Bloggernacle, Meet The Mormon Studies Review

(Cross-posted at By Common Consent. Also, the first three paragraphs should be read in the voice of Billy Mays, and taken in the spirit of the ?Tribute to Doin? It Wrong? video. The pdf of the inaugural Mormon Studies Review‘s Table of Contents can be downloaded here.)

Do you suffer too many sleepless nights, wondering if Mormonism can add anything to the study of ethics?

Struggling to keep up with developments in the seemingly always-nascent (sub)field of Mormon studies? Do you ever walk through the book aisle and think, ?holy fetch, when did that book come out?? Have you ever found yourself wondering, ?what the heck is Mormon studies, anyway?” Or, does a sleepless night rarely go buy without you asking, ?well, how does the study of Mormonism illuminate the translocative elements of religious studies?? Well, you are not alone!

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New Mormon Studies Book Series: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

(Cross-posted at By Common Consent.)

Did you hear? Mormon studies is so hot right now. This semester witnessed the start of the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair in Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia (held by Kathleen Flake), next month will see the innaugural issue of the newly re-launched Mormon Studies Review (be very, very excited), and several new and exciting books are about to hit the shelves. And all this on top of the other Mormon studies programs that have been launched and the flood of excellent books that have been published in the last few years.

And now, there is a new book series at an unexpected university press.

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Measuring Scholarship: The Size and Shape of Books

Forgive this post for being more of a smattering of ideas than a cohesive analysis. I’ve recently been considering the size and importance of books, both in the academic field of history in general and Mormon studies in particular. This reconsideration was inspired by an essay in Perspectives on History, the magazine for the American Historical Association. (I strongly recommend reading it before reading this post.)

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MHA Odds and Ends: October 2013 Edition

As crazy as it sounds, the year is coming to a close. Fall Semester is well underway (except out here in Cambridge where it is only beginning), the leaves are changing colors, and my bike ride is getting colder. Also, MHA just released its fourth and final newsletter for the year, so it’s time to keep our tradition alive of highlighting news-y things for our audience. In the words of The O’Jays and, more recently, Jalen Rose, we “gotta give the people what they want!”

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Scholarly Q&A on the Succession: Christine and Christopher Blythe

(The following is a give-and-take with Christopher and Christine Blythe, graduate students in American religious history who specialize in the many divergent forms of Mormonism. Christopher attends Florida State University, where he is nearing completion of his PhD, and Christine recently started a master’s program at Memorial University of Newfoundland. A couple weeks ago, I highlighted two of their recent articles; today, they answer a few questions presented to them by the JI cabal. The Blythes have a documentary history of the succession period due to be published by Kofford Books next year.)

Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup (August 25, 2013)

‘Nother week, ‘nother roundup. Let’s do this.

Not to be confused with the Army of Helaman.

First up, the LDS Church reached a milestone by surpassing 75,000 missionaries. These two should not be counted among them.

Exciting news in Book of Mormon Studies: the Maxwell Instute has appointed Brian Hauglid as editor, and Joseph Spencer and Mark Wright as associate editors, of the re-named Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (previously named Journal of Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture and Lots of Other Names That Made this a Ridiculous Journal Title Studies). I think they should recruit this guy to write their first lead article.

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Responses: The Blythes Take on Succession

First of all, we hope you enjoy JI’s new look. And yes, we are aware that the “music notes” can easily catch your attention.

If the recent resurgence in Mormon schism studies did nothing more than give room for John Hamer’s phenomenal images, then it has served a noble purpose indeed.

But the blog is not the only thing that was in need of a facelift recently–so was the historiography surrounding the “succession crisis.” One of the popular topics that was repeatedly researched during the rise of New Mormon History, the story of how Mormonism became/remains so prone to schism has received a lot of attention. Historians like Michael Quinn, Andrew Ehat, Ron Esplin, and many others laid the archival groundwork for much of the narrative—and that’s just for the period immediately following Joseph Smith’s death. The John Whitmer Historical Association, which sponsors an annual conference as well as a biannual journal dedicated to the various traditions that race their roots back to Joseph Smith, continues to pump out fascinating scholarship year after year. And most of the major works in Mormon history now realize they must address these schism issues—think of the recent biographies of Parley Pratt and Brigham Young—it has begun to infiltrate the mainstream of Mormon studies.

But just like any topic within the wild and still inchoate (sub)field of Mormon history, its approaches have continued to evolve. In the beginning, very few works, besides that of Danny Jorgensen, invoked a theoretical methodology in tracking what Jorgensen called “Mormon Fissiparousness.” Rather, most narratives, while grounded in ground-breaking archival research, relied on basic teleological trajectories and focussed on seemingly objective tools like facts, dates, names, and words.

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Guest Book Review: Seth Perry, “Mormons and the Bible: A Classic Gets a New Edition”

[Today’s book review comes from JI’s good friend Seth Perry, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where he wrote a dissertation on the Bible in early America, and will be a Visiting Professor of American Religion at Indiana University this fall.]

Since it was Philip Barlow?s Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (1991, 2013) that taught me to read paratexts, it seems fitting to approach Oxford University Press?s new and expanded edition of the book through the materials that frame it.

The back-cover blurbs attached to the new edition include these lines from a 1995 Dialogue review written by Scott Kenney, co-founder of Signature Books:

There can be no question that as a work of Mormon intellectual history this is a seminal ? and eminently readable ? work?.Mormons and the Bible has all the markings of a Mormon classic.

OUP likes the quote ? it also appears on my 1997 paperback. Characteristic of the genre, though, the blurb misses all of the subtlety of what Kenney was actually saying about the book.

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Guest Post: Brittany Chapman on Ruth May Fox, Mormon Women, and Political Rights

[Today’s contribution to this month’s Mormonism & Politics series comes from Brittany Chapman, who basically runs the Church History Library nowadays.]

 ?Stronger than my political convictions,? wrote suffragist Ruth May Fox, ?was my belief in the political rights of women.?^[1]

I?ve been thinking lately about how women view themselves, and the seeming monumental change in that perception since the nineteenth century. Often when we speak of women in politics during that time period, we instantly mark ?suffrage? as one of woman?s greatest achievements. Our nineteenth-century heroines are those who touted women?s advancement in the public sphere?education, employment, and, most heralded, the vote. Rightly so.  Now four or even five generations removed from that innovation, the value of universal suffrage is obvious and marginalizing woman?s voice at the ballot box is unthinkable. It is easy to assume the value of the vote was always obvious and that every woman always wanted it. But alas, such was not the case for hundreds of thousands of women. So, who were the women who did not want the vote, and why? What were they saying? And, at the root of it all, how did they view themselves?

There is a fascinating piece by Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper) entitled ?Female Suffrage: a Letter to the Christian Women of America.? Cooper, well-read and well-bred, represented a preponderance of women when she argued that they should not have the right to vote. In the same breath, she advocated women receiving higher education, equal pay for equal work, and other basic equalities. How did these seemingly inconsistent ideas of equality co-exist?

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Call for Papers: “The Book of Mormon: Americanist Approaches”

Editors:
Jared Hickman, The Johns Hopkins University
Elizabeth Fenton, The University of Vermont

Over twenty years ago, Nathan Hatch highlighted a gap in the study of American religion, noting that, ?for all the attention given to the study of Mormonism, surprisingly little has been devoted to The Book of Mormon itself.? Though scholars of US religion and culture have produced a wide range of work on Mormonism, its history, and its peoples in the past two decades, Hatch?s assertion remains largely true. In the field of US literary studies particularly, The Book of Mormon stands as a telling absence, perhaps because questions about what it is and where it came from have overshadowed discussions of how it works and what it does. This essay collection begins with the premise that, whatever else it may be, The Book of Mormon is a significant, world-altering literary text that should be studied as such.

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