The Conversion of Parley Pratt; or, the patterns of Mormon piety

I.
First, definitions.

(And already, you know this will be long.)

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Here comes Brittany.

Please welcome our new guest blogger.

Brittany has an MA in Victorian Studies from the University of Leicester (U.K.) and BA in Humanities from BYU. She takes special interest in nineteenth-century life writings (diaries, autobiographies, correspondence) and Utah women’s history. Brittany is currently editing the life writings of Ruth May Fox, which will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2010. She works at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City and likes to do fun stuff–especially if it involves the outdoors, travel, literature, and being with friends and fam. And Red Robin hamburgers.

The FLDS rally at the Salt Lake Courthouse, July 29, 2009

This morning, several hundred members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Salt Lake City’s Matheson Courthouse and on the lawn of the Salt Lake City and County Building across the street to express their dismay that District Judge Denise Lindberg was considering ordering the United Effort Plan trust, which contains a great deal of church property, dismantled and sold.

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MHA 2010: Call For Papers

Mormon History Association
2010 Independence Missouri Conference
Call for Papers
The Home and the Homeland:
Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions

The forty-fifth annual conference of the Mormon History Association will be held May 27-30, 2010, at the Kansas City Sports Complex Hotel in Kansas City, MO. It has been twenty-five years since the last MHA conference was held in Missouri. The 2010 theme, ?The Home and the Homeland: Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions? recognizes the family as a central social and religious institution within Mormon traditions.

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Book Review: Lance Allred?s Longshot: the adventures of a deaf fundamentalist Mormon kid and his journey to the NBA (HarperCollins, 2009): A pilgrim?s progress

I have in the past devoted significant wordiage to the subtle intersections between the religiocultural paradoxes of the Wasatch Front, the deeper ideologies of the Mormon mind, and pro basketball. These arguments, one hopes, have made the world such a place that the reasons why Lance Allred’s new book should be immediately embraced by all students of such things are always already self-evident. But in case they are not, I here offer a few lines of explication.

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The guest blogging exploits of Jacob B begin now

This summer the JI hopes to host a number of fascinating and informative guest bloggers; our first is Jacob Baker, who blogs normally here and who also eats a mean calzone.

Jacob is a PhD student in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. He has published essays on Mormon theology, philosophy, and history in Dialogue and Element: The Journal for the Society of Mormon Philosophy and Theology and is currently working as editor of a collection of essays by Mormon and non-Mormon scholars on Mormon philosophy and theology (somehow he’ll need to learn write and care about non-Mormon topics if he is ever to get a job). Though ridiculously ignorant of history and historiographical methodology, he feels honored to be a former Bushman fellow (2007) and sit in wonderment and awe at the feet of Matt B., Stan T., and David G. (Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens were pretty good too). Most importantly, he he is married to the former Amanda Nielson and has 3 children.

The JI reviews the Church History Library and Archives

Over the past week, four contributors to the Juvenile Instructor have toured, given tours, researched in, peered through the windows of, and otherwise participated in the opening of the new LDS Church History Library and Archives. Their experiences, ruminations, and ponderables are below.

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Revisiting: Mormonism in Transition: a history of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930

This post inaugurates a new series at the Juvenile Instructor, featuring brief conversations reassessing the significance of major works of Mormon history.

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Sacred Space at BYU, June 3, 2009: Conference and metaconference

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There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this conference, and every inch of it deserved. Not a cubic zirconium among the presentations, and more than one absolute diamond (Laurie Maffly-Kipp on preparation; Richard Cohen on the Hebrew temple). This was an impressive and a diverse kaleidoscope, and the most interesting thing was the way, one after another, each speaker demonstrated the point Jeanne Halgren Kilde made – that talking about sacred space, at its essence, is talking about the way we experience religion. Space matters because people do things in it.

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Teaching Joseph Smith

I’m teaching a course this semester called “Prophecy in American History.”   We’re examining particularly the interaction between prophetic figures and the society around them.  How did they use religion to critique, affirm, or offer alternatives to the world they lived in?   In what ways does religion shape what it means to be an American, and vice versa?  After an introductory class in which we read Max Weber, Rodney Stark, Anthony Wallace, and Walter Brueggemann on the nature of prophecy, we have turned our attention to a series of American prophets.   We began with Anne Hutchinson; next week we’ll discuss Nat Turner.

The week following, we’ll visit Joseph Smith.

What I’ve reproduced below is the blog entry that I’ll post the night after the Nat Turner course, introducing the students to the readings they will do for Smith.

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