Joseph Smith

7 posts

My Interview on WIRED.com's "Geek's Guide to the Galaxy" Podcast

Though it doesn't officially come out until tomorrow, my interview with the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast is now live and available through iTunes and elsewhere. I really enjoyed doing this interview. Host David Barr Kirtley asked great questions, and we chatted not just about

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1 Min
By: William Shunn

Book Excerpt! Chapter 4 from THE ACCIDENTAL TERRORIST

Excerpted from The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary by William Shunn, available now! My mission began around the time the prophet Ezra Taft Benson forcefully reaffirmed Joseph Smith’s declaration that the Book of Mormon was “the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of

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9 Min
By: William Shunn

Book Excerpt! Chapter 2 from THE ACCIDENTAL TERRORIST

Excerpted from The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary by William Shunn, available now! Two years earlier, my father and I were driving back roads somewhere east of Victorville in the California desert when he sprang a terrifying question on me. “Son,” he asked, “do you want to serve

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11 Min
By: William Shunn

The Book of Mormon: Joseph Smith's First Novel

This essay is excerpted from The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, available everywhere November 10, 2015. WARNING: This essay contains graphic descriptions of primitive surgery that some readers may find disturbing. In January 1994, when I was 26 years old, I sat down in my bare, cold room

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9 Min
By: William Shunn

Joseph Smith's "Capital" Idea

As I was working through the very final set of revisions on The Accidental Terrorist, I had to hunt down the original source of a well-known Joseph Smith quote on the topic of the accuracy of the Bible. I found what I was looking for in his History of the

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2 Min
By: William Shunn

Yet Another Memoir Excerpt—I Call This One "Prophet Sharing"

[Looks like marriage is in the air. For more info on what the heck is going on here, click here.] The modern church has plenty of embarrassing historical specters hanging around, but few haunt it the way polygamy does. The church has tried to distance itself from the practice in

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10 Min
By: William Shunn

An Excerpt Ripped Bodily and Without Context from Chapter 31

For the remainder of the hour, Elder Fowler and I wound Buddy Van Rijk in an increasingly constrictive net of dogma, woven from strands—even by Christian standards—of ever more tenuous logic. It was the type of snare that can only constrain a willing captive; one misstatement on our

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6 Min
By: William Shunn

Showing 12 of 7 total posts

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