Gospel Topics Essays

Gospel Topics Essays is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' own set of essays, published on the church's official site since 2013, addressing doctrine and contested points of its own history directly, including topics such as Book of Mormon translation and Book of Mormon and DNA studies. As the church's own current authoritative statement it is the correct source for what the institution itself now says about these historically sensitive topics, notable because it represents the church addressing questions it had previously left largely unaddressed. Its limit is that it remains an institutional self-account, so a claim about independent historical or scientific assessment needs a source outside the church itself. This atlas separately records three individual essays from this series, on plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo, race and the priesthood, and the Manifesto and the end of plural marriage; each is one essay in this same continuously maintained series, so citing this general record alongside one of those essays, or citing two of those essays together, for the same claim is the church's own institutional voice appearing more than once, not two independent lines of evidence.