Tag: Joseph Smith

An Agnostic View of Joseph Smith: A Possible Prophet Puzzle Solution

By Ryan Stuart Bingham Nearly forty years ago, Jan Shipps challenged Joseph Smith’s biographers to reconcile “the charlatan-true prophet dichotomy which has plagued Mormon history from the beginning.”1 While biographers have presented evidence with increasing rigor and have offered broader interpretations of Joseph Smith, the alternate distractions of devotion and incredulity have maintained the old …

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Cell Mates: Poetry

By Paul Swenson   Called to hold the keys of mysteries. Yet both, at 34, were locked away; Joseph jailed at Liberty, dropped through a hole   in prison floor into the pit. In Birmingham, Martin declared: Where there is injustice, I am there, and it would not be fair   of me to spurn …

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A Joseph Smith Too Small

Philip L. Barlow is Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. Earlier this year, Oxford University Press published an updated version of his classic book, Mormons and the Bible. The following excerpt is from its new preface. IN RECENT YEARS I have come to judge [Joseph Smith’s] project as …

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“Praise to the Man”

One of the highlights of the 2012 Sunstone Symposium was a unique performance of “Praise to the Man” as arranged by Kim McCall and performed by the Sunstone Ward Choir. Listen to it here: Praise to the Man

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The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism–Part III

Continued from Part II In May 1842, Joseph Smith reassembled a cadre of bodyguards, selecting primarily those with experience as Danites in Missouri. Former Danites such as Dimick B. Huntington, Daniel Carn, and Albert P. Rockwood began serving as Nauvoo’s “Night Watch.”[i]Previously a Danite captain, Rockwood had already been serving as “commander of my [Smith’s] …

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Notes to D. Michael Quinn’s: “The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism” Part II

100.  LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, 138, 144-52. While Anderson, “Clarifications of Bogg’s [sic] `Order’ and Joseph Smith’s Constitutionalism” acknowledges that the Boggs extermination order responded to what Anderson calls “the hot skirmish at Crooked River” (45), he emphasizes the “unfounded rumors” (45), “the upcoming fictitious attack on the county seat” (46), the …

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