By Ryan T.May 14, 2009
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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By ChristopherMay 14, 2009
Please join the JI in welcoming our newest guest blogger, Russell, who offers the following introduction:
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By GuestMay 13, 2009
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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By David HowlettMay 9, 2009
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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By David HowlettMay 8, 2009
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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By ChristopherMay 5, 2009
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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By ChristopherMay 4, 2009
I?ve been surprised that the following recent events and statements have not received more attention from the bloggernacle. I thought I?d briefly announce and discuss them here, as I think they are relevant both to scholars interested in Mormonism and race/ethnicity and to Latter-day Saints whose lives these events affect in very real ways.
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By ChristopherApril 22, 2009
I came across this a few months ago, and have been waiting until Earth Day to post it. Since last year’s Earth Day post at the JI looked at a quote from 19th century Mormonism on the environment, I thought it would be appropriate to do something from the 20th century this year. In July 1991, the New Era included a brief article entitled “Planet Pleasing” in the “FYI: For Your Information” section of the teenage-oriented periodical. In addition to the sound and practical advice of the article, I’m intrigued by the author’s effort to connect with her teenage audience. Such lines as “It’s cool to save fuel” and “Gee … Try a Tree” (such profound poetry) suggest a conscious effort to make environmentalism sound cool to young readers (and check out the name of the fictional letter writer within the article … how clever).
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By Brett D.April 16, 2009
Over the past few years I have gone through a few large Mormon history research collections, including the Kenney Collection at BYU, the Stanley Ivins Collection at the Utah State Historical Society, and the D. Michael Quinn Collection at Yale. All of these collections have yielded immense amounts of information that I probably would not have come across elsewhere. The Kenney Collection contains boxes of notes from the First Presidency Papers, General Auxiliary Organization Board Minutes, and other materials that are restricted at the Church Archives. While the Ivins Collection does not contain as much information from restricted collections at the Church Archives, it is an important collection of notes from diaries and books written by people who visited Utah during the nineteenth century, many of which are obscure. And the Quinn Papers contain what is perhaps the gold mine of information from restricted Mormon archival materials, with notes from General Authority diaries, Quorum of the Twelve and Seventies Minutes, and notes from a vast number of other important Mormon sources.
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By ChristopherApril 14, 2009
I came across the following article while looking for something else in Samuel Brannan’s The Prophet yesterday. It was authored by Parley P. Pratt and published in May 1845. I had never heard of it or come across it anywhere else [1], and thought readers might find it useful (or at least entertaining).
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