Send a text

Abish kicks off the final Pearl of Great Price episode with a beverage that feels appropriately Utah-coded: the Still Small Spritzer. The recipe is delightfully chaotic and deeply on-brand. Step one is living within DoorDash range of Swig so you can order a sugary soda concoction (sparkling water with fruit syrups) and have it delivered like the Spirit itself descending from on high. Step two is adding Malibu and vodka “measured with your heart,” because the Spirit of Revelation apparently also governs alcohol ratios. The hosts report that the result is extremely drinkable, occasionally Malibu-forward if you forget to stir it, and broadly effective at getting everyone into the right mood to talk about Mormon primary indoctrination.

Scriptures: [00:23:08]

Instead of a traditional scripture breakdown, aaaAAAaaa launches the segment by playing the church’s official Articles of Faith children’s choir recordings, which immediately turns the podcast into something resembling a haunted Primary program. The hosts listen live and react in real time as Victorian-sounding organ arrangements and eerily enthusiastic children chant Joseph Smith’s theological bullet points. Commentary ranges from bafflement at the bizarre musical choices to jokes about building a haunted house where every room contains a different ghostly child singing an Article of Faith.

Church Teachings: [00:36:26]

Moroni steps in to explain the actual history of the Articles of Faith, revealing that they began not as revelation but as public relations. In 1842, Chicago newspaper editor John Wentworth asked Joseph Smith to explain Mormonism for a broader audience. Smith responded with what is now known as the Wentworth Letter, which summarized church history and ended with thirteen concise statements describing Mormon beliefs. Those statements became the Articles of Faith, essentially functioning as a nineteenth-century missionary pamphlet meant to make Mormonism sound normal and familiar to outsiders.

History: [00:53:51]

For the history segment, Abigail decides to close out the Pearl of Great Price era with something less lecture-heavy and more chaotic: a game built around the Articles of Faith songs themselves. Instead of presenting a traditional research segment, she surprises the hosts with the church’s official musical versions and invites everyone to react, critique, and riff as they listen.

Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..
If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com.
And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!

Support the show

Send a text

aaaAAAaaa opens with peak chaotic-table energy: ASMR jokes, factory-noise soundscape pitching, and the general vibe of “we are spiritually unwell but comedically hydrated.” The episode’s drink is the Gin Anthonic, a gin-and-tonic riff that swaps tonic for champagne (Saturday-morning lawlessness), plus muddled peach and whatever sweetener is on hand, built to match the Anthon-manuscript theme without requiring anyone to pretend they’re classy.

Scriptures: [00:25:49]

Moroni tackles JSH 1:43 to the end, framing it as Joseph’s “most intense night of insomnia in American religious history,” with Moroni doing the “per my last revelation” bit as the angel returns again and again like a divine auto-reply. He spotlights the story beats: repeated nighttime visits, Joseph collapsing from exhaustion, the annual “come back in one year” plate-tease, and then the 1827 handoff where the plates supposedly become the hottest stolen-object in upstate New York despite also allegedly weighing an absurd amount.

Church Teachings: [00:46:11]

Abish digs into what the modern church tries to do with the Charles Anthon story: it becomes a tidy faith-parable about Isaiah 29 (“the learned man can’t read a sealed book”), with Anthon cast as the learned man, Joseph as the humble unlearned underdog, and the plates as prophecy fulfillment. The manual-friendly takeaway is basically: scholarship can’t birth scripture, faith does; and also please stop asking why Joseph needed academic validation if God already told him everything.

History: [01:04:59]

Abigail takes the Anthon-manuscript thread and yanks it straight into the 1980s with Mark Hofmann, pitching him as the most Joseph-Smith-compatible criminal imaginable: a document dealer who understood exactly what collectors and the church wanted to be true, and built a business selling “missing link” artifacts that felt emotionally consequential. She walks through his methods at a high level (mixing authentic material with altered and forged items, using period materials, artificial aging, and building credibility through plausibility) and then lands on the irony that discernment somehow never showed up to work.

Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..
If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com.
And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!

Support the show

Send a text

Moroni rolled in with “Brightness Above the Sun”, a bubbly pink-lemonade situation spiked with “a shot and a half” (measured emotionally, not metrically), topped with Sprite, and generally engineered to be impossible to mess up unless you actively hate joy.
The vibe was: Olympics chatter, political despair snacks (State of the Union avoidance, assorted internet clips), and then a hard pivot into “we finished the PoGP… and Joseph still has more content to punish us with,” as you officially marched into Joseph Smith’s self-published history.
Pop culture tangents did what they do: figure skating awe, a brief tour through hot celebrities and chaos, and the recurring theme that nobody in this economy has the emotional bandwidth for the world, but everyone can still be loyal to lemonade + bubbles.

Scriptures: [00:20:38]
Abish took the first half of JS-H 1:1–42 and basically ran a “Joseph Smith, but with an editor” intervention: reading the long, exhausting verses, then immediately translating them into what Joseph could have said if he weren’t allergic to brevity.
The segment hit the big beats (Joseph setting the record straight, the church-fight chaos, the grove, the “I was gagged by darkness” moment, persecution-as-proof, and then Moroni showing up like an overcaffeinated Bible audiobook) with constant side-eye at how Joseph somehow remembers angel ankles and bosom details but can’t be bothered to write down “many other passages.”
The running joke was that Joseph writes like a high schooler padding a word count, except the grade is “new religion” and the penalty for failure is that your whole extended family still can’t buy wine at Trader Joe’s.

Church Teachings: [00:39:23]
aaaAAAaaa framed JS-H 1:1–42 as an origin story that quietly installs an “epistemic immune system,” then introduced the distinction between immunizing strategies (external, ad hoc protective arguments) and epistemic defense mechanisms (internal, structural features that make the belief system self-sealing).
From there, the segment read straight through the pattern: Joseph pre-labeling critics as malicious, controversy being treated as proof, and controlled access to evidence, then showing how later Church messaging echoes the same posture with “don’t study through defectors” and “ignore anti material.”
Then you zoomed out to compare the same mechanisms in other high-control environments: disconfirmation that strengthens commitment, “don’t listen to antagonists,” coercive inner-circle leverage, and the “apostate material” contamination framing, with the hosts interjecting the obvious: if the institution had nothing to fear, it wouldn’t need a whole toolkit devoted to information quarantine.

History: [01:01:23]
Abigail took the “multiple First Visions” rabbit hole and just kept digging until the tunnel reached the Earth’s core: laying out that historians compare at least nine major accounts, split between Joseph’s own later tellings and secondhand contemporary reports, and then walking through how the story shifts depending on when it’s told and who it’s told to. The thread running through it was myth-making: early versions reading more like personal religious crisis, later versions evolving into a polished institutional origin narrative built to justify authorit

Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..
If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at greatandspaciouspod@gmail.com.
And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!

Support the show