promises
The story of the relationship between Mormonism and Africans is a story of promises—promises made and promises failed. Through the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, whether as translator or composer, assured the world that all humanity is “alike unto God, both black and white, bond and free, male and female.” This assurance comes to …
Violence, Mormonism, and the Sober Lessons of History: Breaking the Cycle of Defensiveness and Escalation
By Joanna Brooks Joanna Brooks is Associate Vice President of Faculty Affairs at San Diego University and the author or editor of six scholarly books. My scholarly training is in the cultural histories of race and colonialism in early America. Because I have this larger view of the violence of colonialism in the …
Are Mormons Christian?: A Personal Response to the Gospel Topics Essay
By Dan Wotherspoon Dan Wotherspoon is the host of the Mormon Matters podcast and a former editor of Sunstone. Compared with many of the other new Gospel Topics essays that have been released during the past two years, “Are Mormons Christian?” has generally flown under the radar. Thank goodness. In fairness, I suppose it …
“Are Mormons Christian?”: A Historical Perspective on the Gospel Topics Essay
By Jana Riess Jana Riess has a Ph.D. in American religious history from Columbia University. She is the author of Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor, and is at work on a book about gratitude. She is a senior columnist for Religion News Service. …
Plural Marriage Among Early Latter-day Saints
By George D. Smith George D. Smith is the award-winning author of Nauvoo Polygamy “. . . but We Called It Celestial Marriage” (Signature Books, 2011). On 22 October 2014, the LDS Church published its most frank essay on the 19th-century origins of Mormon plural marriage, practiced in secret among nearly 200 families in …
The Book of Abraham Crisis: A History
by Christopher C. Smith Christopher C. Smith is a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University and is completing a dissertation on early Mormon views of Native Americans. Stage 1, 1860–1861: Théodule Devéria The first hints of difficulties with the Book of Abraham appeared in the late 1850s when French scholar Théodule Devéria wrote …