Mormonism in a US religious history grad seminar

If you were to design a graduate seminar on American religious history, and you were allowing yourself one book on Mormon history, what would you pick? It should be a work that extensively engages themes from the wider field, not just Mormon studies. (Since I know almost everyone will pick RSR, I’m going to exclude it from our options.)

And for the Westerners [edit: by this I mean western historians] who read the blog, what book [edit: on Mormon history] would you pick for a West seminar?

For the two Steves, would you pick something different for a history seminar v. a religious studies seminar?

Of Hips and Miracles

My daughter was diagnosed with Perthes yesterday. It’s a condition where blood doesn’t get to the hip bone and so it doesn’t grow, which causes all kinds of problems. She’s been having a lot of difficulty walking recently but the doctor says its very treatable and for this we are grateful.

Her condition reminded me of a few stories from the past that I’ve read recently.

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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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2009 in Retrospect: A Glance at Important Books and Articles from the Last 12 Months

Along with Jared T’s list of recently published and forthcoming book in Mormon history, I thought I would put up my own perspective on the past scholarly year. Not only does this allow me to mention some of the articles that caught my eye in the last twelve months, but it also provides a way to discuss major themes of recent scholarship.

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Full Disclosure

The comments on my last post got me thinking about a few things, particularly the fact that the subject of the post studied under the venerable historian of the English Reformation, Eamon Duffy. In the second edition to Duffy’s monumental The Stripping of the Altars, which present the English Reformation as an unwanted destruction of the English people’s traditoinal religion, Duffy makes the following disclosure:

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Acknowledgements

In thumbing through Gwenfair Walters Adams’s Visions in Late Medieval England (Brill, 2007), I was surprised to see the following as the last line of her acknowledgements: “And ultimately, I am most grateful to God.”

Having never seen this before my question are 1) has anybody else ever seen such a thing, and 2) would you ever consider doing such a thing? Why or why not?

Considering Biography and Thought in Early Mormonism

I’ve recently been researching the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, a late 18th- early 19th-century thinker who represented the transition between German enlightenment and Romantic thought. Schleiermacher, long recognized as an important sage in German culture, has only recently been given due attention in the English-speaking world. Thus, the literature on his theology is somewhat scant in the American academy (save for his demonization by 20th-century neo-conservatives like Karl Barth), especially when compared to someone like Joseph Smith who has long been scrutinized, praised, or overall engaged by scholars both within and without the Mormon tradition. Because of the relative newness of the topic, however, the narrative and frameworks in which to understand Schleiermacher’s thought is still being developed. Several important questions are just now beginning to be asked—questions which, surprisingly, still have relevance to Mormon history today.

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Joseph Smith, Thomas Dick, and the Tricky Task of Determining Influence

Recent tangential comments on JI lately have briefly touched on the development of Joseph Smith?s theology, the correct context in which to place it in, and determining what influence(s) led to what came to be his Nauvoo doctrinal system. These, as well as other topics, are among those that, in my opinion, were not handled well in the new Mormon history.

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“Myths” among Mormon Historians

No, this post is not meant to address Mormon history myths promulgated in Seminary or Sunday School, but rather the possible historical misconceptions that are accepted and presented among the academy.

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Book review: Reid L. Neilson and Terryl Givens, eds., Joseph Smith, Jr., Reappraisals after two centuries. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

This review, originally appearing in a slightly different version in Mormon Historical Studies 10:1, is reprinted here with the kind permission of Alex Baugh and Jacob Olmstead, editor and book reviews editor, respectively.

It is a mark of the fascination that Joseph Smith inspires in students of religion and religious history (the present author not excepted) to the present day that, despite the plentitude of biographies, specialized studies, movies, hymns, visual art and all the rest that his life has evoked even only in the past sixty years, this volume is still welcome.

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