Announcement: Spencer Fluhman Hired By the BYU Department of History

In 2004, J. Spencer Fluhman joined the faculty of the department of Church History and Doctrine in the BYU Department of Religious Education (“The Religion Department” as it’s commonly known) as a full-time employee. In the interim he has rapidly gained a reputation not only for solid scholarship but for his engaging and entertaining teaching style. He recently published an important piece about Joseph Smith’s polygamy in the latest number of Mormon Historical Studies and his dissertation, ?Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Antebellum America” will be published within the year. He also recently finished a term on the board of the Mormon History Association. Many of us here at the JI count Spencer as a mentor and a friend as well as a colleague.

We’re pleased to announce that this past week, Spencer was hired by the BYU department of history and will begin teaching in the fall.  Please join us in congratulating Spencer on this new chapter in his career.

Announcement: The New Claremont Journal of Mormon Studies=> Call For Papers

David Golding is a PhD student in the History of Christianity at Claremont Graduate University and a co-editor (with Loyd Ericson) of the new Claremont Journal of Mormon Studies. He has been kind enough to share a little bit about this new publishing venture and a Call for Papers.

Announcement: The New Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies is. . . .

Patrick Q. Mason. He did his graduate work at Notre Dame under George Marsden and recently published a form of his dissertation as The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Antebellum South (I have to say that the title of his dissertation, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Mob,” is pretty dang awesome). He has also published several articles of note. Apparently it won’t be official until March, but the word is now out.

Congrats, Pat. This is great news for Claremont, too.

News and Notes from MHA

MHA put up its quarterly newspaper this week, and there are a few items worth noting.

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The LDS History Canon; Or, a Mormon Comps List

At the award-winning US Intellectual History Blog, David Sehat took on the monumental task of outlining the US History Canon (he had previously done a list on the 19th century here). Designed primarily as a template for a comprehensive exams reading list, it also aims to be a great source on standard debates in historiography. Here is the stated goal:

Come up with a list of truly canonical books that everyone who has gone to graduate school in U.S. history should have read. This is not just a list of intellectual and cultural history–it is supposed to include all the major works in modern U.S. history in all the different sub-specialties. In certain cases where an article was substantially the same as an important book, we added the article instead. We also left out many good books and books that would help to fill out a coherent narrative, trying instead to arrive at a truly canonical list. That is, of course, an impossible task, given the fragmentation and specialization of the historiography of the United States. But we thought it worth the effort in any case.

Of course, these types of lists are more to provoke discussion than to be a definitive statement. A so-called “canon” is more often a reflection of the compiler’s interests and background than an objective judging of the entire breadth of scholarship.

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From the Archives: “Mormonism in New York and Utah.”

From Evangelical Christendom 12 (1870), 27.

Evangelical Christendom, published out of London, was the official journal of the World Evangelical Alliance, organized in Britain in 1846 to coordinate and promote evangelical mission work around the globe.  (An American affiliate was organized in New York City in  1847.) The journal was annual, but also comprehensive; routinely hundreds of pages long, containing book reviews, conference reports, missionary dispatches from around the globe, and a section entitled “Foreign Intelligencer,” made up of dispatches from countries around the world on the state of evangelical religion.   “Mormonism in New York and Utah” is one of these.

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Women in the Academy: Heather Olson Beal

Heather Olson Beal is an assistant professor of education at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. She blogs at Doves and Serpents.  (Dr Olson Beal is the seventh academic profiled in the “Women in the Academy” series, which Elizabeth Pinborough started in February 2010.)

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Jesus College, and Ashamed Faith

Walking through the campus of Jesus College is akin to visiting a middle age monastery.

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Being Biblical

I took a directed readings course for one of my last classes at BYU, and one of the books was about colonial New Englanders? notions of America as a promised land. While that may seem rather innocuous, I was struck by the similarities to Mormon notions and the fact that JS would have been immersed in that culture (no getting around the fact that he would have been influenced by such ideas). When I met with the professor to discuss the book I mentioned my concern and I think he sort of made a joke. But then seeing that I still looked concerned he simply said, ?it?s in the Bible.? That made me feel better.

In the process of getting comfortable with finding Mormon-looking ideas in JS?s environment, I’ve wondered why I felt this way. I think the impulse derives from the feeling that the Bible is a legitimate source, whereas other sources may not be. This is a very Protestant approach.

JS seemed to have a different approach though.

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Joseph Smith and Matthew Philip Gill: the dynamics of Mormon schism

Jacob Baker and I discovered the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ while Bushman summer fellows in 2007.    We spent a lot of time kicking back and forth analysis of this most interesting schism group, and organized an MHA panel around them in 2008.    And, today, the turgid pace of academic publishing has finally reached consummation, and the paper I wrote that summer has been published in the current issue of Nova Religio 14:3 (February 2011) 42-63.

The Latter Day Church is fascinating in part because of how skillfully Matthew Philip Gill engages in prophetic mimesis, replicating the experiences and language of Joseph Smith to create himself as Smith’s heir, calling to repentance the failed church of Salt Lake City and promising a re-invigorated version of Mormon spirituality – one which both invokes Joseph Smith’s charisma anew, but which also rewrites the sacred history of Mormonism in ways that follow the cultural accommodations the LDS church has made.   Gill’s movement is neither sectarian – which seeks to heighten tension with Western culture – nor a church movement – one which seeks to lessen that tension.  Rather, scholars like Armand Mauss and Thomas O’Dea have observed that the LDS Church itself seems to combine both of these impulses, oscillating back and forth along a spectrum of resistance, tension, and accommodation.  Just so, the Latter Day Church of Christ itself seeks to heighten both resistance and accommodation – rejecting, for instance, evidence that Joseph Smith ever practiced polygamy and embracing whole-heartedly the LDS church’s sentimental emphasis upon the family, but also heightening the sort of radical spiritual claims which have become routinized in American Mormonism.   Gill, after all, has had visionary experiences of all the figures Joseph Smith claimed to have encountered, adding a resurrected Joseph himself into the bargain.   As his father (and first counselor) asks derisively of the LDS Church, “We have again an era of prophets.  Proper prophets.  Not people who are just put into position and over time get to be a prophet . . . Where?s the revelation in that?”    And such is a new church born.

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