“Thou Wast Willing to Lay Down Thy Life for Thy Brethren”: Zion’s Blessings in the Early Church, Part II
By October 2, 2008
*This is continued from Part I.
By October 2, 2008
*This is continued from Part I.
By October 1, 2008
*This is the first of a two-part summary of the paper I presented at JWHA this past weekend.
By September 18, 2008
I had the privilege a couple weeks ago of plowing through the Beinecke Library out at Yale in search of LDS-related stuff. Specifically, I got to spend a couple days just looking through the D. Michael Quinn Collection–quite a treasure-trove of documents, specifcally relating to “transitional” period Mormonism.
By August 17, 2008
Enlightenment thought brought many threats to eighteenth and nineteenth century religious movements.
By August 13, 2008
David Whitmer was a powerful figure in the early Mormon Church. Besides being one of the Book of Mormon Witnesses, he was in the Missouri Presidency and (some believed) ordained to be Joseph Smith’s successor in 1834. He was released from his Missouri position in 1837 and was excommunicated from the Church in 1838.
By August 4, 2008
Limiting the time-frame of when Joseph Smith was visited by Peter, James, and John to a specific period has been problematic for Mormon historians. This mostly results from Joseph’s (almost) complete silence regarding the event. His statements on it are both very rare and quite ambiguous. Here, I will give a brief outline of the debate, a couple of the most relevant arguments, and then leave it open for discussion on some important questions.
By July 14, 2008
Well, it depends on who you ask. As discussed before (see esp. comments 9-12, 25-29), the argument over what was rational and what was absurd was a hot topic in Antebellum America, especially when attempting to describe and understand new religious movements. What many felt was completely asinine, others found fulfilling. This led to confusion on both sides while they tried to grapple with the other’s beliefs. Here, for example, is an editorial written in Europe in 1843 attempting to explain this new Mormon movement stealing away many of their citizens.
By July 8, 2008
Beginning in the 1830s, Parley P. Pratt produced a tremendous amount of literature describing his people’s persecutions. Pratt wrote not only for his fellow religionists, but also as a means to inform other Americans of the Mormon plight and seek redress.[1] Of the hundreds of pages of his prose, among the most significant included his Extra of the Mormon newspaper The Evening and the Morning Star entitled “?Mormons,’ So Called”, which is perhaps the most comprehensive contemporary description of the 1833-1834 Jackson County expulsion.[2] Pratt included this Extra as part of his eighty-four page history of the Missouri persecutions that he published in 1839.[3] In turn, this history later formed the basis of parts of Pratt’s autobiography.[4] Beyond his narrative contributions, Pratt also wrote several poems describing his people’s sufferings that he published in 1840 in The Millennium and Other Poems.[5]
Historian Kenneth Winn has described Pratt as the leading Mormon commentator on
By July 2, 2008
Literary scholar Lawrence Buell, in his excellent New England Literary Culture, explored one of the most important ideas related to the antebellum Romantic thinkers–an idea that he defines as “literary scripturism.”
By June 27, 2008
No time for a real post dealing with the martyrdom today, but here’s ERS’s memorial of Joseph Smith’s death.
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