Articles by

Steve Fleming

Why All the Brodie Love? A Little Historiographical Context

By May 29, 2010


On Chris Smith?s post, in my attempt to defend ?the bracket? or experiential agnosticism as a historiographical method, I made the remark that Fawn Bordie had said very little that was new. I no doubt was engaging in hyperbole, sometimes that happens around the blogs.

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How I Became a Mormon Historian and Just about the Only Mormon Fan of Refiner?s Fire

By March 28, 2010


Since Ardis Parshall said JI needed more posts like Jared’s…

Once when a member asked the typical question of what I wanted to study when I got home from my mission, my companion interjected, ?He?ll say he doesn?t know, but if you really press him, he?ll say he wants to be a historian.?

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Why the Late Middle Ages Are Important for Understanding Mormonism

By March 22, 2010


So when David G. was introducing his “academic friends” (his words) to his new wife at their reception, he gave her a little summation of everybody’s research. When he got to me he simply said “I can’t really explain what he does.” I know I’ve brought this predicament on myself, so to try to remedy this little problem I have, I decided to post a little write-up I did for my medieval professor.

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Book Review: Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits

By March 14, 2010


Wilby, Emma. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2005.

The amount of scholarship on early modern witchcraft is huge, but Wilby?s book represents an interesting trend.

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Book Review: Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons

By March 7, 2010


Stuart Clark. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

So I though I’d post a summary of a few really great books I’ve read recently that I see as being useful to those studying Mormonism.

Thinking with Demons focusses on what intellectuals said about witchcraft and demons during the witch-hunt era (1400-1700). In some ways the topic is much bigger than witchcraft since demons were central to how early modern people saw the world operating generally.

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The Trinity

By January 10, 2010


I know this has been discussed around the blogernacle, but I just wanted to share a few historical anecdotes.

The first time I read the Nicene Creed (on my mission) I thought, ?do we really disagree with this?? This thought has only been compounded as I?ve studied Christian history.

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Thoughts on Polyandry

By December 13, 2009


I’ve frequently seen complaints that Joseph Smith’s practice of marrying already-married women is “particularly troubling.” That is, that marrying married women is somehow worse than marrying single women. Why is that? Why is men sharing a wife somehow worse than women sharing a husband?

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Of Hips and Miracles

By December 13, 2009


My daughter was diagnosed with Perthes yesterday. It’s a condition where blood doesn’t get to the hip bone and so it doesn’t grow, which causes all kinds of problems. She’s been having a lot of difficulty walking recently but the doctor says its very treatable and for this we are grateful.

Her condition reminded me of a few stories from the past that I’ve read recently.

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Full Disclosure

By November 7, 2009


The comments on my last post got me thinking about a few things, particularly the fact that the subject of the post studied under the venerable historian of the English Reformation, Eamon Duffy. In the second edition to Duffy’s monumental The Stripping of the Altars, which present the English Reformation as an unwanted destruction of the English people’s traditoinal religion, Duffy makes the following disclosure:

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Acknowledgements

By November 4, 2009


In thumbing through Gwenfair Walters Adams’s Visions in Late Medieval England (Brill, 2007), I was surprised to see the following as the last line of her acknowledgements: “And ultimately, I am most grateful to God.”

Having never seen this before my question are 1) has anybody else ever seen such a thing, and 2) would you ever consider doing such a thing? Why or why not?

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Recent Comments

Steve Fleming on BH Roberts on Plato: “Interesting, Jack. But just to reiterate, I think JS saw the SUPPRESSION of Platonic ideas as creating the loss of truth and not the addition.…”


Jack on BH Roberts on Plato: “Thanks for your insights--you've really got me thinking. I can't get away from the notion that the formation of the Great and Abominable church was an…”


Steve Fleming on BH Roberts on Plato: “In the intro to DC 76 in JS's 1838 history, JS said, "From sundry revelations which had been received, it was apparent that many important…”


Jack on BH Roberts on Plato: “"I’ve argued that God’s corporality isn’t that clear in the NT, so it seems to me that asserting that claims of God’s immateriality happened AFTER…”


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. …”

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