2015 Wheatley Seminar – Call for Applications

Announcing the 2nd Annual Wheatley 2015:

The 2nd Annual Wheatley ?Faith Seeking Understanding? summer seminar will run from June 22 through July 10, 2015.  It is being sponsored by the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University and is under the direction of Professor Terryl Givens, Wheatley Fellow and Professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Richmond. From the announcement:

What are the general contours of Christianity?s efforts to find a marriage of belief and intellect? Does Mormonism face the same challenges as the broader Christian tradition? What are the contributions of Mormon theology to current debates in the political and cultural realms? How reasonable are LDS positions on the family, marriage, pro-life and end of life issues? Is the Mormon theological tradition an asset or a handicap in the public sphere? With what mix of revealed truth and rational discourse can Mormons best address these issues in public debate?

Students in the seminar will spend three weeks addressing these and related questions. Along the way they will survey illustrative moments in Christianity?s engagement with secularism, and examine pivotal Mormon theological understanding of such concepts as agency, the eternal soul, embodiment, and human potential and purpose. Invited guests from inside and outside the Mormon tradition will share experiences related to religiously informed participation in the public square. The purpose is to foster Latter-day Saints who are better equipped to participate effectively in society-wide conversations where LDS values are relevant and at stake. The seminar will culminate with student-authored position papers to be presented in a public symposium.

The Wheatley will provide $1500 stipend to seminar participants, along with a housing allowance. The seminar will meet on Brigham Young University campus for two hours a day, generally four days a week. Students will be expected to devote full time to the seminar during its three week duration. Applications are invited from upper level undergraduates or graduate students in all disciplines.

Additional details and an application form can be found by clicking the title above. The application deadline is March 15, 2015 and notifications will go out by March 31, 2015.

Women in the Academy: Julie K. Allen

Julie K. Allen joined the Scandinavian Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006. She received her PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2005. Her research focuses on questions of national and cultural identity in nineteenth and twentieth century Danish, German, and Scandinavian-American culture.

Internship: Joseph Smith Papers

Joseph Smith Papers Project Internship

Purposes:

The Church History Department announces an opening for a one-year internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project.   This will be a part-time (28 hours a week) temporary position beginning in March 2015.

Responsibilities:
Duties will include research related to document analysis (textual and documentary intention, production, transmission, and reception) and to contextual annotation of documents (identifications and explanations). Research will involve work in primary and secondary sources for early nineteenth-century America and early Mormonism. Work will include general assistance to volume editors.

Qualifications:
?    Bachelor?s degree in history, religious studies, or related discipline, with preference given to those with master?s degrees and/or in doctoral programs.
?    Possess excellent research and writing skills.
?    Ability to work in a scholarly and professional environment.
?    Requires both personal initiative and collaborative competence.

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Q&A with Jedediah Rogers

A few weeks ago, I posted my review of Jedediah Rogers’s new book, The Council of Fifty: A Documentary History (Signature, 2014). Today, we are pleased to feature a Q&A with the author. Enjoy!

What first grabbed your attention about the Council of 50?

The devil is in the detail, as they say, so while I was familiar with some of the council?s larger themes, it was the little things that struck me: the council prohibiting ?cutting Spanish rusty? or converting corn into whisky; Hosea Stout wittily suggesting in an April 11, 1883, meeting that a legal defense for a bigamist might be that ?he cohabited with only one at a time?; Moses Thatcher?s reported opposition to ?the proposition to anoint John Taylor as Prophet, Priest and King?; and so on.

More generally, I was grabbed by the tension between rhetoric and reality. The council discussed grandiose ideas?playing a pivotal role in the End Days, working to elect Joseph Smith as U.S. president, destroying an army and navy with an invention of ?liquid fire??that to some modern observers may seem absurd. Council members, interestingly, seemed to have thought them all probabilities. Council deliberations sometimes contained violent rhetoric, including some early utterances by Young on the doctrine of ?blood atonement,? while simultaneously centering on the millennial dream of a utopian society. Historiographical debates suggest another dynamic: was the council a mere symbolic formality or did it represent the Mormon quest for real political power? Like most things historical, the answer in this case is not either/or. (Mike Quinn cautions historians not to confuse symbol and substance; indeed, within the structure of Mormonism the Council of Fifty was subservient to the First Presidency and the Twelve, at least under the reigns of Young and Taylor. Taylor?s anointing, Quinn argues, is a prime example of the symbolic nature of the Fifty. Still, readers will find ardent rhetoric of council members convinced they were part of something grand operating in the temporal realm. And we must not downplay the significance of the council in organizing and leading the trek west and as the governing body in the Salt Lake valley from 1848 to 1850. While their minds may have been, at times, hovering in the clouds, they also worked in the soil, and they expected results from their labors.)

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MSWR

Keep an eye out, now! A small handful of roundup links on matters of interest from the past few weeks…

TLC’s My Husband’s Not Gay

Just when you’d thought we’d exhausted all the angles for a Mormon-related reality series, we now have My Husband’s Not Gay, from TLC (of Sister Wives and My Five Wives fame). Shot in Salt Lake City, My Husband’s Not Gay premieres tonight at 10 ET, and reportedly it revolves around the lives of four LDS men who, despite feeling attraction to men, do not identify as homosexuals. Indeed, three have chosen (presumably on the basis of their religious convictions) to marry women, and the show will trace the conflicts between sexual desire, human identity, and religious conviction.

In anticipation of the premiere, the show has generated a fair bit of controversy. Gay advocates have turned up the heat on TLC, denouncing the show as “downright irresponsible”; “dangerous for LGBT people”; and “damaging for Mormons, especially gay Mormon youth.” A sizable campaign has also been petitioning for the show’s cancellation. TLC, for its part, shrugged off the criticism earlier this week, and the LDS Newsroom struck a moderating tone. On the basis of his critic’s sneak preview, NYT TV critic Neil Genzlinger characterizes the show as classic incendiary reality tv, although he does note “a few interesting and genuine-sounding moments in which the couples or their friends explore the collision of  faith and feelings.” Those kinds of enlightening moments, however, he expects to be inevitably “drowned out.”

Other multifarious tidbits:

Peggy Fletcher Stack reports on Ordain Women‘s new photo illustration series envisioning female officiation in priesthood ordinances.

Regional media continue to track the unfurling of the Book of Mormon musical across the country in smaller markets, the responses of Latter-day Saints and the Church’s proselytizing response.

A new (and largely nonplussed) review of Avi Steinberg’s recent “bibliomemoir” The Lost Book of Mormon: A Journey Through the Mythic Lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri.

P.S. To all last-minute applicants for the Maxwell Institute’s Mormon Theology Seminar, 2015, a reminder that Jan. 15 is your day of reckoning.

Upcoming Books – 2015

A few weeks ago, Ben published a round up of the best books published in Mormon History in 2014. This week, we are publishing a list of the forthcoming books. There are some amazing books coming out this year. Paul Reeve has already published his long awaited Religion of a Different Color as a Kindle Book. A hardback book will be out within a month. Thomas Carter’s emphasis on the material world offers a fascinating change of pace from the work that is usually published within Mormon history. His book promises to help us understand how Mormon theology affected the physical settlement of Utah. Signature Books was unable to produce a list of forthcoming books but as you will see, provided some interesting rumors.

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CFP: Materialities of American Texts & Visual Cultures (New York, 9-10 Apr 15)

Columbia University, New York, April 9 – 10, 2015
Deadline: Jan 23, 2015

CFP: 2016 Church History Symposium – “Beyond Biography: Sources in Context for Mormon Women’s History”

2016 Church History Symposium

Beyond Biography: Sources in Context for Mormon Women’s History

March 3-4, 2016

Scholars of Mormon women’s history have long demonstrated a commitment to and an interest in biography. The resulting narratives have helped to recover and preserve voices that would have otherwise been lost to modern awareness and have allowed us to sketch the outlines of Mormon women’s experience over the past two centuries. The 2016 Church History Symposium will build upon past biographical work and push our understanding forward by addressing the following questions: How might we employ archival and other sources to create more complete and complex pictures of Mormon women’s history? How might we consider what individual lives mean within their broader contexts? How will these approaches expand or recast our understanding of Mormon history?

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Images: Woman?s Bondage, The Cave of Despair, and The Twin Relic

In today?s post I will look at three images published in Frank Leslie?s Illustrated Newspaper in the early 1880s that focus on the alleged plight of female converts to Mormonism from rural Europe. [1] All three are familiar to modern scholarship. To avoid going on too long, I will put the detailed descriptions in the footnotes and mention a few key points in the main post.

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Joseph Smith’s and Morton Smith’s Similar Views of Jesus’s Deificaiton

I’m no New Testament scholar. At all. But I had to look a few things up for my dissertation in my attempt to trace ideas in Joseph Smith’s teachings and revelations. In particular, Joseph Smith made some interesting statements about Jesus that were very much at odds with Protestantism. A handful of ideas in particular stood out and overlapped: that Jesus became God during His life, either through his baptism or through an additional temple rite and that Jesus did so even though he was a pre-existent deity. And I found it interesting that Morton Smith made all these same claims.

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