You read the CES Letter, and you don’t know what to think.  Your world fit together so well, and now you feel it’s crumbling apart.  You question everything, even your relationship with God.  You want to know about seerstones and Book of Abraham papyri and polygamy.  We will get to that.  First, I want to […]

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  In this article, Zelph on a Shelf responds to the recent discussion of New Mormonism, including my post here.  New Mormonism or New Order Mormonism or Sacramental Paradigm Mormonism is the idea that one ignores (this is not to say that it opposes the literalness) the historicity of the Book of Mormon and other restoration events […]

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  The church just released two essays that touch on the area of female equality issues. The essay on Mother in Heaven was informative but not terribly groundbreaking.   Joseph Smith referenced the existence of a Mother in Heaven, and modern church leaders affirm that doctrine, but outside of that nothing has been revealed.  We don’t pray to […]

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  The following is an alternate view of Joseph Smith, which incorporates the historical information used against Joseph but from a faithful perspective.  I don’t agree 100%, but I like a lot of the points in this.  Even though it comes from a non-LDS, I think it’s a view shared by a segment of believing […]

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My post on New Mormonism last week raised a lot of questions. First of all, we need a new name for New Mormonism. My term “sacramental paradigm Mormonism” is not very catchy, and the term “New Mormonism” gets some people really upset. 🙂 To be clear, New Mormonism to me is not a new church, […]

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    For my Sunday reading blog post, I’m sharing a story forwarded to me by a family member recently.   I work where there is a little duck pond. We have all kinds of ducks and geese living there—mostly domesticated. They get used to people feeding them and don’t behave like normal ducks and […]

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  I’ve been following a few discussions on the Mormon Discussions board the last few day on the topic of “New Mormonism“. These spawned from a post on the Ex-Mormon reddit board called “I don’t recognize this new version of Mormonism.” I was born in the 1970s. I was molded by prophets like Benson and […]

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Dan Peterson on his blog, posted a review from John Gee of the book From Darkness unto Light, Joseph Smith’s translation and publication of the Book of Mormon by Michael MacKay and Gerrit Dirkmaat.  From John Gee: Richard Bushman’s discussion of the Book of Mormon in Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism was really […]

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  Belief as a choice is a trending topic within the LDS world. Presumably this is the response to the many undergoing faith crisis as difficult facts about LDS historical origins are being publicized as of late. It feels like the believers are pointing fingers at non-believers, saying “You chose not to believe!” implying some […]

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My faith crisis hit me me right in the middle of raising children. For about ten years I’ve been trying to decide how/if to teach my children in a different way than I had previously, which was a very literal and faithful approach. Even though I lost the literal belief in the origins of Mormonism, […]

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