I picked up the latest issue of Fides et Historia last week and was pleased to find an article by JI’s own Matt Bowman. The paper, entitled “The Crisis of Mormon Christology: History, Progress, and Protestantism, 1880-1930,” is an expansion of what Matt initially presented at the 2007 Summer Seminar, and examines “how Mormon visions of Christ changed during a period in which their experience of culture was simultaneously destructive and creative: the tumultuous years around the turn of the century, which witnessed both the destruction of polygamy (and the utopian society it represented) and a forcible reconciliation with the United States.”[1]
On December 10, 2008 Benchmark Books hosted a lecture/book signing with George Smith for his newly released Navuoo Polygamy: “But We Called It Celestial Marriage”. We hope to have a review up soon of this book. In the mean time, we want to provide a transcript of the proceedings. Special thanks go to Brent Brizzi for his painstaking work in providing a transcription of the evening’s lecture.
James Twitchell. Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to In Your Face. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. 324 pp.
James Twitchell, professor of English and Advertising at The University of Florida, explains on his website that his research interests include the effort to “interpret American culture in terms of commercialism.”
I am making my way through Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. I’ve skimmed through most of it before, but because it is the primary text to be used for a course I’m TAing next semester, I’m taking my time and more thoroughly analyzing the book.
I just finished The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin, 2006), an 800-page tome by Niall Ferguson, the Lawrence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. [Tisch and Hoover, an interesting pair of sponsors.] Ferguson recounts the violent first half of the 20th century with reference to nations (in the classical sense of “peoples” or, more modernly, ethnic groups) rather than states, but doesn’t leave much hope for improvement as we move through the first half of the 21st century. I’ll throw out a lifeline [hint: religion] in the closing paragraph.
The now-common question, “Are Mormons Christian?” (and it’s various derivations, i.e. “Is Mormonism Christian?”; “Are anti-Mormons Christian?”; etc) has generated significant discussion, thoughtful analysis, contentious argument, and unfortunately quite a bit of immaturity, pettiness, and frustration among Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christians, and interested apologists and scholars over the years.
As an academic historian (in training), when I write about the dead for work or for the Juvenile Instructor, I don methodological goggles, like naturalism, skepticism, how-will-this-affect-my-careerism, and any-color-but-rose-ism. When finished, however, I remove those goggles, storing them safely on my utility belt for future use. Today, in this time of thanksgiving, I approach the blog and the dead we study with a set of lenses I normally use only in private or at church.
Having recently completed my Preliminary exams, and thus ended my self-imposed blogging moratorium, I have decided to put up a first offering in a series of posts regarding the ethnicity paradigm and Mormon identity.
Mormonism has a rich textual culture. Our meetings and teaching and studying are filled with encounters with the written word, and especially the holy word contained in scripture. In addition, many Mormons are prodigious readers and seekers of wisdom out of the best books that Mormonism and the world have to offer (perfectly illustrated by Dave?s Getting Hooked post and the accompanying responses).
Michael Crichton passed away this week. As a measure of the stature he has attained in popular culture, the news penetrated the roar of a presidential election to make a headline or two in just about every media source. One that caught my eye is “Michael Crichton got my son hooked on reading.” Yup, I remember reading The Terminal Man as a kid and thinking it was sort of different — it was science fiction, but without ray guns or spaceships. But science fiction is an easy hook compared with history. This being a history blog, the question we need to ask is: When did you get hooked on history? What was the first history book that made you sheepishly approach the reference desk at the local library and say, “Did this guy write any other books?”
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Glen Larson on CFP: Book of Mormon: “Please add me to your mailing list. Thanks”
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Kathy Cardon on Legacies in Mormon Studies: “I worked in the Church's Historical department when Jenny was in the Museum. I always enjoyed our interactions. Reading this article has been a real…”
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