Dave's Mormon Inquiry

More books on Reed Smoot

I just read through the careful transcription (posted at the Juvenile Transcriptor) of a recent presentation by the authors of two recent books on the Smoot hearings. The Smoot hearings are getting some historical attention lately — I suspect Kathleen Flake's book gets some of the credit for this.

And JI deserves kudos for posting other recent transcriptions as well: a Robert Millet presentation at a book signing event talking about his new book Bridging The Divide, The Continuing Conversation Between a Mormon and an Evangelical, and a Richard Bushman presentation given at Weber State entitled "Rough Stone Rolling and the Intellectual Prospects for Mormonism." It's great that presentations like these can be made available to a wider interested audience.

Where Are They Now?

From Wednesday's Deseret News, on George P. Lee, formerly an LDS Seventy: "Prosecutors in southern Utah have dismissed criminal charges against an excommunicated general authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." See full story here.

The Bloggernacle Minute, 3-19-08

I'm looking at 336 posts from 70 blogs in my Google Reader (the wages of procrastination). Here are some of the more interesting posts I found in a quick tour of a third of a thousand B'nacle posts from the last ten days.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

The P-Day outing to a religious site. Horseplay and cameras. Later, posting the photos on a public website. All of this in clear violation of the 11th commandment (thou shalt not generate bad publicity for the Church), not to mention generally accepted standards of Christian conduct for ordained ministers. The best reflection on this series of unfortunate events is Joel Campbell's Mormon Media Observer column at the Mormon Times, "Desecration of a Shrine." Obviously possessed of the sort of self-restraint that only seasoned journalists display, he resists the urge to point out that the missionaries were only 19 or 20 and that these were activities (not clear whether anything that occurred amounted to a crime yet) directed against property, not people.

Town and Gown at SVU

There's a nice editorial in a Virginia paper about how SVU is getting along nicely with Buena Vista, the small town in which SVU is located. (Hat tip, Mormon Times.) It's not Big News, but it's nice to see a story about a bunch of Mormons who are getting along with their neighbors. Good for SVU and its students and faculty.

The Bloggernacle Minute, 3-8-08

I have 196 posts from 67 LDS blogs in my Google Reader. Here are some of the posts I really liked, with a few oh-so-brief comments on each. There's a lot of good material popping up lately -- my rule of thumb is to choose only one post per Big Blog and to favor newer and smaller blogs when possible.

Apostasy is Back on the Bookshelf

Once upon a time, The Great Apostasy by Elder James E. Talmage was on every Mormon's reading list. But somehow that topic went out of fashion for a couple of decades -- no LDS books treated the subject and it received considerably less attention in General Conference talks. Suddenly, the Great Apostasy seems to be back.

Religion Still Hovers Over Candidates

At GR, a nice post on the MSM's sparse coverage of Senator Obama's passing references to the Bible. Here's how one newspaper quoted in the story summarized Obama's statement:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama defended his belief in same-sex civil unions March 2 by referencing Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and then implicitly criticizing those who view Romans as a binding teaching on homosexuality.

Palmer Contra Ritual

The SL Trib has a short opinion piece titled "Jesus stressed kind behavior, not rituals, to get to heaven." I didn't think much of it until I noticed that the author was Grant Palmer.

The Bloggernacle Minute, 3-1-08

I have 256 posts from 65 weblogs in my Google Reader for the last ten days. You'll notice I add a blog every week or two (check the "New LDS Blogs 08" list about 5 clicks down the right sidebar). Below are a few of the highlights, with a couple of extra newsworthy links thrown in.