Category: LDS
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Some Fawn Brodie Sources
Many of the books that Fawn Brodie consulted in writing her famous biography of Joseph Smith “No Man Knows My History” are available from Google books or other sources. Here are links to some of them:
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Scrying
This is an interesting addition to the Joseph Smith file: a bit of background on John Dee: In the early 1580s the English scholar and magus John Dee undertook an experiment with his “scryer,” who went by the name of Edward Kelley, to try to acquire otherwise inaccessible knowledge by means of invoking and interrogating…
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The Book of Mormon as Automatic Writing
In his essay, Automaticity and the Dictation of the Book of Mormon, (available here) Scott C. Dunn argues that the Book of Mormon (BOM) is the product of automatic writing. He begins with the example of Helen Cohn Schucman and her three volume “A Course in Miracles” dictated to her by “by an inner voice…
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What Happened to the Gold Plates?
I knew that Mormon accounts of the plates used to translate the Book of Mormon say that the angel Moroni took the plates back at some point, but I had a hard time finding the source texts for how or when this might have happened. So far, I have three sources: [1] Biographical Sketches of Joseph…
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“Is Mormonism Christian?”
The current issue of First Things, which I subscribe to, contains an article with a topic very familiar to those of us who interact with the LDS Church: Is Mormonism Christian ? The authors are Bruce D. Porter from the First Quorum of the Seventy on the LDS side, and Gerald McDermott a Professor from Roanoke College…
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Five Objectionable Mormon Doctrines
In The New Mormon Challenge, Craig Bloomberg takes a stab at defining what he thinks the “five most objectionable Mormon doctrines” are. He says: a finite theism in which God at some point in eternity past was merely a man and not divine; a view of the universe as not eternally contingent on the will…