Patrick Mason answers your questions

Thanks to Matt and everyone at JI for this opportunity.

For those of us who are interested in Mormon history, particularly in graduate school or the early years of our academic careers, the question of how to position oneself is always a vexed one. I was one who very consciously did NOT want to write a ?Mormon dissertation.? That?s why I chose a comparative topic: violence against religious minority groups in the postbellum South. Mormons were one of these groups, but at the time of my dissertation proposal I thought they would represent only a minor aspect of the study. I was as surprised as anyone when they turned out to be the best part of the story, and got twice the coverage in the dissertation and eventually became the centerpiece of my book.

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Scholarly Inquiry: Patrick Mason

Our next Scholarly Inquiry will be with Patrick Mason, who will in the fall assume the Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. We invite you to submit questions for Patrick – on his research, present and past, on his work at Notre Dame, and of course, on the Hunter Chair, below; answers will soon be forthcoming.

Patrick Mason is currently Research Associate Professor at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and Associate Director for Research of a multi-year research initiative called ?Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.? In the fall he will assume his new duties as Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.

His new book is The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has also published articles on topics including the history of Utah state legislation against interracial marriage, anti-Jewish violence in the South, the role of religion in the African American protest tradition, the possibilities of Mormon peacebuilding, and most recently on theodemocracy in 19th-century Mormonism.

Reassessing: The Refiner?s Fire: the making of Mormon cosmology, 1644-1844

It’s my opinion that the further we get from the publication of John Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire, a wildly inventive examination of Mormon origins through the lens of various esoteric European -isms (including occultism, the quest for hidden and often mysterical knowledge;  hermeticism, a particular brand of the occult supposedly derived from ancient Egypt and for Brooke basically a restorationist concept that sought to regain Adam’s access to God, and the non -ism alchemy, or the transformation of the mundane into the exalted) the more interesting a book it seems. 

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How Thomas Aquinas?s Theory Of Scripture Explains Why Jimmer Fredette Is The Hinge On Which Modern Mormonism Pivots

(Part whatever of my ongoing investigation into the cultural intersections of religion and basketball; part I, on the intertwining cultural meanings of Mormonism and the Utah Jazz, can be found here; part II, a review of the religious pilgrimage of Cleveland Cavaliers bit player Lance Allred, here; part III, on the Puritan antecedents of LeBron James nemesis Dan Gilbert, here.)

The author of Holy Scripture is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal.   That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it.    Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division. For as the Apostle says (Hebrews 10:1) the Old Law is a figure of the New Law, and Dionysius says [Coel. Hier. i] “the New Law itself is a figure of future glory.” Again, in the New Law, whatever our Head has done is a type of what we ought to do. Therefore, so far as the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what we ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify what relates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense.

– Thomas Aquinas,Summa Theologica 1.1.10.

Like Walt Whitman, and Holy Scripture properly understood, Jimmer Fredette contains multitudes. 

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From the Archives: “Mormonism in New York and Utah.”

From Evangelical Christendom 12 (1870), 27.

Evangelical Christendom, published out of London, was the official journal of the World Evangelical Alliance, organized in Britain in 1846 to coordinate and promote evangelical mission work around the globe.  (An American affiliate was organized in New York City in  1847.) The journal was annual, but also comprehensive; routinely hundreds of pages long, containing book reviews, conference reports, missionary dispatches from around the globe, and a section entitled “Foreign Intelligencer,” made up of dispatches from countries around the world on the state of evangelical religion.   “Mormonism in New York and Utah” is one of these.

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Joseph Smith and Matthew Philip Gill: the dynamics of Mormon schism

Jacob Baker and I discovered the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ while Bushman summer fellows in 2007.    We spent a lot of time kicking back and forth analysis of this most interesting schism group, and organized an MHA panel around them in 2008.    And, today, the turgid pace of academic publishing has finally reached consummation, and the paper I wrote that summer has been published in the current issue of Nova Religio 14:3 (February 2011) 42-63.

The Latter Day Church is fascinating in part because of how skillfully Matthew Philip Gill engages in prophetic mimesis, replicating the experiences and language of Joseph Smith to create himself as Smith’s heir, calling to repentance the failed church of Salt Lake City and promising a re-invigorated version of Mormon spirituality – one which both invokes Joseph Smith’s charisma anew, but which also rewrites the sacred history of Mormonism in ways that follow the cultural accommodations the LDS church has made.   Gill’s movement is neither sectarian – which seeks to heighten tension with Western culture – nor a church movement – one which seeks to lessen that tension.  Rather, scholars like Armand Mauss and Thomas O’Dea have observed that the LDS Church itself seems to combine both of these impulses, oscillating back and forth along a spectrum of resistance, tension, and accommodation.  Just so, the Latter Day Church of Christ itself seeks to heighten both resistance and accommodation – rejecting, for instance, evidence that Joseph Smith ever practiced polygamy and embracing whole-heartedly the LDS church’s sentimental emphasis upon the family, but also heightening the sort of radical spiritual claims which have become routinized in American Mormonism.   Gill, after all, has had visionary experiences of all the figures Joseph Smith claimed to have encountered, adding a resurrected Joseph himself into the bargain.   As his father (and first counselor) asks derisively of the LDS Church, “We have again an era of prophets.  Proper prophets.  Not people who are just put into position and over time get to be a prophet . . . Where?s the revelation in that?”    And such is a new church born.

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Q&A with Stephen C. Taysom, author of Shakers, Mormons and Religious Worlds: conflicting visions, contested boundaries (part II)

Below is part II of our q&a with Stephen C. Taysom.

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Updated Call for Papers: 3rd Biennial Faith and Knowledge Conference (Update, December 8: Registration Open)

The Intellectual Prospects for Mormonism?: The Third Biennial Faith and Knowledge Conference for LDS Graduate Students in Religion
Duke University
February 11-12, 2011

The Faith and Knowledge conference series was established in 2006 to bring together LDS graduate students and young faculty in religious studies and related disciplines in order to explore the intellectual interactions between religious faith and scholarship.  In past conferences, graduate students have been invited to reflect upon aspects of their own   intellectual reconciliations?or their failures to do so?between church and academy, and to offer fruitful solutions to fellow students undergoing similar intellectual journeys.

In keeping with these past objectives, we invite graduate students in religious studies and related disciplines working on issues related to religion (including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, ethics, history, and others) to consider Mormonism?s prospects. What intellectual and ethical issues do Mormons now face in the academy and in the intellectual world generally?  What are Mormonism?s prospects for development, reconciliation, or heightened conflict?

The conference will feature a keynote address by Grant Hardy, author of Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader?s Guide.

Papers should be brief, pointed comments of ten to fifteen minutes reflecting the author?s experience and designed to serve as starting points for discussion.

Travel and accommodations subsidies will be available for those who contribute papers.

The deadline for paper proposals has been extended to October 15, 2010. Short proposals (no more than 250 words) should be sent to Ariel Bybee Laughton ( ariel.laughton@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).  Presenters will be notified by December 1, 2010.

Richard Bushman
Jason Combs
Ariel Bybee Laughton
Seth Payne
Taylor Petrey

UPDATE:

The upcoming Faith and Knowledge conference for graduate students in Religious Studies is now accepting participant registration for those not giving papers.  The 2011 conference schedule should soon be finalized and made available to those who register.  In the past, qualified registrants have been eligible for a free hotel room for the duration of the conference in order to make it easier for graduate students to attend.  The $25 registration fee helps pay for the conference expenses.  Register here.

Q&A with Stephen C. Taysom, author of Shakers, Mormons and Religious Worlds: conflicting visions, contested boundaries (part I)

Over the past two months, Matt Bowman and Steve Taysom have had an ongoing dialogue about Taysom’s new book, in part in response to your questions.  Part I is below; part II will come Thursday.

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Welcome, Max

We’re pleased to announce that Max Mueller has agreed to join the permanent cast of the Juvenile Instructor. His name shall soon materialize on the sidebar. Again, with new and improved plaudits and laud, his bio:

Max Perry Mueller is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Harvard University, focusing on nineteenth century Mormonism and African American religious history. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.) and Carleton College. His current research project involves early black Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake. He is excited to find interlocutors on all things Mormon, especially issues of race in the Restored Church (to which, quoting Booker T. Washington following his own 1913 visit to Utah, he has ?not yet converted?).