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A Life Lived in Crescendo

A Life Lived in Crescendo

Last updated on: January 25, 2025 at 11:52 pm by Dan Peterson

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A Life Lived in Crescendo 2025-01-25T23:52:00-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The new/old Provo City Center Temple — the aboveground portion, anyway; much of it is underground — as seen from the south. It’s the city’s second temple, but it’s older than the city’s first temple. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Following our participation in an endowment session at the Provo City Center Temple this past Thursday, my friend and former missionary companion and former BYU department colleague, Stephen D. Ricks, shared with me a passage (verse 94) from the apocryphal Acts of John that is suggestive of an ancient Christian prayer circle. It occurs to me that some readers here might find it interesting:

Now before he was taken by the lawless Jews, who also were governed by (had their law from) the lawless serpent, he gathered all of us together and said: Before I am delivered up unto them let us sing an hymn to the Father, and so go forth to that which lieth before us. He bade us therefore make as it were a ring, holding one another’s hands, and himself standing in the midst he said: Answer Amen unto me.

One of the relatively new monuments at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which (“American Primeval” to the contrary) is located several hundred miles from Fort Bridger and, for that matter, from Wyoming altogether (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

This item has been newly posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Interpreter Radio Show —January 12, 2025, including Doctrine and Covenants in Context: D&C 6-9

For the 12 January 2025 installment of the Interpreter Radio Show, Martin Tanner, Terry Hutchinson, and Mark Johnson hosted Barbara Jones Brown as their special guest. They discussed NetFlix’s American Primeval, Barbara’s new book, Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, co-authored with Richard E. Turley; and Come, Follow Me Doctrine & Covenants lesson 6. A recording of their conversation has edited to remove commercial breaks and has now been archived and made available for your enjoyment.

The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640, or you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

Our director, Mark Goodman, on the set of the Interpreter Foundation’s 2022 docudrama, “Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon,” with Joseph Smith and the Eight Witnesses
(Still photograph by James Jordan)

The Come, Follow Me curriculum for this next month, February, will be largely devoted to the study of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and, to a considerable extent, to the story of the Three Witnesses and the Eight Witnesses to that book. Accordingly, with that focus in mind, the Interpreter Foundation is making available some of the materials that it has created about the Witnesses and their story. Here is one of those materials: Episode 14: Plural Marriage – Part 2

Witnesses of the Book of Mormon—Insights Episode 14: How did the women of the early Church deal with plural marriage? How do we reconcile ourselves to this practice of that time? This is Episode 14 of a series compiled from the many interviews conducted during the course of the Witnesses film project. . . . These additional resources are hosted by Camrey Bagley Fox, who played Emma Smith in Witnesses, as she introduces and visits with a variety of experts. These individuals answer questions or address accusations against the witnesses, also helping viewers understand the context of the times in which the witnesses lived. This week we feature Gerrit Dirkmaat, Associate Professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. For more information, go to https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/. Learn about the documentary movie Undaunted—Witnesses of the Book of Mormon at https://witnessesundaunted.com/.

Please note, too, that our docudrama Undaunted is now available for free streaming at the website The Witnesses Initiative.

Located in front of the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, these 2003 statues of Joseph and Hyrum Smith show them on their way from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Carthage Jail, where they would both be murdered by an anti-Mormon mob on 27 June 1844. The human figures are by Latter-day Saint sculptor Stanley J. Watts and the horses are by the Latter-day Saint sculptor Kim Corpany.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

We held a marathon 4.5-hour Interpreter Foundation board meeting today, at the conclusion of which I finally received my copy of the Interpreter Foundation’s latest book, Joseph Smith: A Life Lived in Crescendo (edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw). I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks. It’s actually in two volumes, and I encourage you to take a look at the table of contents. There are some superb articles in A Life Lived in Crescendo; I know that because I was able to read several of them prior to publication.

Robert Walter Weir’s painting of, I think, the departure from England of a group of agnostics and atheists who came to America in quest of freedom from religion (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

As is my frequent practice, I close now with some appalling horrors that I’ve drawn for your dyspeptic pleasure from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

And then these three articles offer various angles on the same general topic:

History and Religion

Travel and Religion

Mountain Meadows Massacre

polygamy

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