By January 13, 2013
Male, travelling missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission trimmed or removed facial hair as part of weekly grooming and hygiene routines. Moustaches were relatively common but Van Dykes and full beards much less so. In the diaries I detect no ?freighting? of facial hair with cultural or religious significance beyond middle-class respectability.
By January 12, 2013
I am feeling the stirrings of envy as I see advertisements for the annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Culture. Rules about repeating seminars prohibit me from jumping at the chance to immerse myself for six weeks in explorations of the theology and history of spiritual gifts, ordinances, and priesthood authority in LDS thought. That triad is impossibly juicy, and I?m anxious to see what presentations and papers emerge out of this year?s group.
Terryl Givens is conducting this summer?s session (June 3 – July 12, 2013), which continues the series started by Richard Bushman and hosted by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute over fifteen years ago. The first series of summer seminars on ?Joseph Smith and His Times? ran from 1997 to 2002. In 2003 Claudia Bushman conducted a seminar on ?Mormon Women in the Twentieth Century.? In recent years, Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens have expanded the Joseph Smith seminar series to broader topics, such as ?Mormon Thought 1845-1890: Dealing with the Joseph Smith Legacy;? and ?Mormon Thinkers 1890 to 1930,? and with the help of Matthew Grow, “Parley and Orson Pratt and 19th-century Mormon Thought.” The last two summers, Richard Bushman organized the seminar around the history and context of the golden plates, and this summer, Terryl Givens will be picking back up the history of Mormon thought with “Workings of the Spirit and Works of the Priesthood: Gifts and Ordinances in LDS Thought and Practice.”
By January 10, 2013
Queen Liliuokalani as a young woman
In 1899, a young Mormon woman named Hannah Kaaepa traveled to Washington, D.C., as a delegate to National Council of Women?s Congress. She had been invited by May Wright Sewall to speak about the rights of Hawaiian women and the recent overthrow of the Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani. While in Washington, she was feted by Hawaiian Queen who threw her a dinner party and invited the women who had accompanied the young Kaaepa to Washington. As a result, Emmeline B. Wells, Susa Young Gates, and Lucy B. Young
By January 10, 2013
From our good friends at the MHA:
_______________________________________
Dear Colleagues and Students:
I serve as chair of the Mormon History Association?s best undergraduate and graduate student papers awards committee. Each year we solicit nominations from students for these awards. Students may make one submission by sending me an electronic copy no later than February 15, 2013. The undergraduate award carries a prize of $300. The graduate award carries a prize of $400.
To be considered:
– the work must have been completed in 2012
– an electronic copy of the paper must be submitted to jsillito@weber.edu by the due date
– the submission must include a cover letter which provides the student?s name, school, status, major, contact information (phone and street address), and e-mail address
Additional information can be found at:
www.mormonhistoryassociation.
Winners in each category will be contacted prior to the MHA annual conference, June 6-9, 2013, in Layton, Utah.
Please encourage your students to make submissions, and feel free to send this information to others who might be interested.
John Sillito
Weber State University
Ogden, UT 84408
801-626-8568
By January 9, 2013
Not even a Catholic blessing could save Manti Te’o and the dying pop-culture Mormon moment he represents. (source: Wall Street Journal)
[cross-posted at Religion in American History]
On Monday afternoon, just hours before the Alabama Crimson Tide blew out the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the BCS National Championship football game, Peggy Fletcher Stack posted a short note at the Salt Lake Tribune‘s Following Faith blog on the Catholic pregame rituals of ND.
Specifically, Stack drew readers’ attention to the Mormon story embedded within a fuller exploration of that subject at the Wall Street Journal: Star linebacker, Heisman Trophy runner-up, and devout Mormon Manti Te’o joins his teammates in “attend[ing] a Catholic Mass, receiv[ing] ‘a priest-blessed medal devoted to a Catholic saint,’ and ‘kiss[ing] a shrine containing two slivers Notre Dame believes came from Jesus? cross.'” He was even photographed receiving a blessing from Notre Dame president emeritus Father Theodore Hesburgh (a blessing Te’o reportedly sought out). Football team chaplain Father Paul Doyle explained that Te’o has privately told him that “he feels supported here [at Notre Dame] in his Mormon religion.”
All of this immediately brought to mind some of my previous thoughts on Mormon supplemental worship, in which Latter-day Saints supplement their Mormon activity by attending other Christian church’s services (a habit that dates back to at least the late nineteenth century). While the example provided by Te’o is clearly part of that larger historical tradition, it also strikes me as unique for a couple of reasons:
By January 8, 2013
For those unable to attend this year’s annual American Historical Association held in New Orleans last week, Twitter is a godsend, and on Saturday night, the site was all abuzz as Laurie Maffly-Kipp, professor of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, delivered the presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History.[1] Entitled “The Burden of Church History,” Maffly-Kipp’s address was a call to members of the ASCH to not abandon church history as the field of American religious history moves further away from institutional histories in pursuit of histories that analyze spirituality and deconstruct the meaning of religion.[2] I’ve yet to read the entire address, but Elesha Coffman has posted a helpful summary and insightful response at Religion in American History that I encourage all to read.
By January 7, 2013
If you don’t subscribe to Dialogue yet, repent now and change your ways before the day of judgement arrives.
In case you missed it during the business that is the holiday season, the winter issue of Dialogue appeared on its website. As its lead article, our own Steve Taysom offers a fabulous look at one of the new and provocative theories in religious studies: Robert Orsi’s “abundant events.” This theory should be familiar with Mormons studies practitioners and Dialogue readers since Orsi, Richard Bushman, and Susanna Morrill did an interview about it in Dialogue‘s fall 2011 issue. Put simply, Orsi’s theory starts with the problem that plagues many scholars: what does one do with supernatural events that are claimed by the religious people one studies? Or as Steve summarizes, “how do scholars of religion account for experiences that are simultaneously irrational and real?” (4-5) Orsi’s response is to construct a conceptual category that both avoids the reductionism of skeptical scholars while still providing a framework in which the importance of the claimed experience can still be analyzed. Taysom examines the theory and sees how it works when applied to the study of Mormonism’s gold plates.
To summarize Steve’s fantastic article, I’ll gist his main argument, critiques, and conclusion, and then highlight what I think are the two most important aspects of the work. After giving a helpful summary of both the academic summary of religion as well as Orsi’s theory of “abundant events,” Taysom engages the benefits and pitfalls of such an approach. The biggest benefit, according to Taysom, is that “Orsi is attempting to create categories that bring religious experience into the ‘real’ world rather than attempting to fence them off” (5). But Taysom’s biggest critique is that Orsi never really explains whether it is the event or the narrative of said event that carries so much weight within a faith tradition. He is not willing to agree with Orsi that “abundant events…seem to exist and act independent of mundane historical agents” (9). For Taysom, it is the later narratives of the event that influence how people act and react, not the original event itself. “I can conclude,” writes Taysom, “that Orsi’s theory of abundant events is useful to the study of religion in general, and Mormonism in particular, only to the extent that it recognizes, accepts, or explains, in an explicit and clear manner, the role of narrative in the process of making the events ‘real'” (10).
By January 6, 2013
Before Christmas I wrote a few posts about the death of missionaries or their close relations and how those deaths were handled institutionally. In this post I will discuss how the missionaries reacted to the death of the President of the Church, Lorenzo Snow, on 1901 Oct 10.
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