By September 4, 2009
The need of specialization has the drawback of limiting the scope of one’s work. As I’ve stumbled through the study of history, this has often been a frustration; the academic study of history is quite focussed. This is needed to gain the expertise one needs in historical writing, but as Richard Fletcher says in preface to his The Barbarian Conversion “Professional historians today are expected to know more and more about less and less.”
By September 4, 2009
Terryl L. Givens, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford?s Very Short Introduction Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 125 pp + appendixes and index.
If you are looking for a book that focuses on the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, what it tells us about antebellum religious culture, or even how it shaped (or was shaped by) Joseph Smith?s mind, then this is not the book for you.
By July 24, 2009
So in my ever-stewing never-ending revisions of my work on Mormonism in the Philadelphia area, I’ve decided that I need to say more about women. This is a challenge since my sources are overwhelmingly written by men. I do have some detailed journals that I can mine better than I have though.
Anyway, up at the archives the other day and I came across another letter from a woman in the area (making a total of 5 letters by women in all).
By June 23, 2009
Over the past week, four contributors to the Juvenile Instructor have toured, given tours, researched in, peered through the windows of, and otherwise participated in the opening of the new LDS Church History Library and Archives. Their experiences, ruminations, and ponderables are below.
By June 18, 2009
This post inaugurates a new series at the Juvenile Instructor, featuring brief conversations reassessing the significance of major works of Mormon history.
By June 4, 2009
I
There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this conference, and every inch of it deserved. Not a cubic zirconium among the presentations, and more than one absolute diamond (Laurie Maffly-Kipp on preparation; Richard Cohen on the Hebrew temple). This was an impressive and a diverse kaleidoscope, and the most interesting thing was the way, one after another, each speaker demonstrated the point Jeanne Halgren Kilde made – that talking about sacred space, at its essence, is talking about the way we experience religion. Space matters because people do things in it.
By June 1, 2009
(Note: If you couldn’t from Ryan T’s last comment and this brief post, three of us JIers are currently taking part in an intense seminar on the Pratt brothers’ writings. Therefore, you may see quite a bit on good ol’ Parley and Orson; be advised.)
By May 29, 2009
As one whose ?to-read? pile lends a large shadow over both my desk and nightstand, devotional history books put out by publishers like Deseret Book or Covenant Press don?t usually make the list. However, a couple weeks I decided to download the audio version of a recent ?popular? devotional/historical work.[1] While this post is formatted like a standard book review, I hope that it will serve as a ?springboard? of sorts to discuss the practice of writing history for the faithful masses.
By March 16, 2009
Currently, a couple of seasoned Mormon scholars are working on a book collection of Mormon documents for Columbia University Press. This got me thinking: what would you say are “essential” documents in the LDS past?
By February 10, 2009
I’m teaching a course this semester called “Prophecy in American History.” We’re examining particularly the interaction between prophetic figures and the society around them. How did they use religion to critique, affirm, or offer alternatives to the world they lived in? In what ways does religion shape what it means to be an American, and vice versa? After an introductory class in which we read Max Weber, Rodney Stark, Anthony Wallace, and Walter Brueggemann on the nature of prophecy, we have turned our attention to a series of American prophets. We began with Anne Hutchinson; next week we’ll discuss Nat Turner.
The week following, we’ll visit Joseph Smith.
What I’ve reproduced below is the blog entry that I’ll post the night after the Nat Turner course, introducing the students to the readings they will do for Smith.
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