The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

I enjoy writing in this blog because it gives me a chance to learn about topics that fascinate me - including sociology and history, especially as it relates to religion. But I readily admit that I am no expert, just learning as I go. Oddly, and sadly, I get the impression that all the insights I am gaining were at one time common knowledge and simple common sense, but have been obscured over the last 50 years or so.  For example, in my post on National Conservatism I wrote about the Christian origins of classical liberalism and Western prosperity, something I read about recently in a book by Larry Siedentop that was self-consciously going against the grain of modern scholarship - “to say the least, not fashionable,” as he wrote in the prologue. Here is my summary of the insight, from my previous post :  Christ taught us 2000 years ago that we are all children of God, and therefore spiritual brothers and sisters, no matter what family we come from, what gender, what degree of ...

I’ve been following Kyle Beshears’ Substack  where he is posting chapters of an academic book he is working on about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for a mainstream Christian audience. For some reason I find this kind of thing fascinating, like a chimpanzee might feel about reading Jane Goodall’s notes. As I’ve written before , Kyle Beshears has a deep understanding of his subject and reports it straight, to his great credit. In this post I will comment on his recent chapter, “Where did the Book of Mormon come from?” As with precious chapters, it is very respectful and gets the facts straight. I just want to briefly quibble with his summation of the state of the evidence for the Book of Mormon.  Today, the LDS Church maintains that the Book of Mormon represents ancient history, not merely theology. For this reason, corroborating evidence for or against its historicity has been the focus of many LDS apologists and skeptics seeking to verify or disapprove its a...