A Conference on How We Think About the Great Apostasy, Coming in March

Please join us for a conference titled ?Exploring Mormon Conceptions of Apostasy? to be held on March 1-2, 2012 at Brigham Young University.

The conference schedule is available at https://sites.google.com/site/mormonconceptionsofapostasy/.

The notion of an apostasy from the primitive gospel and the original church has been a key animating feature in Mormonism since its inception and in other ?religions of the book.? Apostasy as a concept, however, has proven to be tremendously fluid, with individual, institutional, communal, and historical meanings and applications all proliferating in religious thought throughout the ages. Fifteen faithful Mormon scholars from many scholarly backgrounds and methodologies, will explore the concept of apostasy in various historical and religious contexts as we consider how to narrate apostasy in ways that remain historically authentic and cohere with Mormon theology. Proceedings will be published by Greg Kofford Press in the series Perspectives on Mormon Theology.

This conference is organized by Miranda Wilcox, assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, with financial assistance from an Eliza R. Snow Faculty Grant.

Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Introduction

Greetings, Juvenile Instructor readers! Matt B (one of your permabloggers) asked if I would be willing to do a bit of a guest stint as a blogger. I?m currently in a PhD program in systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, and teach as an instructor at Georgetown. Because I?m LDS, I?ve been asked to teach a class this semester on Mormonism, which I?ve titled ?Mormonism: A New World Religion.? This series of posts will be about my experience teaching the course. The title is supposed to have a bit of a double meaning. First, it?s a religion from the New World, one of the few (discounting the bewildering variety of Christianities) that originated in the New World. Second, sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has predicted that Mormonism will be the next world religion to emerge since Islam.

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Notes on the Pew Survey.

Between October 25 and November 16 of last year, researchers for the Pew Forum interviewed 1,019 Americans who identified themselves as “Mormon.” That point is key.

There was surprise among the researchers and advisory board (including myself), and no doubt among the General Authorities when it turned out that 77% of Mormons in America attend church every week, because it is received common knowledge among most who care about such things that the actual rate of attendance (and tithepaying &etc) is nowhere near this high.

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Come October We Will Bid Goodbye to Elder Jensen as LDS Church Historian

He will be given Emeritus status at the October General Conference and Elder Steven E. Snow will become the new Church Historian.

I don’t know a lot about Elder Snow, but I do know that Elder Jensen will be sorely missed. He has been a tremendous advocate for Church History and those who have had even the most passing personal contact with him know him to be a genuine gem of a person.

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Panel Summary: “Teaching Mormonism in the Digital Age”

I spent this last weekend at the annual American Historical Association meeting and since the American Society of Church History is an affiliated organization and holds its meeting concurrently, I was able to sit in on the Mormon History Association panel entitled “Teaching Mormonism in the Digital Age.” What follows is a summary of the presentations given. Jan Shipps chaired the panel with Kathleen Flake, Patrick Mason, and Peter Thuesen participating. Jonathan Moore was supposed to participate, but ultimately was not able to make it. Dr. Flake tried to incorporate some aspects from his paper into her own. For me, the most exciting part of the panel involved the glimpses of Dr. Flake’s upcoming work which looks to be groundbreaking.  This rather long summary is from handwritten notes, so I make no claims to it being a perfect representation of the presenters’ ideas. Any mistakes are my own. I hope you enjoy.

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Mormon Books in the Wall Street Journal

(cross-posted at Religion in American History)

In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Samuel Brown, professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah, friend of the JI, and author of the recently-released In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012), penned a short annotated list of “the five best” books on Mormonism, which included the following:

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Recently Published and Forthcoming Mormon History Books, 2011 Edition (Also: JI’s 1000th Post!)

UPDATES: See comments: 1, 13, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 28.

It’s time for the yearly round up of recently published and forthcoming Mormon history books. See last year’s list here. Be sure to also check out Ben’s recap of significant scholarship in 2011 and Stapley’s Christmas Gift Book Guide. Be sure to let me know what I missed in the comments. Rumors about book projects are always welcome! Finally, according to the WordPress stats, this is our 1000th published post. Not a bad milestone for any blog.

Arthur H. Clark & Oklahoma University Press

Gregory K. Armstrong, Matthew J. Grow, Dennis J. Siler. Parley P. Pratt and the Making of Mormonism. (AHC 2011)

James C. Work. Don?t Shoot the Gentile. (OUP 2011) ?A witty memoir of a non-Mormon teacher?s rookie years in Utah?

Call for Applicants: Paper Prizes in Communal Studies

Passed along from JI friend Matt Grow:

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN INDIANA CENTER FOR COMMUNAL STUDIES CENTER PRIZE

The Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana announces its annual prize competition for the best undergraduate and graduate student paper on historic or contemporary communal groups, intentional communities and utopias.

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Book Review: Mason, Patrick Q. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

In The Mormon Menace, Patrick Mason adeptly traces the contours of anti-Mormonism in the late nineteenth-century South and explains how proselytizing, polygamy, and extra-legal violence shaped the South’s response to Mormonism. Mason attends to the ways in which southern honor, defined by a communal estimation of the individual and often deployed to protect or avenge the virtuous female, provided justification for illicit actions against Mormon missionaries. While granting that anti-Mormon violence paled in comparison to racial and political attacks against African Americans, Mason contends that “Mormonism was unique in the way it inspired southerners to set aside general norms of civility and religious tolerance” (13).

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Graduate Studies, Mormonism, and the Bloggernacle: A Survey

From Patrick Mason:

At the January 2012 meeting of the American Society for Church History, I’ll be on a panel called “Teaching Mormonism in a Digital Age.” In my comments I’ll be considering the impact of the “bloggernacle” on Mormon studies, specifically in regard to the current generation of graduate students. I have designed the following questionnaire to get a better handle on why people read Mormon blogs and what they get out of them. The questionnaire is for any graduate student, full or part time, LDS or non-LDS, in any academic field. The informed consent form on the first page will explain more, or you can contact me at patrick.mason@cgu.edu with any questions. Thanks for participating.

The link to survey is found here.