By September 12, 2022
You can join BOMSA here!
October 6 – 9
USU Conference Center
Thursday (October 6)
Display of Book of Mormon Original Manuscript – 1:30 pm
Panel presentation: “Complexities of Conservation, Imaging, and Piecing together the Fragments of the Original Manuscript of the BoM for the Joseph Smith Papers,” by Emiline Twitchell, Tyler Thorsted, and Robin Jensen
Church History Library, Salt Lake City
By September 8, 2022
Please find a flyer attached to this post if you’re able to share it with others!
Join the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a virtual career day event and explore exciting career opportunities with the Church History Department.
Do you have a passion for Church history? Are you a history student who wants to work in your field? Join us for a virtual career day info session, interact with current employees from the Church History Department, and learn about potential career paths and upcoming internships.
By September 1, 2022
EIGHTH BIENNIAL FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE CONFERENCE
CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY
CLAREMONT, CA
MAY 19-21, 2023
The Faith and Knowledge Conference was established in 2007 to bring together Mormon graduate students (a member of any Restoration church) in religious studies and related disciplines in order to explore the interactions between religious faith and scholarship. During the past seven conferences, students have shared their experiences in the church and the academy and the new ideas that have emerged as a result. These papers and conversations provided thought-provoking historical, exegetical, and theoretical insights and compelling models of how to reconcile one’s discipleship with scholarly discipline.
By August 26, 2022
K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
I haven’t read a book as historiographically disruptive to Mormon Studies as K. Mohrman’s Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and U.S. Nationalism. Covering 1830 to the present, it covers a much longer period than most monographs on Mormonism. In addition to a longer framing, Mohrman employs queer feminist theory, queer of color critique, critical ethnic studies, and other methodological tools to reveal what Mormonism’s “peculiarity” (or lack thereof) tells about what it means to be American. The book’s rich examination of Mormonism’s place in the United States and also for what Mormonism’s being defined as “peculiar” reveals about the biopolitics of American exceptionalism. In short, Mohrman argues that Mormonism is not exceptional, and in fact, shows what it means to be American across time in U.S. history.
By August 8, 2022
This review comes from Makoto Hunter, a graduate student in history at the University of California–Santa Barbara studying American religious life at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and public memory. A former research and editorial assistant for the Intermountain Histories digital history project, she has authored two online public history series, titled “Mapping the Polygamy Underground” and “Confederate Markers in the Intermountain West.”
Reading Caroline Kline’s Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness, published this year by the University of Illinois Press, has been an exercise of discovery, delight, and richly provoking insights. Based primarily on 98 anonymized oral history life interviews conducted with Latter-day Saint women of color (archived at the Claremont Colleges Library), Kline’s interdisciplinary work is part ethnography, part lived religion, and part theology. The book documents the lives of Latter-day Saint women of color, examines their experiences with and perspectives on intersections of religion, gender, race, and class, and argues for understanding their agentive lives through the lens of a shared moral orientation which Kline calls non-oppressive connectedness. Attentive to interviewees’ expressed priorities and values, Kline both shares their stories in their irreducible complexity and highlights key throughlines and contextually specific nuances in what ultimately synthesizes into a lay theology expressed from the margins of the tradition. As such, in addition to gathering personal, textured accounts of what it is like to live as a woman of color in Mormonism, Crossroads also expresses a Mormonism that is interpreted, adapted, and authored by women of color. This book is an indispensable companion for any study of contemporary Mormonism, particularly as expressed in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Crossroads’ denominational focus).
By July 25, 2022
Salt Lake City, UT, United States
By July 8, 2022
Documents, Volume 13 was edited by Christian K. Heimburger, Jeffrey D. Mahas, Brent M. Rogers, J. Chase Kirkham, Matthew S. McBride, and Mason K. Allred. Visit josephsmithpapers.org for more information.
The Joseph Smith Papers Project recently released the thirteenth volume of their Documents series, which covers the relatively short period of August-December 1843. It comprises ninety-eight documents, transcriptions, contextualization, and footnoting that “chronicle a busy, often tumultuous period of [Joseph Smith’s] life” (xix). Helpfully, they show a religious leader, politician, businessman, and family man managing many concerns while acting primarily in his prophetic ministry. As with other volumes, D13 shows the workings of a man who saw no distance between the sacred and the profane. This collapsing of boundaries was evident, too, in his personal life. Even as he escaped the Missouri courts, he could not escape difficulties in home life or pressure in his religious ministry.
By July 6, 2022
Book reviews are their own genre. They are not like anything else that you’ll write as a scholar. This is true for several reasons, which I’ll outline, but certainly because they are doing a particular kind of work in their analysis. Articles and books are generally self-explanatory for what they do as pieces of academic writing—book reviews’ values are not as easily grasped at first blanche.
In this post, I hope to share a few pointers for how to write a helpful book review. I use “helpful” and not “good” purposefully. Book reviews are utilitarian and meant to be engaged and digested by more people than will read the book. Know the genre and recognize its value.
By June 15, 2022
Please enjoy the following presentations. One is by Rick Turley, entitled “The Rise and Fall of Mark Hoffman” and was delivered at Utah State University:
LINK: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usu_lectures/8/
The second is by Emily Utt, on time capsules in Latter-day Saint buildings, entitled “Wine, Wheat, and Whatnots: The Material Culture of Cornerstones,” delivered at a presentation for the Utah State Historic Preservation Office:
By June 13, 2022
Christopher James Blythe is Assistant Professor of English (Folklore) at Brigham Young University and editor of the Journal of Mormon History. He received his PhD in American religious history from Florida State University.
Shortly after the trailer for Under the Banner of Heaven released in late March, my Twitter feed filled with commentary about its reproduction of the Latter-day Saint temple endowment ritual. The only twitter post I specifically remember from that evening was from a young ex-Mormon woman who expressed concern that depicting temple ordinances was an act of prejudice. What followed over the next several hours was a textbook example of social media bullying filled with insults and condescension. By the next day, the young woman, now sufficiently bludgeoned and put back in line, had professed her intention to never write about Mormonism again. You are right, guys. I feel terrible. Sorry I didn’t think through how offensive my comments were. Reading her apology was as disturbing as witnessing the initial onslaught. Twitter rarely facilitates healthy discourse, and, in this case, its users already had the mechanisms in place to silence unpopular opinions. It was unacceptable to express even the mildest concern about the treatment of what millions consider a private, sacred rite. I don’t like depictions of the temple ceremony, but I am much more disturbed by the sentiment that Latter-day Saints (and their supporters) should not speak out against a clearly prejudicial take on their religious tradition. So, as a result, I have agreed to write about Under the Banner of Heaven’s depiction of temple ordinances in its third episode.[i]
© 2024 – Juvenile Instructor
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