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A new series of offerings from “Becoming Brigham”

A new series of offerings from “Becoming Brigham”

Last updated on: June 11, 2026 at 8:57 pm by Dan Peterson

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A new series of offerings from “Becoming Brigham” 2026-06-11T20:57:08-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, “Ruth im Feld des Boaz” (1828, Ruth in the Feld of Boaz”)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image

A new article of mine has appeared in Meridian Magazine. I hope that you’ll take a look at it: “The Hidden Meaning in Ruth’s Most Famous Promise” I think that temple-attending Latter-day Saints above a certain age are likely to find particular significance in what the article has to say.

Painting by C. C. A. Christensen (d. 1912); Wikimedia Commons public domain image

I’m also pleased to announce a new development in connection with our Becoming Brigham mini-documentary series: Our interviews with scholars for Becoming Brigham typically run at least an hour and, more commonly, several hours. Yet, in any given episode, we can only use a few minutes from each interview. Still, in the course of creating the series, we’re accumulating many hours of valuable material from leading scholars.

It would seem to me very sad to simply let such materials go to waste. So we’ve decided to share what we’ve gathered. We realize that the audience for these will likely be rather small — probably limited to serious historians and history buffs — but we’re making audiotapes of the full interviews available online, accompanied by essentially unedited transcripts of them. (We have, I confess, tended to omit instructions and conversations regarding the filming and recording process itself.) I see doing this as a service to Latter-day Saint historical studies, Western American history, and scholarship more generally, but also as a guarantee against any inadvertent distortion (by our selection) of the interviewee’s position. Everything that a given scholar said to us will be publicly accessible, and at no charge.

The first in our series of audiotapes and transcripts to appear is now up online: “Becoming Brigham Interviews: Sam Weston.” We’re aiming at putting one of these up roughly every other week, but it’s a lot of work to prepare the transcripts and so forth, and I hope that people don’t become cross with us if we don’t really manage to publish one every couple of weeks. I expect that we won’t quite meet the goal. I don’t want to impose too much of a burden on those who are doing the work to make this possible.

The Kyiv Ukraine Temple (image from LDS.org)

On quite a different topic: I still haven’t read nor even seen a copy of Jeff Strong’s book Torn: Why People We Love are Leaving the Church and What We Can Learn from Them. (Heck, I’ve been so thoroughly under the weather since returning from Washington State this past weekend that I’ve scarcely left my bedroom all week long. I really don’t like sharing.) I’m happy, though, to see that Torn is generating conversation. I welcome the conversation, and I fully intend to read the book. It deals with a really important subject that must be addressed.

I know that it’s going to seem like piling on, since I’ve already shared two quite negative responses to Torn — see here and here — and am now about to share a third and a fourth. But these are the things that, quite unbidden by me, have been coming across my radar screen from people that I know. I still think it important, for those who concern themselves with such topics, to read and seriously consider Torn. In the meanwhile, though, I commend this article to your notice, which was written by the very useful C. D. Cunningham: “The Borrowed Wisdom of ‘Torn’: The book offers familiar counsel about compassion, but its weak data cannot support its sweeping claims about faith loss.” And there’s this, as well, which I may or may not have already called to your attention, as I believe I was traveling abroad when it was published: “Analysis: Unrepresentative data is limited in what it can show about Latter-day Saints: The question of what Latter-day Saints actually believe is too important to be answered by convenience samples drawn from self-selected online communities.” It was mentioned to me earlier today by one of its two co-authors.

A group of American Muslim soldiers mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan in 2009
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I liked this article, by David Brooks: “More Than Evolution Requires: Christopher Beha’s journey out of atheism.”

It wasn’t only Latter-day Saints who were less than enthused at the Department of Defense’s recent revamping of the list of recognized religious preferences in the military. Here’s an article by Rachel E. VanLandingham, who, having retired as a lieutenant colonel from the United States Air Force, is currently the Irwin R. Buchalter professor of law at Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles, and president emerita of the National Institute of Military Justice: “Thanks to Pete Hegseth, some U.S. service members lost full freedom of religion: The Pentagon’s sharp reduction of its list of recognized religions is both morally and constitutionally repugnant.”

The Birmingham England Temple is currently under construction. A very small temple, it will be the third in the British Isles, but others have also been announced. (LDS Media Library fair use)

There is, I admit, an undeniable sense of futility in chronicling the crimes and offenses continually committed by theists in the name of their “beliefs.” Why? Because the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ is effectively infinite and because the perpetrators show no apparent shame and are never punished for their evil deeds. But, nonetheless, I persist. (It is, I suppose, a duty that I owe to the uncaring, indifferent, and pointless universe.) Here is yet another entry from the Hitchens File: “European young adults assemble food supplies, hygiene kits for women and children in need: Service project is part of One by One Young Single Adult Conference in England.” Wouldn’t you think that religious zealots such as these could simply leave other people alone?

But they can’t seem to do it and, as this news item illustrates, they’re seldom if ever willing to let a good emergency go to waste: “Church Coordinates Relief Efforts After Mindanao Earthquake”

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