By July 3, 2009
It was a productive summer for JI bloggers in 2008.
Enjoy these gems, remembering that there were many more great posts than these.
Be sure not to miss Posts You Might Have Missed January-February 2008 and March-May 2008.
By July 2, 2009
More great stuff, March and April 2008:
Posts You Might Have Missed From January-February 2008
Directions to the Steed Farm Please
By July 1, 2009
For those embroiled by the academic search for truth?who have suspended belief or lost faith or sought a new faith?the word is not doubt but hope, fierce and brave and full of anxious questions. A few poems today from beloved poetess Emma Lou Thayne.
By July 1, 2009
I realized I started a “Posts You Might Have Missed” series that was supposed to cull some memorable posts from our first year, but I only got through December, 2007. So, this is the first part of my atonement for dropping the ball on that, which will cover from January to February 2008. Enjoy with us this stroll down memory lane.
By June 24, 2009
I received the following in my email. I’ll post it since it’s a great documentary as well as being a great Mormon book store.
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 16, 2009
Charles L. Cohen is Professor of History and Religious Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions. He is the author of God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and the editor, with Paul S. Boyer, of Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Dr. Cohen was the 2005 Tanner Lecturer at the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association, and his lecture was published as “The Construction of the Mormon People,” Journal of Mormon History 32 (2006): 25-64. He is also the author of “No Man Knows My Psychology: Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith, and Psychoanalysis,” BYU Studies 44 (2005): 55-78. Additionally, he advised Spencer Fluhman’s 2006 PhD dissertation (“Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Antebellum America”), and is currently mentoring Jed Woodworth’s graduate studies at UW-Madison.
By June 15, 2009
Apropos of nothing: some numbers about millennial temples. To justify its place at JI, let’s call it an exercise in evaluating an agent’s perspective.
By June 15, 2009
Jeanne Halgren Kilde is the Director of the Religious Studies program at the University of Minnesota, where she earned her PhD. She is the author of two immensely important books: When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America, and more recently Sacred Power, Sacred Space: an introduction to Christian architecture and worship, and of several articles. The value of her work is only enhanced by her graciousness as a scholar and mentor. We’re immensely honored to have her offer her thoughts here on the recent BYU Sacred Space seminar, at which she participated.
Thank you to Matt for inviting me to contribute a few words to this blog. And thank you to everyone involved in the Sacred Space symposium, including the audience members. Everyone I met was enormously hospitable and generous.
By June 15, 2009
Rick Phillips, “Mormon Religiousness and the Enduring Significance of ‘Gathered’ Communities.” Phillips argued that having a dense population of Mormons contributes to religiousness and church activity and sees statistical evidence for decreased religousness among LDS in the Mormon Culture Region (Utah, Idaho, etc.) as LDS population density has decreased. Don’t miss notes from Massimo Introvigne on Mormonism and Twilight in Italy, Michael Homer on Oriana Fallaci and Anti-Mormonism, and Elder Robert S. Wood, and Iain Irving on Mormonism and Postmodernism/Modernism.
Utah has been characterized as the Mormon homeland where it dominates politics, etc. In July 2005, a Salt Lake Tribune article presented statistics that said the proportion of Utah’s citizens that were Mormon began declining in the 1980s. In a series following, the Tribune took time to follow up on this trend.
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