Articles by

Christopher

“Owned by the white people”: America and Native Americans in Church History Sunday School Lessons, 1934

By August 10, 2010


I recently moved, and in the process spent some time going through the several boxes of papers (consisting mostly of photocopies of archival documents, papers written for courses as both an undergrad and grad student, and old syllabi) I’ve accumulated over the last few years.

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Announcing “Scholaristas”: A new blog exploring women’s religious history

By July 28, 2010


As promised, former JI blogger Elizabeth has teamed up with two other bright and thoughtful young historians of American religion to create a new and sorely needed blog. We are pleased to announce and endorse Scholaristas, a blog devoted to the study of women’s religious history by women. The bloggers describe themselves and their blog as follows:

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Farewell, Elizabeth

By June 16, 2010


Much to our collective dismay, Elizabeth has decided to step down as a contributor here at Juvenile Instructor. Liz came aboard almost two years ago and for a long time was the lone female blogger here. She’s contributed a number of insightful and provocative posts during her tenure, and more recently launched two of JI’s more successful series—Secularism and Religious Education, exploring the ways different Mormon students at Divinity Schools have grappled with secularism and their individual educational pursuits in Religious Studies and Women in the Academy, profiling several up-and-coming female Latter-day Saint scholars. Perhaps more than all of that, though, Liz is known for incorporating the personal into her academic and historical reflections.

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The Tea Party as a Religious Movement: A Response

By June 4, 2010


(Cross-posted at Religion in American History)

Over at Religion Dispatches, Joanna Brooks has a two-part post asking ?Who Says the Tea Party isn?t a Religious Movement?? In challenging Lou Ruprecht?s answer of ?no,? Brooks notes that ?for the Mormon sector of the movement (including Tea Party icon Glenn Beck), ? the Tea Party taps into a powerful and distinctive complex of Mormon beliefs about the divinity of the U.S. Constitution and the last-days role of righteous souls from the Rocky Mountains in saving it from destruction.?

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Is Mormonism “understudied”?

By June 4, 2010


I’m making my way through Jeffrey Williams’s Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), an admittedly revisionist challenge to the current scholarship on early Methodism that highlights the rhetorical violence in the sermons, conversion narratives, and personal writings of Wesley’s disciples in the early American republic. I may consider posting a brief review of the book (and noting any potential avenues for research in Mormon studies it may suggest) when I complete it, but for the time being, I want to focus in on one line from the book’s foreword, authored by Catherine Albanese and Stephen Stein, editors of the Religion in North America series of which this book is a part.

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Of Mormon Fundamentalism and Outlaw Country Music

By May 12, 2010


Over at Religion in American History, I put up a post this morning as part of an ongoing series on “surprising or otherwise interesting primary sources.” I’m cross-posting it here for anyone interested:

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New Blog: Religion in the American West

By April 21, 2010


Juvenile Instructor readers will be interested in the recently-launched group blog, Religion in the American West.

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“Prelude to American Imperialism”: Mormon Polygamy, Natural Law, and Whiteness

By March 4, 2010


I put up a link earlier this week on the sideblog to an article by Nate Oman* entitled “Natural Law and the Rhetoric of Empire: Reynolds v. United States, Polygamy, and Imperialism” (available at SSRN here). Because Nate is shopping the article around to law journals and it thus might not catch the attention of historians (attention it definitely deserves), I thought I’d post the abstract here for anyone who missed the sideblog link and/or the discussion on it over at Times & Seasons).

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“Mormon history?s (and historians?) movement out of the margins”: The State of Mormon History and Mormon Historiography

By February 19, 2010


In yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed, Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey explore what they see as the paradox of the current state of American religious history. On the one hand, more historians appear to be engaging religious history than in past years. They note, for example, that according to a recent AHA report, “religion now tops the list of interests that historians claim to have as their specialty” and point to a number of stellar offerings recently published in the field.

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Announcement: Mormon History Association Awards

By February 2, 2010


MORMON HISTORY ASSOCIATION STUDENT AWARDS

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