Why I am a Tory

Admin: Guest post by Russell.

Perhaps it is the heretical imp in me, but I have often shifted in my seat uncomfortably as I sit in classes at BYU and in the church house while folks accept as axiomatic all the talk about the American revolution as merely the harbinger of the Restoration. The argument goes like this: the gospel could not be established in a land of tyranny, it is argued. Whatever the errors or skeletons of our founding fathers (if they be admitted at all), they served as Cyrus figures for the Saints. They were “wise men” who helped to shake the shackles of tyranny from the colonists (“shake” here should be read as war and destruction of human life–just so we’re on the same page). I have two problems with this: 1) I hate war. Elder McConkie is correct: war is one of the greatest tools of Satan and 2) while no nation is free from the blood of innocents, for being the land of freedom, America has not been kind to LDS ideals to say nothing of the LDS people. To soothe my theo-ideological angst, I sometimes engage in a rather subversive counterfactual: could the Lord have carried out the restoration in a British America?

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The 2009 Mormon History Association Annual Conference: Notes From Day 1

We greet you from Springfield, Illinois, the Land of Lincoln.  It’s been a good conference so far.  We’ve here combined our notes from the respective sessions we attended. Our notes are fragmentary, but will give our readers a sense of the presentations.

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MHA Conference-Housekeeping Items/Things To Look For

Well, this week the Mormon History Association Conference will be in full swing at Springfield, Illinois. The preliminary program is here.

Panel Changes:

There has been at least one change to the schedule that you should be made aware of. The panel I’m a part of with Paul Reeve and Stan Thayne has moved to 2B, Friday 2:00 to 3:30 pm. It had been on Saturday.  Presumably (we haven’t gotten any definite word), our panel switched with Chris, Ed and Mark Brown’s panel, which would place them in our old spot of 6A.  So, be tuned to that and come out to see us!

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Passionate Stability: Polygamy, Dating, and the Creation of Modern Mormon Gender

Admin: Guest post by Russell.

*A caveat: I am taking a conscious cue from Richard Hofstadter–this is a line of inquiry rather than a footnote-drenched piece of archive-based scholarship.

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Joseph Smith and Poetry-Prophecy

If to some it seems presumptuous to call Joseph Smith a prophet, it will probably seem downright asinine to suggest that he was a poet too. And yet that?s the proposition I?d like to put forward in this post. The typical narrative renders Joseph as the unlearned ploughboy that he was, who could, as Emma assures us, hardly write a well-worded letter. But anyone who?s looked at how Joseph actually spoke and wrote (including anyone who?s followed along at all in the Gospel Doctrine course recently) knows that he used language in some interesting ways, ways that for some reason we do not often see language being used nowadays in the Church.

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New Guest Blogger

Please join the JI in welcoming our newest guest blogger, Russell, who offers the following introduction:

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The Apostolic Authority of the Nineteenth Century Mormon Woman

Here’s another post authored by occasional guest blogger and friend to JI, Bored in Vernal. Enjoy!

I’ve been enthralled by the portrait of Mormon women painted by Edward W. Tullidge in his 1877 book The Women of Mormondom. He called them women of a new age, of new types of character, religious empire-founders, and even bestowed upon Mormon women the title “apostles.” Of course, the term “apostle” when associated with the female sex was not, in the late 1800’s, fraught with as much tension as it is today. Yet I was still interested to investigate the impulse which led Tullidge to employ this word when speaking of our nineteenth-century sisters.

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Community of Christ Historians (Part Two)

This post continues a typology of Community of Christ historians currently working in the field. Continuing with the Biblical theme, this post considers historians running in different directions?the Jonahs running away from the tradition and the Pauls who have had their road to Damascus experience and changed allegiances.

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Community of Christ Historians (Part One)

Historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith once quipped that ?a comparison is a disciplined exaggeration in the service of knowledge? (Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, p. 52). With this caveat in mind for what the comparative enterprise entails, at the invitation of the JI permabloggers, I?ve constructed a short typological overview of Community of Christ historians currently in the field. My schema is a bit artificial (there aren?t that many historians to classify in the first place), but I?ve done so simply to serve ?a useful end.? This short essay looks at four categories of CofC historians and highlights one or two representatives from each type: the priests (historians who work for the church), the Isaiahs (the faithful iconoclasts), the Jonahs (the disillusioned historians), and the Pauls (the converts).

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“The government is the devil”: Glenn Beck and Mormonism Redux

As a follow up to my post on Glenn Beck’s drawing upon a certain strain of Mormon apocalyptic folklore in articulating his political positions (and the mainstream media’s ignoring the influence of Beck’s religion on those positions), I thought readers might be interested in the latest instance illustrating it.

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