Teaching Official Declaration 2

This is a guest post from Rachel Cope, professor of religion at Brigham Young University.

As a Mormon, I believe, first and foremost, in the atoning sacrifice of the Savior, and I recognize my need to submit to his grace. I also believe that Joseph Smith?a prophetic figure?had visions, restored gospel truths, and translated a sacred text by the power of God. Consequently, doctrine seeps into my understanding of history, and history is intertwined throughout my doctrinal perspectives. Reverence and trust, rather than skepticism and doubt, dominate my view of the past. How history is written and interpreted, then, is important to me as a woman of faith who also happens to be a Professor of Religion at Brigham Young University.

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Lucy Emily Woodruff Smith’s 1893-94 Diary: What it Reveals about Lucy, her Husband, and Ourselves, Part I

With the increased attention to George Albert Smith since his turn in the line-up of Prophets for the 2012 Relief Society and Priesthood curriculum, President Smith has captured the imagination of LDS members for his vulnerability, his personal struggles with chronic mental and physical illness, and his perceptibly gentle and compassionate nature.  Indeed, his very flawed humanness has made him recently a kind of accessible hero-prophet?one with whom some Mormons feel a more intense kinship.  With that keen interest, it?s timely to talk about his wife, Lucy.

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New Guest Blogger: Andrea Radke-Moss

Please join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger: Andrea Radke-Moss.

Andrea G. Radke-Moss is a professor of history at Brigham Young University-Idaho, but currently on a two-year leave of absence to be home with her two later-in-life babies. Her book, Bright Enoch, a history of coeducation at land-grant universities in the 19th century West, was published with the University of Nebraska Press in 2008. Since then, she has published numerous chapters on women in the Great Plains, Mormon women at the Chicago World’s Fair, and women in higher education in the West. She is a contributor to the current Women of Faith series by Deseret Book. She is currently researching elite Mormon women’s and men’ birthday celebrations in the 19th-century, and Mormon women’s experiences with violence in Missouri.

Thoughts on Gender in Mormon Theology – stemming from Mormon and Protestant Encounters

Rachael has a BA in history from Brigham Young University, is currently slaving away working in a law office in Washington DC, and is waiting to hear back about graduate schools this Fall. This post ushers in her guest-posting stint with JI.

?Gender is a modern invention,? Kathleen Flake declared yesterday at the Crossroads conference. Any logical discussion of the question of gender in Mormon theology was therefore declared ?impossible.? At least that?s how I and dozens of others understood her response that wasn?t a response to my query on the subject.

Today at Stake Conference, Elder Scott spoke of the sanctity of womanhood, and the need for men to appreciate and affirm women who ?magnify? the divine endowment of feminine traits they have been given.

Clearly, the theological place and meaning of gender is a massively tangled bramble bush of an issue, and this post is in no way meant to resolve the question I posed to Kathleen Flake yesterday as to what exactly constitutes ?femininity? and ?masculinity? in our eternal identity, and what implications these notions can have beyond the mortal realm and particularly in exaltation. This matter, of course, also has direct bearing on the controversy surrounding traditional and same-sex marriage, and I firmly believe that the Church needs a clear explanation of what gender is and why the particular synthesis of one man and one woman is the divinely ordained model, in order to offer more compelling defenses (theologically, at least) for traditional marriage. (I won?t countenance polygamy in this discussion as a potential arrangement in the afterlife. We can argue about that premise in another post).

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Reminder and Webcast Information: “At the Crossroads, Again: Mormon and Protestant Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries”

As a reminder to those interested, this weekend (Friday and Saturday, Feb. 24-25) at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy is sponsoring what is being billed as a “groundbreaking event” intended to “facilitate a conversation of the ‘mind and heart’ that will set the standard for how members of religious communities can discuss differences in a way that does not compromise intellect or integrity, but is also sincere and empathetic.” Entitled “At the Crossroads, Again: Mormon and Methodist Protestant Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries,”* featured presenters include a number of well-known and recognized scholars of Mormon and Protestant history, theology, hymnody, politics, gender and sexuality, and social activism, including David Campbell, David McAllister-Wilson, Kristine Haglund, Eileen Guenther, Terryl Givens, Kathleen Flake, Elaine Heath, Robert Bennett, and Warner Woodworth, plus many more. A full schedule is available here and brief biographies of the several presenters here.

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“Mormon” Dissent: Gestures to the Past and my own Mormon Story

Update on “The Mormon Body Project:”  I found skinny jeans.  Anyone who wants pictures can visit: http://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/the-skinny-on-the-hunt-for-skinny-jeans/

Last week, I attended a presentation at Benchmark Books by Will Bagley, Polly Aird, and Jeff Nichols on their new book Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West.  They regaled the audience with stories of Ann Godge, a wife of John D. Lee who claimed that the Danites lived on top of caves and were willing to kill their own sons for infractions, Brigham Young Hampton, who tried to entrap several of Utah?s Gentile government officials in a prostitution ring and was instead arrested for running a brothel, and Charles Derry who could not bear the Mormon Reformation and was marginalized within his community.

As they were speaking I began to reflect on the stakes might be in labeling such people as Mormon dissenters.  Although these men and women had all once belonged to the Mormon faith, many of them had renounced Mormonism and considered themselves to exist in opposition to the church.  On the one hand, classifying them as Mormon dissidents seems to be a political statement that forces historians of the Mormon religious tradition to take voices of dissent seriously and to recognize them as belonging to the same history as men like Brigham Young and Joseph Fielding Smith.  One of the claims that Bagley, Aird, and Nichols made that night was that historians need to recognize the difficulties that everyday Mormons encountered as they tried to apply the principles of their faith to their lives.  While some people struggled through and remained within the faith, others decided to leave or to become figures of opposition.  Bagley, Aird, and Nichols want us to recognize that both options were valid.  On the other hand, to call someone like Godge Mormon does violence to the way that she saw herself.  Godge would have rejected the description and vehemently denied that it remained a part of her identity even after she had denounced the faith.  As historians, we need to think about the implications and politics of choosing certain descriptors for the people whose lives we are choosing to tell.

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Open Source History and Mormon Primary Sources

David Golding is a PhD student in the History of Christianity at Claremont Graduate University, is a co-editor (with Loyd Ericson) of the Claremont Journal of Mormon Studies, and assisted in creating the new MHA website. He also wrote the leading book on the web programming framework, CakePHP. He has been kind enough to share a little bit about an exciting new primary source project.

See his previous posts here and here.

We all have become hybrids in this day and age, haven?t we? In another life?and it still manages to remain with me no matter what I might do to shake it off?I worked in software development and desktop publishing. I can?t help but return to systems theory and technology as I build my own research agenda as a historian. For years now, I?ve anticipated historians taking advantage of what software engineers work with every day: open source data and logic. And yet nothing quite like open source technology has taken root in the archival and historical professions. It?s time for us to consider the benefits of pushing our research into a collective and open system, a system already possible (and free of charge) thanks to advances in social media, software versioning, and cloud computing.

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Avoiding Intellectual Paralysis, Part III: Revisiting Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven

This is a (very loose) continuation of the (very broad) series on reaching a broader audience. See also here and here.

“Bowman doesn’t shy away from the unsavory aspects of the Mormon faith, including a now-discredited belief in polygamy (as revealed in a revelation to Joseph Smith, the founder of the religion), as well as institutionalized racism. However, the ongoing controversies of the church and the stream of recent media describing Mormonism as a cult–from Jon Krakauer’s scathing non-fiction work Under the Banner of Heaven to HBO’s Big Love–is left entirely unaddressed in this work, which instead pays occasional attention to the inherently American aspects of the religion.” –Publisher’s Weekly

“Any discussion of Big Love, a complicated recent portrait of polygamy in a Mormon-like community, is left out. Nor is there a mention of Jon Krakauer?s forceful and very critical 2003 book, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith.” -Dwight Garner, New York Times

Many people, correctly, have pointed out the obsession with Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven as one of the many oddities in these unfortunate reviews of Matt Bowman’s recent book. What, we wonder, made Krakauer’s caricatured telling of Mormonism’s “violent” past so crucial that to avoid it in a historical survey of the LDS Church is worthy of being charged with negligence? Few academics praised the 2003 book, it makes very few lists of “necessary” monographs on Mormon history, and almost anyone with more than a superficial understanding of Mormonism’s past recognize the sensationalistic aspects of its thesis. Put simply, it’s a shoddy work of history, and should have been destined to be another flash-in-the-pan sensationalist work that soon fell into insignificance. (The Mormon Murders, anyone?)

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Announcing the Mormon History Association’s New Website

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Book Review: Johannes Dillinger, Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America

Dillinger, Johannes.  Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America: A History.  Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

There’s no need to point out that treasure digging has been a major theme in the historiography of the early life of Joseph Smith for 40 years or more.  So it was with great excitement and high hope that I read the first book-length treatment of the subject.  This book exceeded my expectations.  In fact, although it technically dedicates only 4 pages to Mormonism, I found the book to be one of the most ground-shifting books I’ve ever read on Joseph Smith.  I hope readers will excuse my enthusiasm, but the first full treatment to the topic has yielded exciting results.

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