Framing the American Religious Past

This past semester, I taught the history major senior capstone research seminar on “Religion in America” [Aside: WHEN will I ever learn to choose appropriately NARROW topics for senior seminar??]. Students’ paper topics ranged from the Branch Davidians at Waco, to the religious geography of the early British colonies, to recovering Jefferson’s personal theology, to protections for religious observance in the 21st-century military, to anti-Semitism in immigration policy of the 1920s and 1930s — 16 papers with the rather dizzying variety you might expect from so open-ended a course. Most of the students, though advanced in the major, had little prior experience tackling religious subjects in history classes, so that added a dimension of danger complexity to the whole enterprise.

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New Course at the University of Utah (with Guest Lectures open to the Public): The Intellectual Life of Mormonism

Brian Birch, Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University, will be teaching a course on the intellectual life of Mormonism this coming fall at the University of Utah. He has kindly made his syllabus and course readings available online, which many readers will want to read at their leisure.

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Mormon Studies in the Classroom: Field Trip!

This post is a continuation of last year’s ?Mormon Studies in the Classroom? series.  See the author?s previous post here, on Mormon Studies in the 7^th Grade Utah Studies Classroom. 

At the end of the 2013-2014 school year, my principal approached me about teaching an elective class related to any of my interests as an educator.  I drafted and submitted a proposal for a class titled ?History Detectives? (no relation to the PBS show), only to find that few students signed up for it.  To make a short story long, I ended up teaching Creative Writing instead (despite the glaring lack of classes on my college transcript that contain either ?Creative? or ?Writing? in their titles).  I had a good time with Creative Writing, though, and geared up to teach it a second time.  (If you’ve never heard of lipograms, you should check them out!  Pretty fun stuff.)

As the second semester of the 2014-2015 school year began, my principal asked if I could resurrect the History Detectives class and take on some of the middle school students that had nowhere else to go for an elective, either because they hadn?t paid their class fees, were behavior problems for other teachers, or simply needed an elective.  I quickly scrapped the Creative Writing syllabus I had planned, and resurrected my plans for History Detectives.   Here is the course description:

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Questions on Mormon Women answered by “Real Live Mormons” in a Religious Studies Classroom

My contribution fits under the Mormonism in the Classroom and Women’s History Month at JI.

During the spring semester, I took a course entitled “American Religious Innovation.” The course examined Mormonism, the Nation of Islam, and Scientology. Each unit covered the history of each religious movement and focused on different aspects of the religion’s beliefs, which encouraged discussion and comparison. The readings for Mormonism addressed American religious culture in the early 19^th century, the Book of Mormon, polygamy, Mormon Christianity, the Mormon community, and modern Mormonism.

At the end of the class’s section on Mormonism, a group of “real live Mormons” were invited to answer the class’s questions.[i] The panel was comprised of a PhD student in History, a worker at UVA’s hospital, a local bishop and his wife, and a set of Mormon elders (one from Southern Utah and one from Taiwan). As might be expected, there were many questions about the role of women in Mormonism and Mormon history.[ii] I’ve included the answers given (if any were addressed on the panel) in italics.[iii]

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Mormon Studies in the 7th Grade Utah Studies Classroom

As my contribution to the Juvenile Instructor?s series on Mormon Studies in the Classroom, I thought I?d discuss the place of Mormonism in the Utah Studies course, which is a required class for all 7^th graders in the state?s public schools.  The structure, sources, and activities for such a class are necessarily tailored to a younger audience than those of the other courses that will make up this series, but I think it?s important to consider how less-seasoned?and more often than not, less-willing?students interact with Mormon studies.

I?m only in my second year teaching the Utah Studies Course, but have been given a lot of latitude by my school (which is a charter school that employs the Core Knowledge Sequence for its main curriculum).  So I?ve put a lot of thought into what I?d like my course to look like, where I think Mormonism should fit, and what I want my adolescent audience to take away from the course.

Course Objective:

The Utah Core Curriculum introduction to the Utah Studies Course says this: 

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On Ending a Course

I?ve just finished teaching my fall course on American religious pluralism—in fact, I was supposed to post about this yesterday but I?m still grading their final exams and submitting grades. It?s that time of year to think about what worked and what didn?t, and how I might do things differently next time.

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Mormons as Part of the Pluralist Kaleidoscope

So when I created my fall course on American religious pluralism I built it around five units. In this post I thought I?d share those, and invite conversation about where Mormonism shows up in my course or where it could be discussed in a similar course.

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My Fall American Religion Course

I’m finally surfacing from the hectic start of semester and wanted to write a couple of posts about the history course I’m teaching in American religious pluralism this fall at Worcester State. It’s an upper-level history elective called “Religions in America,” and in previous versions I’ve taught it mainly as an introduction to American religious diversity… sort of a “religious literacy” exercise in which students depart the course knowing a little something about many things rather than having deep knowledge of a few things. This term, however, I’ve focused the course more narrowly on the history of the idea (and imperfect implementation over time) of American religious pluralism.

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