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66 years ago today (Dec. 17, 1947), an Old Testament "scholar" for BYU gave the annual "Joseph Smith Memorial Fireside" message in Logan Utah at the Lds Institute for Religion. The Institute, geared to be a spiritual hub for Utah State University Mormon students, has grown from 114 students to it being perhaps the "second largest" LDS Institute of Religion in the world with over 7,000 students. See Perry honors 75 years of Logan InstituteThe Logan Institute has made a significant "contribution" to the Mormon celebration of "Smithmas" by developing "Joseph Smith Memorial firesides" that "began in 1944 and have...

  Joseph Smith's First Vision in which he saw the Father and the Son during the spring of 1820 may be the best-documented theophany in history, said Steven C. Harper in his Aug. 4 FAIR Conference address."In the 1830s and '40s, Joseph wrote or enabled scribes to write eight known documents declaring that the Lord opened the heavens upon him," said Brother Harper, associate chair of the Department of Church History and Doctrine at BYU. Five of the documents are unique, with the other three being copies of previous ones, and five other writers documented the event during Joseph's lifetime,...

Hey, Who Are You Calling a Cult?   The LDS Church is less of a cult than many of the religions that accuse it of being one. BY: Orson Scott Card    He wrote to me in all innocence, a reader from a Catholic country where Mormon missionaries had only recently begun to gather congregations of believers. "I asked my priest," he said, "and he told me that Mormons are a cult." Setting aside the obvious riposte ("What did you think your priest would tell you, that Mormonism was true Christianity as restored by God to living prophets?"), I think...

SALT LAKE CITY --SNIP Harper, an assistant professor of church history at BYU and a volume editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, spoke at the University of Utah on Jan. 28 on "Memory and the First Vision."... "I think we've been quite narrow-minded in the ways we have thought about Joseph's accounts. And I mean that both by believers and non-believers, by those who accept the accounts as divine narratives and those who are critical of them as nonsense," Harper said. SNIP Memories are subjective and personal. One person's memory of a Jazz basketball game will be very different from...

SALT LAKE CITY -- Joseph Smith recorded several different accounts of the First Vision. On Jan. 28 Steven C. Harper, an assistant professor of church history at BYU and a volume editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, will use the latest scholarship on memory to analyze these different accounts. Harper's lecture, "Memory and the First Vision," will be 7 p.m. Jan. 28 at the University of Utah campus in the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building, Room 101. The Salt Lake Mormon Studies Student Association hosts the event. There is no cost to attend. For information, go to saltlakemormonstudies.wordpress.com.

Historical sources, like the people who make them, are rarely either completely perfect or totally unreliable. The bread and butter work of the historian is less the divining of bias than a careful reading of his documents to determine just what is said, whether his source is in a position to know the information related, and to what extent each one tells a partial or complete story. Because it is claimed that Joseph Smith’s account of the events surrounding his First Vision are not factual, the foregoing procedures must be applied to his own statements and to all other accounts...