Jennifer Champoux is a scholar of Latter-day Saint visual art and a co-editor of Approaching the Tree: Interpreting 1 Nephi 8, forthcoming from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. Her current projects include directing the Book of Mormon Art Catalog (a digital database launching soon) and writing a book on artist C. C. A. Christensen for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series published by the University of Illinois Press.
I write this from 40,000 feet over the Atlantic, returning home after the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (MSH) conference at Pembroke College, Oxford. This year’s theme of “aesthetics” fostered a lively discussion about the meaning and function of art within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Among the presenters was Mark Wrathall, who, drawing on Nietzsche, postulated that the experience of true beauty (encompassing the lovely and agreeable as well as the challenging and painful) creates a new reality and teaches us to feel differently.[1] His remarks made me wonder, does Latter-day Saint religious art allow for true beauty understood this way? Can it initiate an emotional response that opens a space for discovery and revelation? Does it make us uncomfortable in a way that reorients us? Or does it sanitize our experience of discipleship and keep us at arm’s length from the messiness of life?
These are the kinds of questions asked in Gary Ettari’s new Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics: Beholding the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), which makes a significant contribution to the growing field of art scholarship in the Latter-day Saint tradition. Ettari is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His fascinating book fruitfully draws from early Christian thinkers, Latter-day Saint rhetoric and scripture, and contemporary neurological and aesthetic theories to examine religious art.
Shields, Steven L. Divergent Paths of the Restoration: An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement. 5thed. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2021. 1030 pp. Forward, bibliography, appendix, index. eBook: $9.99.
With an updated encyclopedia spanning 1,030 pages and around 500 entries, Steven L. Shields fifth edition of Divergent Paths of the Restoration: An Encyclopedia of the Smith–Rigdon Movement is a valuable scholarly resource. The book is too large for print, and publisher Signature Books is offering an affordable eBook-only version. While some may be tempted to skip the introductory pages, Shields lays out important principles for interpreting his book in a “Begin Here” section. Read it!Divergent Paths is not simply a book tracing how churches broke off from other churches. Shields uses the term “expression” as a neutral term for groups and/or individuals with unique perspectives about the Restoration and works to avoid taking sides.
On Pioneer Day this year, I sat in Florida, some 2,000 miles from my beloved Salt Lake City, feeling homesick. Nobody in Sarasota would even know what it meant if I wished them a happy 24th, let alone want to listen to me wax poetic about the cheese fries and dipping sauce at the Training Table (RIP) or hear out my opinions about what should or should not go in funeral potatoes. (Green onions, not regular onions. I will die on this hill.) Fortunately, I had an excellent companion for this bout of homesickness: This is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions, edited by Carol A. Edison, Eric A. Eliason, and Lynne S. McNeill, a sprawling volume that is particularly interested in parsing the fine-grained details of Utah’s cuisine. Readers can ponder the foodways of indigenous people, Greek immigrants, Mormon settlers, Salt Lake City’s Nikkei Senior Center luncheons, and many other groups.
Chief Plenty Coups: Visions at the “End of History”
In the late 1920s, only a few years before his death, the great Crow chief Plenty Coups related his life’s history to his friend, the white ethnographer Frank Bird Linderman, who recorded that,
Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. ‘I have not told you half of what happened when I was young,’ he said, when urged to go on. ‘I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.’[2]
This guest post comes from stephen b., a Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He writes about religion in public life, secularism, modernity, and the Progressive Era.He also hosts the Mormon Studies podcast Scholars & Saints.
While historians can do their work largely not reliant on “high theory,” theory can’t do its work without the contingency and specificity of history. In her book The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood talks about the embodied religious practices of Egyptian Muslim women in the piety movement of the Islamic Revival during the mid-1990s. By analyzing the conditions under which these women became subjects through embodied practices such as arguing, reading, memorizing, teaching, and so forth, Mahmood illustrated concretely why theories of agency and subject formation in the work of Judith Butler are problematic in the ways that they epistemologically exclude possibilities of agency that do not center on the feminist/liberal assumption that freedom is constitutive of agency (Nor do they acknowledge the need to ground, as Mahmood says, “a theory” in concrete examples).
The registration deadline for “Restoration, Reunion, Resilience,” MHA’s 2021 annual conference is rapidly approaching. Registration closes at the end of the day on May 26, 2021. The face-to-face component will be held at the Utah Olympic Park complex in Park City June 10-12, 2021. Online content will become available at the same time. Conference registration (for MHA members) is $189 (with access to both in-person and online content). However, there are a variety of options to join MHA and to register for the conference. A full list of fees can be found here.
Joseph and I are thrilled by the line-up of presentations, plenaries, posters, roundtables, and book critiques. The preliminary program exhibits an ever expanding state of the field, including contributions from international scholars never before made possible at MHA. The depth and breadth our MHA 2021 preliminary program represents are truly exciting.
Presenters at the conference must register by the deadline. This will also ensure timely posting of online sessions (since online sessions cannot be posted until all presenters pay membership and registration dues). For other attendees, on-site registration will be available for an additional $40 (not including any meals).
Whether connecting with the program content in-person or virtually, Joseph and I look forward to the opportunity to once again connect with you.
In the previous installments of this series, I have given a brief history of the research Don Bradley and I have been conducting over the last three decades on the Kinderhook plates episode in early Mormon history.
As explained in the previous installment (2 of 4), I had found what I believed to be the source of the content of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Kinderhook plates: The Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL).
So, as I was saying, in the spring of 1996 I delivered a presentation at MHA in which I argued that Joseph Smith did translate (mistranslate) a portion of the fraudulent Kinderhook plates but that he had attempted this translation by secular methods. (For the basic outline of the argument, see the previous installment.)
A few months after the presentation, I found the source of the content of the translation.
It was in the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language.
If I remember it correctly, I started studying the Kinderhook plates episode in the fall of 1990, soon after I completed my mission and returned to BYU—and there found the magnificent run of BX8600 books in the 4th-floor stacks of the Lee Library. I spent countless hours between there and the old Special Collections (with its stunning window view of Mount Timpanogos).
A decade earlier, historian Stan Kimball had obtained permission to conduct destructive testing on the one extant Kinderhook plate—in order to determine whether it was ancient or modern. In the late nineteenth century, men from Kinderhook, Illinois, claimed that the plate had been fabricated there in 1843 and then planted near a decomposed skeleton in a nearby American Indian burial mound. This was all in preparation for the excavation and “discovery” that followed. The problem was that, according to the History of the Church, when Joseph Smith was shown the plates he believed they were genuine and even translated a portion of their inscriptions. So, were the plates genuine or bogus? ancient or modern? The destructive testing conducted in 1980 conclusively demonstrated that the plate and its inscriptions were a 19th-century fabrication.
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “The burden of proof is on the claim of there BEING Nephites. From a scholarly point of view, the burden of proof is on the…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “But that's not what I was saying about the nature of evidence of an unknown civilization. I am talking about linguistics, not ruins. …”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “Large civilizations leave behind evidence of their existence. For instance, I just read that scholars estimate the kingdom of Judah to have been around 110,000…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “I have always understood the key to issues with Nephite archeology to be language. Besides the fact that there is vastly more to Mesoamerican…”
Steven Borup on In Memoriam: James B.: “Bro Allen was the lead coordinator in 1980 for the BYU Washington, DC Seminar and added valuable insights into American history as we also toured…”
David G. on In Memoriam: James B.: “Jim was a legend who impacted so many through his scholarship and kind mentoring. He'll be missed.”
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Recent Comments
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “The burden of proof is on the claim of there BEING Nephites. From a scholarly point of view, the burden of proof is on the…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “But that's not what I was saying about the nature of evidence of an unknown civilization. I am talking about linguistics, not ruins. …”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “Large civilizations leave behind evidence of their existence. For instance, I just read that scholars estimate the kingdom of Judah to have been around 110,000…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “I have always understood the key to issues with Nephite archeology to be language. Besides the fact that there is vastly more to Mesoamerican…”
Steven Borup on In Memoriam: James B.: “Bro Allen was the lead coordinator in 1980 for the BYU Washington, DC Seminar and added valuable insights into American history as we also toured…”
David G. on In Memoriam: James B.: “Jim was a legend who impacted so many through his scholarship and kind mentoring. He'll be missed.”