“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 August 17, 2008
Enlightenment thought brought many threats to eighteenth and nineteenth century religious movements.
By August 2, 2008
Recently (and weirdly) the Holy Eucharist has been in the news.
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 May 26, 2008
I am here responding to panel 6E of the 2008 Mormon History Association Annual Meeting: “Scientific Mormonism: evolution, monism, and Mormon thought,” featuring the following papers:
?Transmutational Theology: An Unofficial Authoritative View, Mormon Responses to Darwin, 1859-1933,” Jordan Watkins, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA
?Marginal Dialogues: B. H. Roberts?s Reading of Science and Philosophy,” Stanley J. Thayne, Brigham Young University
?The Making of a ?Mormon Modernity,?? John Dulin, Whittier, CA
An image: BH Roberts, hunched over a copy of William James?s The Varieties of Religious Experience, pencil in hand, brow furrowed, looking for new ideas, new images, new ways to express and understand exactly what it was that his Mormonism was telling him about the universe and humanity.
By April 27, 2008
Five years before the 1920s, a decade in which he did a least as much as John T. Scopes to instigate warfare between Protestant liberals and fundamentalists, and fifty years before Martin Luther King praised him as the greatest preacher of the century, the Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick was appointed to the Jessup Chair in Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary. [1]
Fosdick was not really an original thinker, but he was a master teacher and popularizer. And, perhaps because of the agonies that he struggled through on his own route to faith, he had a powerful understanding of the anxieties that plagued his age. Because of the new Biblical criticism, Fosdick wrote,
The old use of the Bible became impossible to many preachers who, as much as ever was true of their fathers, believed in Jesus Christ as the world?s Saviour and wanted to proclaim his Gospel as the power of God unto salvation.[2]
In other words, these preachers – like Fosdick himself – believed passionately in God revealed in Christ. But they no longer accepted the accuracy of Biblical history. And they did not know what to do.
By April 22, 2008
One topic I find most interesting about Mormonism is the ability of the Latter-day Saints to create the sacred.
By February 19, 2008
We as Latter-day Saints love to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
By January 23, 2008
In his 1993 Tanner Lecture delivered to the Mormon History Association, historian Richard Hughes suggested that “romanticism quickly emerged as the defining intellectual influence [of the Mormon Church] … and this was the difference that made all the difference.”[1] In a similar vein, Jacksonian scholar and Joseph Smith biographer Robert Remini concluded that “Joseph was a romantic to his innermost fiber.”[2] The connection between romanticism and early Mormonism is a fascinating one that deserves further attention.
© 2025 – Juvenile Instructor
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