The Joseph Smith Papers: Job Notice!!

From Mark Ashurst-McGee:

Historian/Documentary Editor, Joseph Smith Papers Website-1000209

Description

The Joseph Smith Papers is engaged in producing a comprehensive electronic edition of Joseph Smith documents featuring complete and accurate transcripts with both textual and contextual annotation for publication at the josephsmithpapers.org website.  (Publication in letterpress form of selected document series will complement the website.)  The scope of the project includes Joseph Smith’s original correspondence, revelations, journals, historical writings, sermons, legal papers, and other documents.  Besides providing the most comprehensive record of early Latter-day Saint history they will also provide insight into the broader religious landscape of the early American republic.  The Joseph Smith Papers Project is ready to hire a historian/documentary editor with the appropriate academic training, research and writings skills, and technological acumen to edit Joseph Smith’s papers.

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Reflections from a Historian Lost in a Divinity School: Or, What Rudolf Otto and Thomas Paine Taught me about the Study of Religion

Part IV in the JI?s ongoing series on secularism and religious education

I feel honored (and intimidated) to continue a worthwhile discussion on the relationship between secularism and religion in academia. While Taylor, Matt, and Ryan have each provided poignant contributions that explore the ideas, tensions, and environments of this issue, my post is designed more as a reflection on my own experience.

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Event Notice: Mark Staker Lecture and Book Signing at Benchmark Books, April 14, 2010

Spend an Evening with an Author

We are excited to announce the arrival of Hearken, O Ye People: The Historical Setting of Joseph Smith’s Ohio Revelations by Mark L. Staker, published by Greg Kofford Books. We will have the author at our store to speak about and sign his book on Wednesday, April 14, 2010. Mark will be here from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., speaking at 6:00, and will answer questions and sign books before and after that time.

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Claremont Conference Program: What is Mormon Studies? 23-24 April, 2010

Hot off the press. (Or, passed along from JI’s friend Jacob B.) This looks fantastic.

What is Mormon Studies?

Transdisciplinary Inquiries into an Emerging Field

Claremont Mormon Studies Student Association

Spring 2010 Conference

[Event Reminder!] Salt Lake Mormon Studies Student Association–April 8, 2010, Jonathan Stapley on Ritual Adoption

The Salt Lake Mormon Studies Student Association will host BCCer Jonathan Stapley on April 8, 2010 at 7 pm for a public lecture entitled, ?All These Years an Orphan?: Ritual Adoption in Mormon Theology and Practice.

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A Modern Divinity School?

Part III in the JI’s ongoing series on secularism and religious education

In sifting through the thoughts that might be relevant to bring to this conversation, it quickly became clear that I wouldn?t be able to form any kind of comprehensive, useful model, or to get the satisfaction that comes with being able to see something as a whole. The differences that Matt articulated in the last post of the series run deep, and seem to impose considerable gulfs between all kinds of people that might try to talk about religion: we occupy largely different worlds. I also came to realize that the blog post is not terribly well suited to interdisciplinary analysis! All I can do here, I think, is try to illuminate a point of contact between the three broad categories we have been discussing ? secularism, religion, and education.

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The 9th Annual Eugene England Lecture at UVU: Colleen McDannell, “The Story Lives Here: Faith, History, and Instructional Mormon Media,” April 15, 2010

This just in:

The Religious Studies Program is pleased to announce the ninth annual Eugene England Lecture on Thursday, April 15th from 7:00-8:30 p.m. (Liberal Arts Building, Room 101). Colleen McDannell, Sterling M. McMurrin Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Utah, will deliver remarks entitled “The Story Lives Here: Faith, History, and Instructional Mormon Media.” The lecture will examine the use of visual culture in American religions utilizing the new LDS Church History Department production of “The Story Lives Here.” The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Brian Birch at brian.birch@uvu.edu or Boyd Petersen at boyd.petersen@uvu.edu or visit www.uvu.edu/religiousstudies.

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?Some things that are true are not very useful:? a vindication.

Part II in the JI’s ongoing series on secularism and religious education.

I am recently, and demonstrably, interested in the ways in which Mormons think about what history is, and how it is manufactured, and why, exactly, we care so much about it. As you are probably aware, Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles recently delivered at Harvard Law School an address titled ?The Fundamental Premises of our Faith.? Generally speaking, he delivered, offering a reasonable primer of the basics of contemporary LDS doctrine and church life: from an embodied God and eternal progression to wards and to nobody?s surprise, marriage. But more than merely outlining the Gospel Principles manual, throughout the entire talk ? oftentimes glancingly, but occasionally explicitly ? Oaks enunciated a particular way of thinking about information, and from whence it is derived, and how it is organized into knowledge, and about how all these things relate to God that, I think, we can use to understand more deeply the position of those ranks of General Authorities of the church who have spoken most notoriously on the writing of church history in the past thirty years or so, on how the writing of Mormon history should be understood.

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