I am delighted to announce that my proposed paper for the 2024 MHA conference has been accepted!
It helps that I got together with Brian Hales and Don Bradley for a combined session proposal, as they are acknowledged to be leading authorities on Joseph Smith’s covenants with other women. The fabulous LaJean Carruth, who has translated George D. Watts’s shorthand notes to English, has agreed to be our session chair.
The 2024 MHA Conference will be held in Kirtland, Ohio and the theme is Conversions, Aversions, and Reversions.
In May 2018 I pushed out an update to my book, Reluctant Polygamist. In the months following the May publication, the Church requested that believers cease using the nickname “Mormon” and published the first volume of Saints.
I played around with re-working my book to avoid use of the term Mormon and found that thus edit would make the work more accessible. I found that even I, as a believer, tended to internally discount “Mormons” and their trials.
With the appearance of Saints, I immediately propritized reading the new narrative history. My reconstruction of Nauvoo events is so detailed that it would be very easy to disprove. And with Saints benefitting from people who are paid to delve into the history of the Church, it was definitely possible that there was some important point I had missed.
The only place where my narrative ran afoul of the Saints account was the assertion that Joseph revealed the doctrine of the New and Everlasting Covenant (with the requirement to enter into plural marriages) in July 1841, no more than six days after the apostles returned to Nauvoo from their missions to Britain.
If the July 1841 date were correct, the I was largely wrong.
I clicked on the footnote. It didn’t go anywhere useful. I wrote to someone who was in a position of authority relative to the Church History department to mention the link was broken and that I couldn’t find the cited information when attempting to find it by searching the Church History holdings. Of note, the cited information was from a sermon only recently transcribed by LaJean Carruth.
A couple of days later the link still wasn’t working, but I was able to find Heber Kimball’s account of Joseph commanding Heber and other apostles about plural marriage. Heber was responding to the campaign of the Smith boys in the late 1860s, where the Smiths were attempting to convert the Utah Saints away from plural marriage based on the Smiths’ claim that Joseph never taught or practiced any such doctrine.
I will leave the details of my discovery to the MHA Conference, but suffice it to say that the July 1841 timing is not correct. Not only was my reconstruction undamaged by the new information, the Kimball sermon enables me to be even more specific about how my narrative holds together.
By the way, I have continued to record chapters of Reluctant Polygamist. Alas, 2024 has turned back into a year where I have many things I am required to do. I also don’t have the benefit of a studio where I can choose to record at any time.
On a typical morning, I wake at 6:15a. I prepare for my recording so that when my son-on-law leaves to teach Seminary, I can get going. I typically record for about half an hour before the people in my household start doing things. The grand-daughter communicates via non-verbal vocalizations that honestly convey much more than you’d imagine. My middle daughter wanders around upstairs and down getting ready for her day. My husband likewise starts padding around, setting floorboards a-creaking.
And then there’s the job and associated travel. There are commitments such as the DC Temple Choir and DC Temple Orchestra (I’m still not sure if they want me to play violin or viola for the Jenny Oaks Baker concert at the Strathmore in March). There is the course I’m taking on writing Binge-worthy TV leveraging artificial intelligence. I’ll be helping run the speech contest for my Toastmasters club, where I am VP of Membership. There are the several novels I care so much about finishing that I plan to step down from Federal employment in March 2025. And there are family trips because I love family and because some of those family members are suffering from life-threatening diseases.
In short, there are all the reasons that existed when I stepped away from blogging at MillennialStar.org a couple of years ago. But I’ve finished recording through chapter 8 of Reluctant Polygamist. Now all I have to do is get back into a rhythm where I’m editing the chapters and pushing them to Youtube… It turns out I don’t have to have a quiet home to edit and publish videos!