The New Church History Library Catalog

The last few years have witnessed a dramatic explosion in the accessibility of Mormon history.  Even five years ago, it was necessary to make expensive pilgrimages to Salt Lake City and other American archives to examine Mormonism?s founding documents?assuming that those documents were unrestricted and available for public consumption.  During the last few years, the Church has proceeded to make high definition scans of Joseph Smith materials available on the Joseph Smith Papers website, numerous materials, pamphlets, and magazines available at the Internet Archive, and the catalog of most of its archival holdings available on the internet.

Continue Reading

Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Unit 4: LDS Theology and Ritual

Our final unit was the one in which we actually read a book by a non-Latter-day Saint. I felt it would be important to have at least one book by a non-member, and for this unit I choose Douglas Davies? The Mormon Culture of Salvation. I appreciate his perspective as an outsider. He talks about things that end up being rituals of a sort, but that I, as an acclimated insider, hadn?t considered rituals, like the sustaining of church callings. (I mean, I guess it?s obvious that it?s a ritual, but I?m so inured to it, and the fact that it?s so short a span of time to perform, that I just didn?t think of it in that way until I read his book. It?s almost embarrassing to admit that, but there you have it. Outside perspectives are important, is the moral here.)

Continue Reading

The Method Behind the Madness: How do you Keep Notes?

We’ve been having a warm-spirited debate on note-taking in the JI backlist. On the one hand, we have Team Evernote (we’ll call them the good guys/gals); on the other, we have Team Zotero (for continuity’s sake, we’ll call them the bad guys/gals). One JIer—hint, it’s the documents and record-keeping nerd—thought it was unfortunate that people don’t talk more about their note-taking methods. So we are breaking the norm and discussing the work behind the published product. I’ll start the discussion and then open it up to everyone else; I’m sure there are a lot of tips out there to share on how to be more efficient in our research approach.

Continue Reading

JMH Roundtable on Writing Interdisciplinary Mormon History

In the most recent issue of Journal of Mormon History, JI friend Rachel Cope put together a wonderful roundtable titled, “New Ways In: Writing Interdisciplinary Mormon History” (JMH 38, no. 2 [Spring 2012]: 99-144). “The writing of Mormon history,” she opined, “has undergone a series of transitions” (99). The most recent transition has been taking place in the past decade or so, as new interdisciplinary approaches have been introduced into the field of Mormon studies. The prior transition, what is typically called New Mormon History and whose shoulders we all stand upon, brought the academic study of Mormonism to new levels and will always deserve deep appreciation. But it was also, for the most part, dominated by the tools common during the New Social History that swept the historical profession in the 1960s and 1970s (when most New Mormon History practitioners experienced graduate training). While such an approach will remain critical to the field, new complimentary avenues are now being invoked, especially from the growing–if still nascent–field of religious studies. This roundtable, Cope explains, hopes to highlight more questions and possibilities by “asking several young scholars to explain how their particular disciplinary lens enriches approaches to and the evolution of Mormon historiography” (100). As with all thought-provoking and cutting-edge roundtables, this series brought a familiar feeling: conviction. I felt convicted in overlooking important questions and ashamed that I often maintain problematic and dated views of history, as I’ll explain below. But in that conviction, I am also enthused to thoroughly repent and correct my ways.

Continue Reading

Malcolm X and Mormon Studies: A short review and some reflections on comparative religion

I was pleased to learn this week that the late Manning Marable’s exhaustive biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize in History. Thoroughly and thoughtfully revisionist, Marable’s account of Malcolm X’s life challenges much of what is presented in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a now classic piece of 20th century American literature that has popularized a particular view of the Nation of Islam minister and his role in the Civil Rights, Black Muslim, and Pan-African movements. Deconstructing the Autobiography (which was published posthumously and, as Marable highlights, heavily edited by “co-author” Alex Haley), Marable then reconstructs the life of the man born Malcolm Little, utilizing a wealth of primary sources, including letters, diaries, interviews, and even FBI files. It is a fascinating biography and well worth the read for anyone interested in the life of this controversial figure.

It also provides a captivating account of the Nation of Islam’s rise in mid-20th century America. The NOI—a somewhat militant Black Nationalist sect that emerged in Great Depression-era Detroit and Chicago—was founded by the mysterious Wallace D. Fard but grew to national prominence under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad in the mid 20th century, when Malcolm Little converted and quickly rose to prominence as a talented preacher and recruiter. Later, Malcolm grew disillusioned with Muhammad’s leadership and left the NOI. His inability to leave it alone, though, ultimately led to his assassination in February 1965 at the hands of NOI henchmen.

Continue Reading

Foxes and Hedgehogs in Mormon Historiography

Isaiah Berlin, one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, once wrote that there were two types of historians: the hedgehog and the fox. Taking the phrase from a throw-away statement of Greek poet Archilochus—“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”—Berlin creatively expanded the sentiment to explore two different approaches to the historical craft. On the one hand, foxes were those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle.” Hedgehogs, on the other, were those “who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel–a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” Berlin then attempted to organize all great historians, writers, and philosophers into these two camps: Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzche, Ibsen, and Proust are examples of hedgehogs, while Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, and Goethe are foxes.”[1] You get the picture.

Continue Reading

Is Mormonism a “western” religion?

Over at the Religion in the American West blog, Laurie Maffly-Kipp has offered her thoughts to the above question. The whole post is worth reading—and it’d be great to generate some discussion on the topic over there—but I wanted to highlight a couple of points I found especially important.

Continue Reading

Mormonism and “Historical/Traditional” Christianity

My dissertation committee felt I sort of gave them a bait and switch at my prospectus defense.  I had spent three years telling them I wanted to compare Mormonism to medieval Christianity (which I’m still doing) but for my prospectus I was now talking about Mormonism and Neoplatonism.  They found this all rather confusing and wanted brainstorm other angles I could take.  In the midst of all this, my medieval advisor exclaimed, “I know what your thesis should be.  It should be how Christian Mormonism is.  This is all thoroughly Christian, it’s just not Protestant.”

What is Christian depends on one’s point of view.  Medieval Christianity was very different from Protestantism.  As I’ve noted around here a few times, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 presents a very different picture of traditional Christianity than do Protestants.

Continue Reading

Religious History Classes Come With Instructions

This is Part 3 in my series on course & syllabus design (“Oz Behind the Curtain”); here are Part 1 and Part 2. I’ve also posted a Part 3a on governance and alignment, but since it’s kind of technical it’s only on my blog; see here if you want to get into those nitty-gritty details.

All my syllabi have some generalized instructions. I include some boilerplate stuff on every syllabus: use of phone and laptops in class, something about attendance and participation to the effect that just showing up is necessary but not sufficient, something about disability accommodations, and so on.

But for a course that studies religion, somehow, I feel there needs to be something more along the lines of ground rules.

Continue Reading

Oz Behind the Curtain, Part 2

This is Part 2 in a series on course & syllabus design; Part 1 is here.

I last taught “Religions in America” in the fall of 2009 as a special topics course in history, which meant I didn’t have to jump through any approval hoops. Since that time, I’ve put the course through our university and General Education governance so it could be listed with a course number in the regular catalog. Now that I’m planning to teach it again in 2012-2013, it’s time to revisit the course from the inside out and update its learning outcomes and course expectations (and give it a revamped web presence). All of this can be done without altering its catalog description or governance approvals–which is an important point if you are inheriting an existing course and are looking to redesign it or reinvent its pedagogy.

My 2009 syllabus enumerated course objectives (old-style, professor-centered).

Continue Reading