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matt b.

Symbola Salvatoris: Rethinking Devotional Art

By April 17, 2024


We welcome this guest post from Jenny Champoux, Director of the Book of Mormon Art Catalog. You can see much of the work discussed here at https://meganknoblochgeilman.com/about.

A recent insightful article highlighted Megan Knobloch Geilman’s artwork as epitomizing a movement the author labeled “Weird Mormon Art.”[1] Geilman, while fully embracing the strangeness of her art, prefers the term “theological realism.” Her phrase nicely evokes the literary and art style of magical realism, which places fantastical objects or events in a real-world setting. Yet, an important distinction must be made because although Geilman’s work relies on meticulously arranged quotidian objects to create theologically rich scenes, there is nothing fantastic about it. While much of “Weird Mormon Art” is characterized by a kind of tongue-in-cheek playfulness, Geilman’s art is gravely serious. Her work is not peculiar simply for the sake of quirkiness or for anti-status-quo positioning, but instead strives for something more.

Geilman tackles the most fundamental human questions head-on. Her art is informed, questioning, and thoughtful—and always deeply devotional. In this vein, her Symbola Salvatoris series considers the relationship between human beings and God. Each of the eight pieces not only includes a symbol of the Savior but also asks viewers to consider how they can come to know God through their own experiences and devotional practice.

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Call for Applicants: National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute: “Mormonism and Mexico”

By December 6, 2021



Applications are now open for the NEH Summer Institute Mormonism and Mexico: A Case Study in Religion and Borderlands

Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA invites scholars and educators to examine the history of Mormonism and Mexico as a case study to explore the impact of borders and migration on religious change in the modern world.

Dates: June 27-28, 2022 (virtual), July 1-8, 2022 (residential), July 18-22, 2022 (virtual)
Applyhttps://mormonstudies.cgu.edu/events/neh-summer-institutes-program/
Application Deadline: March 1, 2022
Stipend: $2,850

This institute will encourage its participants to think about the intertwined history of Mexico and the various churches that make up the Mormon tradition as a means to explore deeper questions about borders and religion.We will explore how political and cultural borders between the United States and Mexico have transformed Mormonism, and in turn how Mormonism has provided residents of both nations a way to transcend those borders through its reinvention.

In so doing, the institute will be of interest to scholars in a number of disciplines: historians, students of religious studies and Latinx students, scholars of the American West, cultural pluralism, and migration. The institute focuses on a religious tradition that has been absent from most borderlands and Latinx religious studies, but whose presence in Mexico and the American West is notable. Just so, it will encourage scholars of religion in the United States and of Mormonism in particular to consider issues of globalization and borderlands.

The institute, intended for 25 college and university teachers, will be held June 27-28, July 1-8, and July 18-22, 2022. Approximately half of the institute will be held at Claremont Graduate University and half remotely via Zoom. While in person, attendees will take advantage of the resources of Claremont’s Honnold Library, including the Gomez Collection on Mexican Mormon History, visit a Mormon Spanish-language service and the Cheech Marin Center For Chicano Art, Culture and History, and visit with a number of visiting scholars and speakers.

Each participant will be expected to develop a project, either research, pedagogical, or having to do with public history.

The institute will be directed by Matthew Bowman, Daniel Ramirez, and Caroline Kline.

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NEH seal

Faculty position in Latter-day Saint/Mormon Studies at The Graduate Theological Union (GTU)

By November 11, 2021




Located in Berkeley, California, the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) is the largest and most
diverse partnership of seminaries and graduate schools in the United States, pursuin
interreligious collaboration in teaching, research, ministry, and service. Since its founding in
1962, the GTU has produced thousands of alumni who teach at eminent universities and
seminaries, lead and work in a broad variety of arenas – cultural, economic, inter-religious, nonprofit
and political – to achieve the greatest good.

PRIMARY POSITION PURPOSE AND EXPECTATIONS: In concert with the Bay Area Latter-day
Saint/Mormon Studies Council, GTU invites applications for a two-year term as Assistant
Professor of Latter-day Saint/Mormon Studies. This appointment will begin July 1, 2022, and
end on June 30, 2024, with the possibility of renewal. We seek an exceptional teacher-scholar
with interests that include, but are not restricted to, Latter-day Saint/Mormon Studies,
including the background, origins and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
and the American Restoration movement out of which it emerged, Latter-day Saint scriptural
texts, Latter-day Saint/Mormon culture, and the global church.

Candidates should be conversant with relevant methodologies and theories, demonstrate
strong facility with biblical and restoration scriptures, and be able to position Latter-day
Saint/Mormon Studies within the Judeo-Christian tradition and American Religious history.
The successful candidate will work under the supervision of the Academic Dean and in concert
with the GTU Director of Latter-day Saint/Mormon Studies and the Bay Area Mormon Studies
Council. Duties include teaching two classes or their equivalent per semester, supporting the
general GTU academic program, working with other GTU centers and affiliates, cooperating
with other Mormon Studies Centers, and supporting the objectives and activities of the Bay
Area Mormon Studies Council. It is expected that candidates will have a devotional grounding
in the Latter-day Saint tradition.

GTU is committed to a diversified faculty. Persons from groups underrepresented in the
American academy are especially encouraged to apply.

The application deadline is January 7, 2022. Applicants should send application materials
electronically to the office of the GTU dean, in care of Sabrina Kennedy, skennedy@gtu.edu.
Materials should include a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, and three letters of
recommendation. For further questions on the position, please contact Interim Dean and VP for
Academic Affairs, Elizabeth Peña, epena@gtu.edu.

The Graduate Theological Union is an Equal Opportunity Employer.


Workshop: Latter-day Saint Philosophy Project

By June 23, 2021


Inaugural Latter-day Saint Philosophy Project Workshop

Conference Venue:

Brigham Young University, United States

Details

Call for Latter-day Saint Philosophy Incubator Workshop

We invite submission of abstracts for a hybrid workshop on any aspect of philosophy that engages with the Latter-day Saint faith. Each accepted speaker will give a 15-minute presentation of their work in progress, followed by a 25-30 minute question-and-answer session. The goal of this workshop is to help develop early-stage ideas into publishable form. We expect that submitted abstracts are for projects in this early stage of development, and hope the workshop can serve the authors in their aim to bring their ideas to fruition.

Submissions are open to all, but those by early career researchers and those developing ideas in underexplored areas of Latter-day Saint philosophy are especially welcome. Submissions may be sent to ldsphilosophyproject@gmail.com. They should be no longer than 500 words, prepared for blind review, and accompanied by a title page including author information. Abstracts should be submitted by July 14th, 2021, 11:59 PM Eastern Time. Accepted speakers will be notified by August 1st, 2021.

The conference will be held on Sept 17-18, 2021 at Brigham Young University.  We will accommodate speakers whose abstracts have been selected but cannot attend in person by enabling zoom presentations. Those with questions may contact us at ldsphilosophyproject@gmail.com.


Mormonism, White Supremacy, Joanna Brooks, and Telling Stories

By June 19, 2020


Joanna Brooks, Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)

I

Like her earlier volume edited with Gina Colvin, Decolonizing Mormonism (University of Utah, 2018), Joanna Brooks’s new Mormonism and White Supremacy is an exhortation as much as it is an academic work. Both both books ask us to consider where the lines between academic analysis and moral analysis exactly lie. Brooks discards the traditional pretense of academic objectivity, the stentorian presumption of omniscience that echoes through the pages of most university-published tomes.

To that end this book will probably be most comprehensible to Latter-day Saint audiences, and Brooks probably intends that. Her book moves quickly through the history of the tradition and assumes some familiarity on the reader’s part with phrases like “First Presidency” and “John Taylor.” Brooks inserts herself into the narrative, a product as well as an analyst of the community she writes about. Indeed, in a real sense this book is a plea to that community. Brooks’s first lines testify to that: “This book seeks to instigate soul-searching,” she declares, “academic, institutional, and personal.” (1)

She writes as an anguished Mormon. She wants her fellow Saints to mourn with those that mourn. She believes that though her tradition has enabled such pain, its Christian roots also equip it to be particularly convicted by the reality of pain and particularly prepared to pursue its alleviation. Brooks not only describes what Christian theology is—she also declares what Christian theology should be quite straightforwardly. A “robust Christian conceptualization of sin would hold that it is a deadly but structuring condition of mortality, just as racism is a deadly but structuring condition of life in the United States.” (5)

Is this unusual for a book about history published by Oxford University Press? In some ways. As American academia institutionalized and professionalized, gradually academics, like journalists, came to see themselves as neutral arbiters, and though every introductory graduate course in the humanities solemnly counsels graduate students that objectivity is impossible, most books (at least in the discipline of history) tend to avoid personalizing the narrative. There is, though, a range of newer scholarship pressing back against this, forcing us to consider ourselves as authors and to perceive the public and political implications of our work. This is probably a good thing.

II

Though Brooks’s prose has a light touch a fair amount of theory drifts through the book. This means while it seems to be written for a Mormon audience it will also be most easily digested by those with at least some familiarity with academic theory about race. That choice may be dangerous, given Brooks’s intentions. But this is still a compelling story about the enactment of a grim tautology. Early Mormons were mostly white people who took for granted their whiteness—an identity then as now with uncertain borders that white Mormons among many others have contributed to defining and clarifying as, for the most part, themselves. Because they were white they believed the church they founded also to be white—if only implicitly.

It is important to recognize that while many Americans imagine “racism” in terms of making conscious choices that reflect disdain for people of other backgrounds, a more useful conceptualization of the term acknowledges that is as much or more about assumption, conditioning, structure and possibility as it is about individual animus or aggressive hate. Therefore, white Mormons simply by default assumed the church’s structures and cosmology to coincide with the racial distinctions they understood to exist on earth. Hence as they created their church they also created, to some extent, what whiteness meant.

And hence, white Mormons like many other white Christians imputed those distinctions onto the hierarchies of eternity, lending the racial structures they believed to exist the weight of divine sanction. As white Mormons teased out their theologies—of sealing, of divinization, of temple worship and priesthood—they nearly always stumbled over people they understood to be not white. These people were to them theoretical problems, needing theological explanation and a place to be slotted into their unfolding maps of heaven. That process defined what it meant to be white in the context of this religion, but it also gave white supremacy on earth divine sanction and justification. By the twentieth century when questioned about its existence within their church, Mormons could simply point to God.

Brooks focuses here primarily upon “whiteness” and “blackness” as categories of identity in white Mormons’ imagination. There are, of course, any number of other racial identities that might play a part in this story. There are also many, many elements co-constitutive with racial identity that Brooks does not touch upon; in particular I think of the co-formation of race and class, as the economic aspects of identity are often overlooked in academic work on Mormonism and race, or religion and race more generally. But Brooks stays focused on the simple fact of white supremacy itself, and how Mormons came to reify it, and that relentlessness gives the book the moral power of a jeremiad.

III

Structurally and conceptually, this book reminds me of Colleen McDannell’s recent Sister Saints (Oxford, 2018). Like that book, this one retells a familiar history from a new angle. We are acquainted with most of Brooks’ characters: they are high church leaders, intellectuals, and activists. She has not really uncovered any stories that historians did not already know. But she has told them in a new way, viewed them through the lens of theory, and showed us new shadows that these people cast, or new light that they threw.

So, like McDannell, her book points to the possibility of stories told from other perspectives—and indeed, Brooks exhorts her Latter-day Saint readers to perceive that possibility, to be aware of other stories, and to do what they can to elevate them. Her introduction and conclusion call upon her Latter-day Saint readers to plumb their tradition in order to confront the challenge. Indeed, one comes away from Brooks’s book with the impression that though this tradition has caused such pain, the Christian resources it has within it might enable believers to be particularly attuned to suffering, particularly equipped for repentance, and particularly capable of imagining what a just and Zion society might look like.

Though Brooks’s subjects often act in ways most Americans today would find distressing, Brooks warns us not to be distracted. She does not “wish to impugn the character of individuals. Rather my goal is to assess how systems of inequality take shape through everyday conduct and choices, policies, laws, and theologies, so that we have a better sense of how to dismantle them.” (17)

Stories point us past themselves toward systems. Individuals make decisions circumscribed by institutions. The real task ahead is not simply to rage at the stories that we have been told or to condemn those who enact injustice. The real task ahead is to write new stories and raise new generations, and hence to build new systems. That task is what this book helps us—Mormons and academics alike—to imagine.

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Reassessing the Classics: Armand Mauss’s THE ANGEL AND THE BEEHIVE (part 3 of 3)

By October 17, 2019


For the past several days, the Juvenile Instructor has examined the work of the sociologist Armand Mauss, a pioneering figure in Mormon studies, under the banner of our occasional series “Reassessing the Classics.” This is the last of three posts dealing with Mauss’s landmark 1994 book THE ANGEL AND THE BEEHIVE: THE MORMON STRUGGLE WITH ASSIMILATION (University of Illinois Press). I wrote it.

I first encountered The Angel and the Beehive in the early years of my graduate school training—not in readings for a course or recommendations from a professor, but in a way far more glancing and tangential (as so many of the best things in academic research develop). I was working on a project about miracles in Mormonism, and it suddenly seemed as though it would be useful to me to know whether or not Mormons commonly talked about such things in the regular monthly testimony meetings held in every Mormon congregation.

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Reassessing the Classics: Armand Mauss’s THE ANGEL AND THE BEEHIVE (part 2 of 3)

By October 16, 2019


For the next several days, the Juvenile Instructor will examine the work of the sociologist Armand Mauss, a pioneering figure in Mormon studies, under the banner of our occasional series “Reassessing the Classics.” For the next three days, several scholars will examine Mauss’s landmark 1994 book THE ANGEL AND THE BEEHIVE: THE MORMON STRUGGLE WITH ASSIMILATION (University of Illinois Press). The first of these went up Monday, October 14. Today, Jana Riess, author of many well-regarded books on Mormonism, including the important THE NEXT MORMONS: HOW MILLENNIALS ARE CHANGING THE LDS CHURCH (Oxford, 2019).

Recently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unveiled the first peek at its new global youth program, which will provide activities and instruction for Saints from ages 8 to 18. As I have been reading about the new initiative, one thought kept going through my mind: Is this a sign of retrenchment or assimilation?*

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Reassessing the Classics: Armand Mauss’s THE ANGEL AND THE BEEHIVE (part 1 of 3)

By October 15, 2019


For the next several days, the Juvenile Instructor will examine the work of the sociologist Armand Mauss, a pioneering figure in Mormon studies, under the banner of our occasional series “Reassessing the Classics.” For the next three days, several scholars will examine Mauss’s landmark 1994 book THE ANGEL AND THE BEEHIVE: THE MORMON STRUGGLE WITH ASSIMILATION (University of Illinois Press). First: Gary and Gordon Shepherd, sociologists in their own right and the authors of a number of well-regarded works in Mormon studies, including A KINGDOM TRANSFORMED: EARLY MORMONISM AND THE MODERN LDS CHURCH (2nd edition, University of Utah Press, 2015).

            Armand Mauss’s The Angel and The Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation was published in 1994 by the University of Illinois Press.  Angel and the Beehive quickly became a landmark work in Mormon studies that continues to be referenced by scholars of contemporary Mormonism to this day.  This was Armand’s first, full-fledged book—one that had been simmering on the backburner of his mind for 25 years.  In it, Armand applied the sociological notion of assimilation and the economics notion of retrenchment to show how the late 20th Century LDS Church was attempting to apply the brakes to liberalizing compromises in belief and practice that had been made in the early and middle decades of the 20th Century. 

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Book Review: Jake Johnson, MORMONS, MUSICAL THEATER, AND BELONGING IN AMERICA (Illinois, 2019)

By August 15, 2019


Once I wrote this sentence: “The musical Saturday’s Warrior might well be the most influential theological text within the church since Bruce R. McConkie’s strikingly assertive 1958 Mormon Doctrine.” At the time I stared at the line on my computer and then deleted them. It felt like the claim needed more unpacking that I was in a position to do at the moment. Thankfully, Jake Johnson has stepped forward to do that work. Here is a creative and often insightful reading of Mormon popular culture, a topic that certainly deserves this sort of attention.

Johnson’s argument is that musical theater has been particularly influential within the LDS church for two reasons.

First, Mormons embrace what Johnson calls a “theology of voice.” The spoken word is particularly influential among church members, he claims, because of the church’s emphasis upon prophecy. “Mormonism’s loquacious God,” says Johnson, delegates the power of his voice. (14) This phenomenon, which Mormon theologians have called “divine investiture,” dates back as far as Joseph Smith’s First Vision, in which God appointed Jesus to speak for him, and Jesus in turn made Joseph Smith a prophet. Smith then delegated that power to other authoritative figures. Though Johnson does not unpack this unfolding of prophecy as thoroughly as he might, this ecclesiology of delegation and appointment is for him preeminently an act of speech. Authority is expressed through echoing the language and even verbal style (that is, the voice) of those in authority, as David Knowlton has observed of the vocal patterns of the LDS testimony meeting.

This is, I think, a smart argument, and in an odd way I think it reveals the faith’s rootedness in American Protestantism, whose reliance on Scripture is always in an uneasy embrace with the verbal word of the preacher. Protestants produced innumerable manuals of preaching produced in nineteenth century America, and the ways in which they sought to reconcile the authority of the written word with the mass appeal of the verbal word are strikingly similar to the tensions of authority Johnson sees within Joseph Smith’s nascent movement. For instance, Johnson cites the famous minister Henry Ward Beecher, who dismissed the theater as “garish” and “buffoonery.” (58) But of course, Beecher was famous precisely for his skill in preaching, his theatrical, imposing presence behind the pulpit, and he had many ideas about the relationship between scripture, verbalization, and truth (most tending toward the liberal).

Johnson traces this impulse toward speech and investiture through Mormon history, spending much of his time with the famous “transfiguration” of Brigham Young in August 1844, at which Young, speaking to the gathered and confused faithful in the wake of the assassination of Joseph Smith, was said to have taken on the image and voice of Smith. For Johnson, this was an act of mimicry. Young was, as Johnson notes, known for love of acting and the theater, and Johnson believes he consciously took on Smith’s voice and affect in an attempt to demonstrate his loyalty and take on the mantle of the fallen prophet.

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Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought announces a new editor

By August 8, 2019


The Dialogue Foundation’s Board of Directors is pleased to announce that Taylor Petrey, Associate Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College, has been appointed the next editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

Petrey holds a BA in philosophy and religion from Pace University, and both an MTS  and a Th.D. degree from Harvard Divinity School in New Testament and Early Christianity. He joined the faculty of Kalamazoo College in 2010 and served as the Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality program from 2012 through 2016. He is currently chair of the Religion Department.

Petrey is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on Mormonism, gender, sexuality, and early Christian thought. His essay “Toward a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology” received Dialogues “Best Article” award in 2011 and has become one of the most downloaded and cited articles in the journal’s history.

“We are very excited that Taylor has agreed to become our next editor, said Dialogue Board chair Michael Austin. “He brings a profound understanding of some of the most crucial issues in Mormon Studies today–issues surrounding gender and sexuality, international Mormonism, interfaith connections, and inclusive theology. And he also understands what it takes to do academic publishing in the information age.”

Under Petrey’s leadership, Dialogue will enter its 54th year of publishing articles, personal essays, fiction, poetry, and sermons relating to the Mormon experience. Dialogue began publication in 1966 with Eugene England as its founding editor. Since that time, the journal has published four issues a year. 

In 2018, Dialogue moved the electronic version of its journal from a subscription-supported to a donor-supported publication model. All of its content is now free on the Internet from the moment of its publication. In 2020, Dialogue will begin partnering with the University of Illinois Press to produce the print edition of the journal and will make all of its past issues available through JSTOR and other electronic databases. 

“This is an exciting time for academic journals generally,” said BYU History Professor Rebecca de Schweinitz, a Dialogue Board member who co-chaired the search committee that recommended Petrey for the editorship. “And it is an especially exciting time for Mormon Studies. We need somebody at the helm who understands both the new audiences that have emerged and the new technologies needed to reach them. Taylor is an exemplary scholar with a deep understanding of the modern publishing world.” 

“I am thrilled to join Dialogue and to be a part of the legacy of this great journal,” says Petrey. “This journal reflects and shapes the best of Latter-day Saint thought, culture, and scholarship and I can’t wait to embark on the next phase of the LDS tradition’s premier intellectual and literary venue.” 

Petrey will replace Boyd Petersen, who has been Dialogue’s editor since 2016. Please join us in welcoming him to the team.  We appreciate your continued support of the journal.

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