Announcement: 2014 McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture

The University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center is proud to present the Fall 2014 McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture with David Campbell, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and co-author of the recent book Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics. Campbell’s lecture, titled “Whither the Promised Land? Mormons? Place in a Changing Religious Landscape,” will be held on Thursday, October 30 at 7:00 PM in the Salt Lake City Main Library auditorium, 210 E 400 S. This event is free and open to the public. More information at www.thc.utah.edu.

In his lecture, Campbell will explore how Mormons fit into a society where once-sharp religious distinctions have blurred and secularism is on the rise. With their high levels of religious devotion and solidarity, Mormons in America are increasingly ?peculiar.? Does their peculiarity come at a price? Does that price include a ?stained glass ceiling? in presidential politics? In other words, did Mormonism cost Mitt Romney the White House? And, how has Mitt Romney?s campaign affected popular perceptions of Mormonism?

CFP: Claremont 2015 Mormon Studies Conference: Authority, Community, Identity

From our friends in SoCal.

Authority, Community, and Identity

Call for Papers

The Religion Department at Claremont Graduate University is pleased to announce its annual Mormon Studies Conference, to be held March 6 and 7, 2015 in Claremont, California.  We encourage proposals from graduate students and faculty of all disciplines.  There are limited travel subsidies available for graduate student presenters.  The theme for this year is ?Authority, Community, and Identity.

The study of Mormonism requires an exploration of what it means to be a religious person.  Individuals exist within a community where they negotiate and maintain their identities.  The conference organizers are open to a wide range of paper proposals, including but not limited to topics suggested by the following themes and questions:  How do people negotiate their Mormon identity in joining or leaving Mormonism?  How does ritual impact community maintenance and religious authority?  How have developments in communication changed methods of creating orthodoxy and heterodoxy?  In what ways have changing norms and debates regarding gender and sexuality impacted identity and community?  How have communities of doubt influenced claims to authority and identity?   How has Mormon identity and community developed regionally and internationally?  What role does tradition play in different geographies?  How has secularization altered Mormon community formation and institutional authority?

While this conference will focus on Mormonism in particular, we encourage comparative papers, or papers on related traditions in which the theories or insights developed have some bearing on Mormonism.

Please email paper proposals and a CV to jeffrey.turner@cgu.edu by November 15, 2014.  Proposals should be no longer than 250 words and should be attached as a Word or PDF document.  Please indicate in the email if you would like to be considered for travel funding.

Guest Post: Barbara Jones Brown, Remembrance: A Photoessay

We’re pleased to present today’s guest post from Barbara Jones Brown. Barbara was the content editor of Massacre at Mountain Meadows (OUP, 2008) and is now at work on the book’s sequel. She holds a master’s degree in American history from the University of Utah and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Brigham Young University. She serves on the board of directors for the Mormon History Association and on the Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team.

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On September 11, 2014, dozens of people from throughout the United States gathered at the lower monument of southern Utah?s Mountain Meadows. We were there to remember the victims of the atrocity that took place in that valley exactly 157 years before, when Mormon militiamen led a massacre of some 120 California-bound emigrants. Most of the victims were from Arkansas. Only seventeen children aged six and under survived. The monument, dedicated September 11, 1999, marks the spot where the emigrants took cover behind their wagons during the five-day siege and where U.S. troops laid many of their bones to rest in 1859.

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

Another week, another Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

On the more academic side of things, the annual conference of the John Whitmer Historical Association kicked things off this weekend in Lamoni, Iowa. Check out the twitter feed for JI Ben’s tweets on the conference. The feed also confirms rumors that LDS Church Historian Steven E. Snow is in attendance. BYU’s L. Tom Perry Special Collections has advertised a position for Curator of 19th and 20th Century Mormon and Western Americana Books. Also, the Mormon Texts Project announced that five historical Mormon e-books have been added to Project Gutenberg. If you’re in the Logan area next week, come hear venerable historian Ron Walker speak on Brigham Young and the Utah War at the 20th Annual Arrington Lecture.

Elder Snow and other Church History Department officials spoke at a press conference recently that provided details on the Church History Museum’s permanent exhibit renovation, “The Heavens Are Opened,” scheduled to open October 2015. As several media outlets noted, the new exhibit will augment the museum’s artifact collection with technology to enhance the story of the early Restoration (1820-1846). These newspaper articles interpret the new exhibit within the church’s recent efforts to approach its history with transparency (with the Joseph Smith Papers and the Gospel Topics essays as the most notable examples), as the exhibit will attempt to tackle difficult historical issues, such as multiple accounts of the First Vision, seer stones and Book of Mormon translation, and Nauvoo polygamy. 

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Jared Hickman on “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse”

Several years ago–perhaps 2009 or 2010–I first heard about a paper slated to be published in a major literary journal that radically reinterpreted the Book of Mormon as an Amerindian apocalypse. Whispers of both its imminent publication and its brilliance continued, and at some point, I was forwarded a prepublication draft of the paper. This isn’t altogether unusual in Mormon Studies–unpublished papers and theses, typescripts of difficult-to-access manuscript sources, and PDFs of out-of-print books passed from person to person have a long, storied, and sometime litigious history in the often insular world of Mormon scholarship. But unlike other instances I’m aware of, the importance of this paper was not in its access to otherwise unavailable primary source material or its controversial content, but rather in its interpretive significance.

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be [links]:

First up, a couple of items from a little beyond a week ago: The Salt Lake Tribune wrote about the latest exhibit at the Church History Library, a veritable treasure trove of rare documents and publications from the archives.  Over at Religion in American History, Charlie McCary and Michael Graziano introduced readers to a course they’re team-teaching at Florida State this semester on Religion & Law in U.S. History. See Part I here and Part II here.

Last Saturday, Slate‘s “The Vault” featured a “day-by-day commemorative map of the Mormon journey West” from the late 19th century. According to Rebecca Onion, “The map?s commemorative publication in 1899 seems to show how quickly pilgrimage tourism, now common among Saints, had taken hold.” Speaking of the late 19th century, it was in 1893 that the LDS Church was denied a seat at the World’s Parliament of Religions held in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Next year, 122 years later, the Parliament will be held in the heart of Mormonism, Salt Lake City.

The Givenses remained in the news this week, with Terryl and Fiona each participating in a Reddit AMA on r/latterdaysaints. They also joined Doug Fabrizio on RadioWest for an interview about their latest book.

Over at A Motley Vision, Scott Hales lays out “a fifteen-week reading course in the Mormon novel.” Check it out here.

We’ll wrap things up this week with a handful of conference announcements: The Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture has posted a CFP for their annual conference, to be held next March in Boston. Proposals are due October 3 (for single papers) and October 17 (for complete sessions). Miles Mullin previews this year’s Conference on Faith and History annual conference at The Anxious Bench. Colleen McDannell is giving one of the four plenary addresses on the subject of “Heritage Religion and the Mormons.? And finally, in what looks to me like the conference of the years, Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History and the Danforth Center at WUSTL are co-sponsoring a conference on “Religion and Politics in 21st Century America” (in Dallas, TX on November 8). The roster of presenters is a veritable who’s who of the best and brightest young scholars of American religious history, including JI’s good friend Spencer Fluhman, who will present on “Never-Ending Mormon Moments.”

Dialogue seeks a new editor

Announcement: A Day with the Bushmans and Patrick Mason, Portland, Oregon, September 20, 2014

From the event‘s organizers:

Date:  September 20, 2014
Time:  10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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Where:
Portland, OR
The Wells Fargo Center Building at 1300 SW 5th Ave.
At the offices of Davis Wright Tremaine
Floor 24

              Located on the Max Green line stop at 5th and Jefferson
There are several parking lots/garages in the vicinity.
Full day parking on Saturday is between $5 and $6.

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Reminder: Mormon History Association CFP, Deadline October 1

Please note the approaching deadline (October 1, 2014). This conference promises to be MHA’s best yet.

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Call for Papers
2015 Provo, Utah
50th Anniversary Conference

?Mormon Cultures, Cultural Mormons?

2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Mormon History Association, whose annual conference will beheld in Provo, Utah, on June 4?7, 2015, at the Utah Valley Convention Center. We invite papers and presentations that consider Mormon history in its broadest possible sense, as well as those which reflect retrospectively on the history of the MHA itself at its first half-century mark.

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CFP: 2015 Faith & Knowledge Conference

We’re pleased to announce the Fifth Biennial Faith & Knowledge Conference, to be held at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on February 27 and 28, 2015, and to post the Call for Papers below. Please note that, unlike previous years, the conference is now officially open to LDS graduate students and early career scholars in religious studies and related academic disciplines interested in the intersections of scholarship and religious faith. Three members of this year’s committee (Rachael Givens Johnson, Joseph Stuart, and Christopher Jones) are all bloggers here at the Juvenile Instructor; please contact us if you have any questions.  

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THE FIFTH BIENNIAL FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE CONFERENCE

University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
February 27-28, 2015

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