Crandall printing museum

This last week, we all went to the Crandall printing museum in Provo, UT. It's a really small place, but it has some very impressive displays, including a working Gutenberg press.

Members of the LDS church often look back at the invention of printing (and other technological advances) and God preparing the world for the Restoration of the Gospel. Assuming what we believe is true (as I do, of course) this makes sense as God would want to make it so the truth He was bringing back would be able to spread quickly and correctly - and since the main witness that what Joseph Smith was saying was true was the Book of Mormon - a 500+ page book - it makes sense for Him to worry about an efficient way to make books.

In any case, the tour starts with a replica of Gutenberg's original press (based on an olive press). Apparently, it's the only press where the type is the actual individual pieces of type set in the text of the bible. It's pretty cool. They even made a page to show us how. And they showed us his REAL most important invention - how to make the special type used to set the text of the Bible.

The next room was an American revolution room, where they had the text of the Declaration of Independence set, if I remember correctly. Another thing commonly believed to be divinely inspired, by the way, since it helped set up this country as a land of religious freedom where a new religion could expect at least SOME protection of the law. The press was essentially the same, just smaller... Technology, till this century, really didn't progress all that fast.

Anyway, the last room was the Book of Mormon printing room. The story of the publication of the Book of Mormon is really a miracle. Apparently, in order to print it in the amount of time that it did, they would have had to print 2 pages a minute - for 10-12 hours a day for 7 months straight. Now, 2 a minute is possible - some volunteers they had one time were able to do it... for 10 minutes... Awesome, eh?

Anyway, great museum, great tour, you should go. That is all.

Another section of the Joseph Smith Papers

This week, I'm supposed to write about the minutes recorded in Revelation Book 2, dealing with the setting up of a quorum of high priests, and how they were to be run. The same minutes are recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants, so again I'm stuck in the hard spot of trying to find extra meaning in something already recorded in a very similar form.

I guess the only thing I'm going to remark on this time is how God is a God of order. Those who run his church aren't arbitrary. Joseph Smith was not a supreme ruler who ruled by whim. He set up a system that could run by itself, and that even the rest of the world could see was logically set up. Even the order of speaking was chosen before hand. This is how God works.

The BYU Museum of Art

For class this last week, we went to visit the Museum of Art's exhibit Types and Shadows: Intimations of Divinity. As a little background, art in general doesn't do much for me. It's not all that touching. While there is some I like, I don't care for a lot of it, and I especially dislike the ridiculous amount of thought and interpretation that someone who does it will do. If I don't like the painting at first glance, I don't want to study it usually.

That said, there were two of the paintings there I remember and that I really liked. The first was a still life painting in triptych form. It was a about the prodigal son. It was very clearly supposed to be incredibly indirect and symbolic, and my one complaint is in regards to that. There were pigs in the middle part, but since the middle part was blurry, I at first thought them grapes or apples or something else since they didn't stick out. So, good symbolism. But on the last part, there was a very clear cow, a reference to the slaughtered calf. Because that frame is clearly painted, it sticks out, and is too different from the rest of the painting to really add to it. It instead detracts. Other than that, I loved it. There is a blue cloth hanging over the entire thing, representing the spirit of God, and the best part was that while the entire picture was blurry in the second frame, the cloth was not, representing God's constant care over us, no matter what we do.

The other is a painting of Christ carrying his own cross. The painting is so photorealistic, it's amazing. The grain of the wood is clear and real. Christ's anatomy is perfectly correct and everything. It's quite stunning, partly because it is NOT a photo. But there is something that I at first didn't like about it. For how heavy a cross that size would have to be, he is standing far too straight. But after I thought about it, I figured that that could represent how Christ is all powerful. Or how, despite the cross, he was unbeaten at that point. Or, how, since he is unhurt, though he should be at this point in the narrative, that his spirit was unhurt and strong at this point. In any case, a stunning painting.

Over all, I enjoyed it, though there were certainly a number of them I didn't care for, including most of the ones the guide decided to stop at.

The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations

For this post, Dr. Holzapfel assigned us to read The Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translations book, specifically, the Revelations on the 27th & 28th of December 1832, and the 3rd of January 1833, pages 293-310. Honestly, I don't know what he expected us to get out of this. It is a copy of the original revelation given to Joseph Smith, and recorded as the 88th section of the Doctrine and Covenants. It is a primary document, which is great and all, but I don't know what I'm supposed to get out of it that isn't already in the D&C. None of the revisions were very interesting, and the only verse that I found was substantially different was where the two revelations in the original were smushed together, but even there, the changes are uninteresting. Maybe I'm just unskilled in this whole textual analysis thing, but without training it seems impossible to see the interesting parts of this. Maybe if he had assigned a revelation we don't already know... Oh well, sorry, that's all the more I can really say...