LL Cool J, Accidental Mormon?   That quote comes from a 1994
farewell address to recently-deceased church president Ezra Taft
Benson from his longtime confidant and counselor Gordon B.
Hinckley, and was published in the Church’s monthly magazine The
Ensign. [Read more...]  On Historical Sources, Mormonism, and
the Pinterests of the new General Young Women’s President  I’ve
spent the last three weeks carefully handling 18th century
manuscripts housed in some of England’s most treasured and
stories archives. Most of these sources fall into one of three
general categories: journals, correspondence, or church records.
The research is for my dissertation, and I’ve been doing this
sort of thing for most of my adult life now: poring over
records, considering their provenance and reliability, taking
into account authorial point of view, comparing them with other
accounts of the same or broadly similar events, attempting to
contextualize their meaning, discerning their relative
significance to a given question or subj