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DIALOGUE a journal of mormon thought is an independent quarterly established to express Mormon culture and to examine the relevance of religion to secular life. It is edited by Latter-day Saints who wish to bring their faith into dialogue with the larger stream of world religious thought and with human experience as a whole and to foster artistic and scholarly achieve- ment based on their cultural heritage. The journal encourages a variety of view- points; although every effort is made to en- sure accurate scholarship and responsible judgment, the views expressed are those of the individual authors and are not neces- sarily those of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or of the editors. ii Dialogue, Summer 2019 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought is published quarterly by the Dialogue Foundation. Dialogue has no official connection with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Contents copyrighted by the Dialogue Foundation. ISSN 0012-2157. Dialogue is available in full text in electronic form at www.dialoguejournal.com and is archived by the University of Utah Marriott Library Special Collections, available online at www.lib.utah.edu/portal/site/marriottlibrary. Dialogue is also available on microforms through University Microfilms International, www.umi.com. Dialogue welcomes articles, essays, poetry, notes, fiction, letters to the editor, and art. Submissions should follow the current Chicago Manual of Style. All submissions should be in Word and may be submitted electronically at https://dialoguejournal.com/submissions/. For submissions of visual art, please contact [email protected]. Submissions published in the journal, including letters to the editor, are covered by our publications policy, https://dialoguejournal.com/ submissions/publication-policy/, under which the author retains the copyright of the work and grants Dialogue permission to publish. See www.dialoguejournal.com. EDITORS EMERITI Eugene England and G. Wesley Johnson Robert A. Rees Mary Lythgoe Bradford Linda King Newell and L. Jackson Newell F. Ross Peterson and Mary Kay Peterson Martha Sonntag Bradley and Allen D. Roberts Neal Chandler and Rebecca Worthen Chandler Karen Marguerite Moloney Levi S. Peterson Kristine Haglund Dialogue, Spring 2019 CONTENTS iii ARTICLES AND ESSAYS Automatic Writing and the Book of Brian C. Hales 1 Mormon: An Update The Gold Plates and Ancient Ryan Thomas 37 Metal Epigraphy Empirical Witnesses of the Gold Plates Larry E. Morris 59 Plain and Precious Things Lost: The Rebecca A. Roesler 85 Small Plates of Nephi PERSONAL VOICES Timo’s Blessing Peter de Schweinitz 107 POETRY Judas Marilyn Bushman-Carlton 131 Sunday School Marilyn Bushman-Carlton 133 The Mormon Peace Gathering Dennis Clark 135 The Moldau in a Utah Living Room Simon Peter Eggertsen 137 Sweater Theric Jepson 139 New & Everlasting Theric Jepson 140 FICTION Bode and Iris Levi S. Peterson 141 REVIEWS Reasonably Good Tidings of Greater- Michael Austin 173 than-Average Joy Grant Hardy, ed. The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Maxwell Institute Study Edition. Understudies for Angels Michael Hicks 182 Megan Sanborn Jones. Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After the Dead. The Maidservant’s Witness Luisa Perkins 184 Mette Harrison. The Book of Abish. iv Dialogue, Summer 2019 ART NOTE On My Art Royden Card 189 FROM THE PULPIT What Shall We See? Samuel Morris Brown 191 CONTRIBUTORS 195 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS AUTOMATIC WRITING AND THE BOOK OF MORMON: AN UPDATE Brian C. Hales At a Church conference in 1831, Hyrum Smith invited his brother to explain how the Book of Mormon originated. Joseph declined, saying: “It was not intended to tell the world all the particulars of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.”1 His pat answer—which he repeated on several occasions—was simply that it came “by the gift and power of God.”2 Attributing the Book of Mormon’s origin to supernatural forces has worked well for Joseph Smith’s believers, then as well as now, but not so well for critics who seem certain natural abilities were responsible. For over 180 years, several secular theories have been advanced as explanations.3 The more popular hypotheses include plagiarism (of the Solomon Spaulding manuscript),4 collaboration (with Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, etc.),5 1. Donald Q. Cannon and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., Far West Record: Minutes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830–1844 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1983), 23. 2. “Journal, 1835–1836,” in Journals, Volume. 1: 1832–1839, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, vol. 1 of the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), 89; “History of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons 5, Mar. 1, 1842, 707. 3. See Brian C. Hales, “Naturalistic Explanations of the Origin of the Book of Mormon: A Longitudinal Study,” BYU Studies 58, no. 3 (Spring 2019): forthcoming. 4. See Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painsville, Ohio: 1834), 290; Walter Martin, The Maze of Mormonism (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1978), 59; and Wayne L. Cowdrey, Howard A. Davis, and Arthur Vanick, “References,” Spalding Research Associates, Aug. 10, 2018, http://www.solomonspalding.info. 5. See William Owen, “Mormon Bible,” Free Enquirer [New York], Sept. 3, 1831, 364; Meredith Ray Sheets and Kendal Sheets, The Book of Mormon: Book of Lies (McLean, Va.: 1811 Press, 2012), 13–16. 1 2 Dialogue, Summer 2019 mental illness (bipolar, dissociative, or narcissistic personality disorders),6 and Joseph’s intellect (with help from the Bible, View of the Hebrews, par- allelism, or his environment).7 Even today the topic remains controversial without general consensus.8 A fifth explanation attributes the Book of Mormon text to “automatic writing,” also called “spirit writing,” “trance writing,” “channeling,” “psychog- raphy,” “abnormal writing,” “direct writing,” and “independent writing.”9 In psychological terms, automatic writing is described as “ideomotor effect,” “motor automatism,” and automaticity.10 Understanding “Automatic Writing” Psychiatrist Ian P. Stevenson, who served as the chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, explains: “The term ‘automatic writing’ is used to designate writing that is done without the writer being conscious of what he is writing. Usually the writing proceeds rapidly, sometimes far more so than the subject’s normal writing does.”11 Independent researcher Irving Litvag further writes: “One type of psychic activity, known as ‘automatic writing,’ began to attract attention through the activities of a group of mediums, mostly English, in the late nineteenth and 6. See I. Woodbridge Riley, The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr. (New York: Dodd, Mean, and Company, 1902), 70; William D. Morain, The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith Jr. and the Dissociated Mind (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1998), 25, 72, 95–96, 105, 109, 113, 172. 7. Alexander Campbell, “Delusions,” Millennial Harbinger, Feb. 7, 1831, 93; Wesley Walters and Michael Marquardt, Inventing Mormonism: Tradition and the Historical Record (Salt Lake City: Smith Research Associates, 1994), 126. 8. See Anonymous, “Could Joseph Smith have written the Book of Mormon?,” MormonThink, Aug. 27, 2017, http://www.mormonthink.com/josephweb.htm. 9. See Robert A. Rees, “The Book of Mormon and Automatic Writing,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 15, no.1 (2006): 5. 10. Daniel M. Wegner, Betsy Sparrow, and Valerie A. Fuller, “Clever Hands: Uncon- trolled Intelligence in Facilitated Communication,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 1 (2003): 6. 11. Ian Stevenson, “Some Comments on Automatic Writing,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72 (Oct. 1978): 316–17. Hales: Automatic Writing and the Book of Mormon 3 early twentieth centuries. Automatic writing involves the reception and tran- scription of various types of communications in written form. The medium claims to have no control over the writing that is produced.”12 While the process is called automatic writing, it can produce words through speech or through other modes of communication: “The subject may speak what is in his mind, as occurs in ordinary cases of mental medi- umship with oral utterances; or he may rest two or three fingers lightly on a pointer that moves around a board with letters printed on it,” commonly called a Ouija board.13 “Planchettes” may also be used, which are described as “a miniature table, usually shaped like a heart, less than eight inches long [with] two easy rolling wheels supported at one end, and a pencil fastened in a hole at the top.”14 In summary, through automatic writing, subjects can produce words using several different methodologies, but in every case the author is believed to be unconscious of the letters and sentences being created. Historically, multiple texts have been attributed to automatic writing (see Table 1). Comparing the Book of Mormon with The Sorry Tale Pearl Curran’s The Sorry Tale is most often compared to the Book of Mormon to support an automatic writing theory. A number of similarities can be identified. The Book of Mormon Dictation A brief review of the details of the Book of Mormon dictation show that Joseph spoke virtually all of the 269,320 words to scribes who recorded them with quill pens.15 He and the scribe worked with dictations of twenty 12. Irving Litvag, Singer in the Shadows: The Strange Story of Patience Worth (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 8. 13. Stevenson, “Some Comments on Automatic Writing,” 316–17. 14. Milbourne Christopher, ESP, Seers and Psychics (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970), 124. 15.On February 18, 2019, Book of Mormon scholar Stanford Carmack wrote: “The 1830 first edition has 6,852 full stops in 269,318 words . if we count the first instance of ‘me thought’ as two words (18, 41; the second is spelled as one word) and the 4 Dialogue, Summer 2019 Publication Year Author Birth Year Education Great Gospel of John 1851– Jakob Lorber 1800 Trained to be the village teacher.

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