Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Practical Apologetics: Keeping the Faith

Another installment in my occasional series (see here and here), this one prompted by a fine little two-page article titled "Keeping the Faith" in, of all places, the BYU Magazine. The Church, both the membership and leaders, finally seems to be waking up to the fact that the Church is losing its youngest adult cohort, the Millennials. What exactly is the problem? What can be done at the local level to address the problem? What can LDS leaders do at the Church-wide level to address it?

Five Things You Didn't Know About Young Joseph Smith

This is the second post in a series (see intro post) looking at Matt Bowman's The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. Here are five things that I pulled from Chapter One, "Joseph Smith and the First Mormons, to 1831," that you might not know or maybe didn't appreciate.

Stirring Up the Saints: The Mormon Reformation

So I read Bigler and Bagley's The Mormon Rebellion: America's First Civil War, 1857-58 (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2011) last week. It will certainly convince you that the Utah Territory of the 1850s was the Wild Wild West as much as it was Zion. Checking the footnotes, it seems like the narrative is built primarily on reports from dissenters, which I suppose is where you turn for facts if you think Mormons were all liars, thieves, and murderers. There wasn't much historical context provided, say about levels of violence in other western settlements or maybe something about that Second Civil War that was just around the corner. It seems misleading to paint General Johnston, commander of Johnson's Army that marched on Utah, as a paragon of patriotism in contrast to Brigham Young's alleged treason without noting that, shortly thereafter, Johnston was in open rebellion against the United States as a Confederate General and died from a Union bullet at Shiloh in 1862. Patriotism was a rather malleable term in the 19th century. Still, the book is a helpful corrective to the usual narrative about righteous Mormon settlers just trying to mind their own business but being harrassed by wicked Gentiles and federal officials.