Juvenile Instructor » 2012

A Conference on How We Think About the Great Apostasy, Coming in March

By matt b.January 31, 2012

Please join us for a conference titled ?Exploring Mormon Conceptions of Apostasy? to be held on March 1-2, 2012 at Brigham Young University.

The conference schedule is available at https://sites.google.com/site/mormonconceptionsofapostasy/.

The notion of an apostasy from the primitive gospel and the original church has been a key animating feature in Mormonism since its inception and in other ?religions of the book.? Apostasy as a concept, however, has proven to be tremendously fluid, with individual, institutional, communal, and historical meanings and applications all proliferating in religious thought throughout the ages. Fifteen faithful Mormon scholars from many scholarly backgrounds and methodologies, will explore the concept of apostasy in various historical and religious contexts as we consider how to narrate apostasy in ways that remain historically authentic and cohere with Mormon theology. Proceedings will be published by Greg Kofford Press in the series Perspectives on Mormon Theology.

This conference is organized by Miranda Wilcox, assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, with financial assistance from an Eliza R. Snow Faculty Grant.

Is Mormonism a “western” religion?

By ChristopherJanuary 30, 2012

Over at the Religion in the American West blog, Laurie Maffly-Kipp has offered her thoughts to the above question. The whole post is worth reading—and it’d be great to generate some discussion on the topic over there—but I wanted to highlight a couple of points I found especially important.

Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Introduction

By CarlJanuary 25, 2012

Greetings, Juvenile Instructor readers! Matt B (one of your permabloggers) asked if I would be willing to do a bit of a guest stint as a blogger. I?m currently in a PhD program in systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, and teach as an instructor at Georgetown. Because I?m LDS, I?ve been asked to teach a class this semester on Mormonism, which I?ve titled ?Mormonism: A New World Religion.? This series of posts will be about my experience teaching the course. The title is supposed to have a bit of a double meaning. First, it?s a religion from the New World, one of the few (discounting the bewildering variety of Christianities) that originated in the New World. Second, sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has predicted that Mormonism will be the next world religion to emerge since Islam.

Mormonism and “Historical/Traditional” Christianity

By Steve FlemingJanuary 20, 2012

My dissertation committee felt I sort of gave them a bait and switch at my prospectus defense. I had spent three years telling them I wanted to compare Mormonism to medieval Christianity (which I’m still doing) but for my prospectus I was now talking about Mormonism and Neoplatonism. They found this all rather confusing and wanted brainstorm other angles I could take. In the midst of all this, my medieval advisor exclaimed, “I know what your thesis should be. It should be how Christian Mormonism is. This is all thoroughly Christian, it’s just not Protestant.”

What is Christian depends on one’s point of view. Medieval Christianity was very different from Protestantism. As I’ve noted around here a few times, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 presents a very different picture of traditional Christianity than do Protestants.

Book Review: Allison P. Coudert, Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America

By Steve FlemingJanuary 17, 2012

Coudert, Allison P. Religion, Magic , and Science in Early Modern Europe and America. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011.

This book made my head spin. Coudert sets about attacking cherished ontologies and historiographical dogmas in ways I’m overwhelmingly in agreement with, but the book still left me dizzy. Coudert comes out swinging and doesn’t let up. Most brilliant is the way Coudert blends these categories with each other and the social history of the periods she covers.

Religious History Classes Come With Instructions

By Tona HJanuary 16, 2012

This is Part 3 in my series on course & syllabus design (“Oz Behind the Curtain”); here are Part 1 and Part 2. I’ve also posted a Part 3a on governance and alignment, but since it’s kind of technical it’s only on my blog; see here if you want to get into those nitty-gritty details.

All my syllabi have some generalized instructions. I include some boilerplate stuff on every syllabus: use of phone and laptops in class, something about attendance and participation to the effect that just showing up is necessary but not sufficient, something about disability accommodations, and so on.

But for a course that studies religion, somehow, I feel there needs to be something more along the lines of ground rules.

Notes on the Pew Survey.

By matt b.January 12, 2012

Between October 25 and November 16 of last year, researchers for the Pew Forum interviewed 1,019 Americans who identified themselves as “Mormon.” That point is key.

There was surprise among the researchers and advisory board (including myself), and no doubt among the General Authorities when it turned out that 77% of Mormons in America attend church every week, because it is received common knowledge among most who care about such things that the actual rate of attendance (and tithepaying &etc) is nowhere near this high.

History News Roundup: Pew Survey, Elder Jensen, and others

By Ben PJanuary 12, 2012

This post is merely designed to be a catch-all for recent Mormon history-related news. Please feel free to add anything I missed in the comments.

Come October We Will Bid Goodbye to Elder Jensen as LDS Church Historian

By Jared TJanuary 12, 2012

He will be given Emeritus status at the October General Conference and Elder Steven E. Snow will become the new Church Historian.

I don’t know a lot about Elder Snow, but I do know that Elder Jensen will be sorely missed. He has been a tremendous advocate for Church History and those who have had even the most passing personal contact with him know him to be a genuine gem of a person.

Oz Behind the Curtain, Part 2

By Tona HJanuary 11, 2012

This is Part 2 in a series on course & syllabus design; Part 1 is here.

I last taught “Religions in America” in the fall of 2009 as a special topics course in history, which meant I didn’t have to jump through any approval hoops. Since that time, I’ve put the course through our university and General Education governance so it could be listed with a course number in the regular catalog. Now that I’m planning to teach it again in 2012-2013, it’s time to revisit the course from the inside out and update its learning outcomes and course expectations (and give it a revamped web presence). All of this can be done without altering its catalog description or governance approvals–which is an important point if you are inheriting an existing course and are looking to redesign it or reinvent its pedagogy.