Introduction to Religious “Practice” Month at the JI

The study of American religion ain’t what it used to be. Not so many decades ago, most scholars had a rather, shall we say, circumscribed view of what it meant to do religious history. Most were preoccupied with the development of religious institutions (in other words, white Protestant churches), with the elite leaders who led those institutions, and sometimes with the formal theological agendas that those leaders articulated. All of those conventions, however, have been overturned more or less recently, and scholarship today is much more inclusive, more democratic, and more attuned to dimensions of the human experience. Much of the old model, as we now can clearly see, rested on Protestant notions about the nature of what constituted “religion” to begin with, and so the process of revision has entailed coming to grips with these subtending assumptions.

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Book Review: All That Was Promised: The St. George Temple and the Unfolding of the Restoration

Blaine M. Yorgason, Richard A. Schmutz, and Douglas D. Alder, All That Was Promised: The St. George Temple and the Unfolding of the Restoration (SLC: Deseret Book, 2013). 348 pp.

Those who have been to St. George, Utah, know that the LDS temple there is something of a spectacle. Blindingly white against the red-rock bluffs that surround it, the contrast is startling enough that it seems to demand some kind of compelling explanation. St. George is now flourishing as Utah’s warm-weather mecca, but for generations it was a quiet and dusty desert outpost like many others throughout the state. Then, the incongruity must have been even more glaring. Why build a temple of worship at such an early date and in such remote place? To what purpose? And, retrospectively, to what effect?

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

A diverse and plentiful array of material in this edition of Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup. Take a look at the following morsels:

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Journal Overview: BYU Studies Quarterly 52:4 (Winter 2013-14)

If you subscribe to BYU Studies Quartely like I do, you?ll know that the latest issue is no longer hot off the press. Not even warm, really. Mine has been lying around for a while, clamoring for recognition, languishing for want of care. Without further neglect, then, the JI brings you another content overview for BYUSQ 52:4. Three historical articles in the issue may be of interest to JI’s readers:

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Journal Overview: BYU Studies Quarterly 52:3 (Fall 2013)

The Fall 2013 issue of BYU Studies Quarterly recently hit the web and print subscribers? mailboxes, which means that it?s time for another quick journal content overview for JI?s readers. All the usual caveats apply?that is, these summaries are meant to whet your appetite, but for the full effect you?ll want to visit the pieces and their arguments in their totality. In this issue of BYUSQ, four original articles and other tidbits are on offer.

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Bricks in Nauvoo; or, A Sleepover at Willard Richards? House

The Ubiquitious Nauvoo Brick Souvenir

By necessity, early Mormons were builders. It’s easy to forget, retrospectively, how much sheer labor went into the communities that early Latter-day Saints, time and again, built from the ground up. Temple building is one of the more conspicuous form of construction activity, but with each relocation Latter-day Saints also faced anew the more mundane labors of improving land, building homes, outbuildings, ditches and canals, fences, roads–in other words, of generating a basic domestic and civic infrastructure. Not unlike many other roving families in early America, Mormons continually reconstructed their material world from the ground up.

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup (09.15.2013)

Welcome to this installment of Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup!

To the news:

This week brings formal tidings from the University of Virginia of Kathleen Flake?s appointment as the inaugural Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies in UVA?s Department of Religious Studies, a development that we celebrated and discussed with her a week ago. The news must have piqued some broader interest as well, because the appointment also was noted in the New York Times.

Some items of interfaith and ecumenical interest. At the Washington Times, Mark Kellner highlighted the recent work of Stephen H. Webb, until recently a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. Webb?s new book Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn From the Latter-day Saints, which is now available from Oxford University Press, professes to take ?Mormon theology seriously from an outsider’s perspective, arguing persuasively that Mormons are a part of the Christian family tree, and that their doctrine offers valuable insights and alternatives to traditional Christianity.? It?ll be interesting to see whether the book is a bombshell in the Christian community. Meanwhile, the Deseret News drew attention this week to comments of Rt. Rev. Scott B. Hayashi, Episcopal Bishop of Utah, condemning ?anti-Mormon humor.?

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Journal Overview: BYU Studies Quarterly 52:2 (Summer 2013)

Not long ago BYU Studies Quarterly rolled out its summer issue, and it?s time for a quick overview of the historical articles there. For those unfamiliar with the journal, BYUSQ has been running under the auspices of BYU since 1959, long enough to claim to be ?the original Mormon Studies journal.? (Until April 2012, the journal ran under the title of BYU Studies.) Currently under the editorship of Jack W. Welch, the journal is interdisciplinary and its purposes run parallel to those of BYU: the journal aims to be ?faithful and scholarly throughout, harmonizing wherever possible the intellectual and the spiritual on subjects of interest to Latter-day Saints and to scholars studying the Latter-day Saint experience.?

The Summer 2013 issue offers several articles that will interest JI?s readers. In the leadoff article, Richard Bennett offers a sequel to his earlier piece ??Line Upon Line, Precept Upon Precept?: Reflections on the 1877 Commencement of the Performance of the Endowments and Sealings for the Dead,? BYU Studies 44, no. 3 (2005): 38-77. In that article, Bennett emphasized the completion of the St. George Temple as a ?watershed moment in the history of the development of modern Mormon temple work.? The article outlined the expansion of certain forms of temple work as the temple was completed, and characterized the period as highly formative for Mormon religious thought and practice.

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“Free Toleration and Equal Privileges in this City”: Religious Freedom in Mormon Nauvoo

Several years ago I reviewed David Sehat?s then-new book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Published in 2011, the book was intended as a corrective to what Sehat characterized as the conventional idea that Americans celebrate an unbroken and unblemished tradition of religious liberty.  Demonstrating that America?s record of toleration and freedom isn?t flawless, Sehat chronicled many episodes of religious discrimination during the nineteenth century Although, as many revisionist texts do, Sehat?s book may have overcorrected, he introduced an important new awareness of the historical reality of not only religious persecution, but subtler forms of establishment coercion that existed in the land of the free during the nineteenth century. Mormons were, quite naturally, a constituency of Sehat?s work, though most of his focus was elsewhere. I expressed in that post my opinion that Mormonism presents a natural point of entry for the study of religious freedom in America. Because of their controversial practice of polygamy and their broad assumption of political autonomy, Mormons were at the center of much national debate over the boundaries of religious freedom in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and this something that scholars like Kathleen Flake, Sarah Barringer Gordon, and now Leigh Eric Schmidt have worked on in various ways. [1] Relatively less has been said, though, about how early Mormons themselves conceived and understood religious liberty. How did this eminently democratic idea, resting on a premise of ideological pluralism, square with Mormon political theology?

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John Wesley Jones’s Pantoscope of California, Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons (1852)

Jones’s Great Pantoscope of California. Broadside, ca. 1852 from Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (Yale UP, 2002), 50.

Another post in the Mormonism’s Many Images series.

In late 1852 and 1853, a new and dazzling show debuted on the stages of Boston and New York. Playing to eager audiences, including the ?elite and intellectual,? John Wesley Jones?s Pantoscope of California. Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons became something of a sensation, running briskly for more than a year and garnering almost uniform praise from critics. It was, an advertisement boasted, the ?LARGEST PAINTING IN THE WORLD,? produced at the astronomical cost of $40,000. Audiences were thrilled by its stunning reproductive detail of the landscape; indeed, Jones claimed that his work was empirical, it was based on 1,500 newfangled daguerreotype images of the American West he and a crew had taken exclusively for that purpose. [1]

Jones?s Pantoscope belonged to the passing nineteenth-century genre of the ?panorama,? and to an age of experimentation with audiovisual entertainment. The absorbing experiences of radio and film were still decades away and popular entertainment remained confined to the stage theater. Panoramas took a variety of forms, but they often constituted ?moving pictures? in the most literal sense. Enormous canvas paintings produced by teams of artists?some reportedly miles long and covering hundreds of thousands of square feet?were rolled across the stage, moving across the audience?s line of sight from one giant spool to another. Accompanied by music and narration, these exhibitions simulated the experience of travel: they were ?designed to convey a sense of movement across space and time? in a uncommonly realistic visual world. For contemporary audiences, this was a new and delightful vicarious experience. Like the telegraph and the steamboat, the panorama was, some proclaimed, a ?wonderful invention for annihilating time and space.? [2]

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