By ChristopherJuly 8, 2008
I returned on Sunday from a trip to Korea. My wife and I joined her mother, three younger brothers, and 15 others from the boys’ Taekwondo school in New Jersey on a two-week guided tour of South Korea. I came back with a scruffy beard, an intense longing for an American cheeseburger, and a head full of random thoughts on all things religious in Korea. I thought JI readers might be interested in a few of those thoughts, and that the blog might be a good place to get feedback to some of my rambling reflections.
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By StanJuly 7, 2008
Continued from Part I
Nelson begins his discussion of “occultism in general” by addressing some of the “very old ‘sciences,’ (if I may abuse this long-suffering word a little more in my dire extremity for a generalazation)” that modern Americans knew simply as “superstition,” namely, witchcraft, necromancy, astrology, and alchemy. Labeling the first two as “black magic” and comparing them to the secret combinations of the Book of Mormon, Nelson warns
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By David G.July 3, 2008
Happy Independence Day. Here’s a discourse given by George A. Smith on the fourth in 1854. Remember that at this time the Saints are struggling with the federal government over the right to self government. Notice how Smith negotiates in his narration his commitment to both an American identity and a Mormon identity.
George A. Smith, “Celebration of the Fourth of July,” July 4, 1854, Journal of Discourses, 6: 364-67.
Gentlemen and Ladies-Fellow-Citizens,-I arise here to address you a few moments upon a subject which has, perhaps, been worn threadbare by orators, statesmen, and divines, for the last seventy years, in the minds of a great portion of
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By matt b.July 2, 2008
This is, quite simply, the single most extensive canvass of American religious life ever achieved.
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By Ben PJuly 2, 2008
Literary scholar Lawrence Buell, in his excellent New England Literary Culture, explored one of the most important ideas related to the antebellum Romantic thinkers–an idea that he defines as “literary scripturism.”
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By GuestJuly 1, 2008
Admin: Janiece (or JJ as we like to call her), is a PhD student at the University of Utah where her she is completing dissertation work in part on the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
In It Does Not Die, Maitreyi Devi wrote a “she said” to Mircea Elidae’s Bengal Nights, the “he said” semi-autobiographical account of his time in 1930s Calcutta and his relationship with Devi.[1] Unsurprisingly, Devi offered a very different version of events in her narrative. Academia (and even Oprah thanks to James Frey) has long debated the definition of memoir and its highly subjective nature. A comparison of It Does Not Die and Bengal Nights provides many aspects for analysis of events personally subjective and emotive while grounded in history. Can scholarship ever overcome personal opinion or reaction in highly emotionally charged historical events?
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