JWHA 2011 Call For Papers

2011 JWHA Annual Meeting Call for Papers

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Methodism, Mormonism, and the Atlantic World

I recently opined on the benefits of situating the rise of Mormonism within the larger historical context of the (late) early modern Atlantic world. I would like now to briefly outline one example of what such an approach might look like. 

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Book Announcement: Stephen C. Taysom, Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries

Stephen C. Taysom. Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. xvi + 263 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth.

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Set Aside Whether Or Not Mormon Fundamentalists Are Mormon. The Better Question Is, Are They Fundamentalist?

A lot of people would say no,

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Is Mormonism “understudied”?

I’m making my way through Jeffrey Williams’s Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), an admittedly revisionist challenge to the current scholarship on early Methodism that highlights the rhetorical violence in the sermons, conversion narratives, and personal writings of Wesley’s disciples in the early American republic. I may consider posting a brief review of the book (and noting any potential avenues for research in Mormon studies it may suggest) when I complete it, but for the time being, I want to focus in on one line from the book’s foreword, authored by Catherine Albanese and Stephen Stein, editors of the Religion in North America series of which this book is a part.

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Glenn Beck, Jim Wallis, Sally Quinn?s On Faith and social justice: a collective failure of imagination

Look, in lots of ways, Glenn Beck is a loon. A loon poorly informed by history, at that. But plowing through the veritable scads of secondary material on my dissertation topic (Protestant fundamentalism) has driven one particular truth pretty well home to me: there’s nothing so destructive to a piece of academic writing as a slightly concealed sneer on an author’s face. Concluding that any particular individual or group is so hopelessly drenched in wingnuttery or disappointing political positions or slavish and bewildering adherence to the blindingly goofy that they are no longer worthy of intelligent analysis is to abdicate the responsibility to understand ourselves that the humanities as a discipline lays upon us. Heck, even for activists (as opposed to scholars), to malign and snarl and taunt the representatives of a cause one finds objectionable is to make the classic mistake of treating the symptom as the disease. Which is why I was not terribly impressed with Jim Wallis’s response to Glenn Beck’s by now blaringly well covered advice to Christians: that they should investigate their faith for the dread and dire words “social justice,” (aka, “Progressivism” (Beck’s definition); aka collectiivsm; aka fascism; aka hurting puppies) and if that mark of the beast should be located, flee for the hills.

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“Mormon history?s (and historians?) movement out of the margins”: The State of Mormon History and Mormon Historiography

In yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed, Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey explore what they see as the paradox of the current state of American religious history. On the one hand, more historians appear to be engaging religious history than in past years. They note, for example, that according to a recent AHA report, “religion now tops the list of interests that historians claim to have as their specialty” and point to a number of stellar offerings recently published in the field.

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History ?thrown into divinity? ? some thoughts on faith, the past, and the historical profession

I

One of Max Weber?s more evocative phrases is the ?disenchantment of the world.? I like it because it does not refer only to the numbing birth of bloodless bureaucracy, to humans in increasingly rationalized aggregate, but also to us as individuals of mind and creativity. The lucid organization of the world as a place human comprehension might master changed our vision, our psyche, and our imagination. The Enlightenment was thus a revolution of the aesthetic and the numinous as much as of knowledge and epistemology.

I want to talk a little bit about how this applies to history, by which I mean not only the sort of narratives and analyses of the past that humans accept as authoritative, but the extent to which we ascribe existential meaning and use to them. We today expect history to be constructed according to a certain set of principles, ways of running the wiring and cranking the engine that we learned from the Enlightenment. But here, I want to float the notion that history may not be a car in the first place.

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An Insider’s View of Early Mormonism. . .and Methodism

After months of anticipation, the JI’s Christopher has successfully completed his MA thesis at BYU. The thesis examines the influence of Methodism on early Mormon history, and will doubtless be a valuable contribution. It is available on-line here and I’ve reproduced the abstract after the jump:

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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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