Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Thanks to Brooke LeFevre for this review!

            It did not take long after I started reading The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth for me to be completely hooked. Really, it was on page 6 in the Introduction. Barr told the story of what inspired her to write the book—her husband’s dismissal from his job as a youth pastor. Barr, a historian of medieval Christianity, had long recognized issues with the idea of Biblical womanhood as it was taught in her Southern Baptist faith, but she had stayed silent for a myriad of reasons. Finally, she could not stay silent anymore. Barr wrote, “By staying silent, I had become part of the problem. Instead of making a difference, I had become complicit in a system that used the name of Jesus to oppress and harm women.”[1]

            For me, those sentences spoke to an internal wrestle I was already having. You see, I had been thinking a lot about Eliza R. Snow. Eliza is, I think, a fascinating case study for the negotiations of patriarchy within nineteenth-century Mormonism.[2] Snow was not what we would consider a feminist. She did not believe in equality between men and women. She upheld the authority of men in the church over women and she taught that wives should submit to their husbands. However, she had a powerful voice within the church and used her voice to help dismantle or counter some patriarchal teachings and encourage women to obtain educations, pursue careers, contribute to the economy, and other things that we might look back on and praise for their feminist underpinnings. Eliza made a real difference in the church. But at what cost? Eliza, it seems, had to uphold the authority and superiority of male power within the church to be given space for her voice to be heard. She was, to some degree, complicit in a system that oppressed women.[3]

            I had been wondering if that was still true today. Do women in the LDS Church today still have to support patriarchal systems to have a voice? Is the possibility of having a powerful enough voice to enact real change worth the risk of complicity in an oppressive system? I still do not have answers to those questions. But Barr’s book inspired me to think more critically about ideas surrounding womanhood within Christianity.

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“After This, Nothing Happened”: Doing (Mormon) History in the Anthropocene

Thanks to Stephen Betts for this stimulating post!

“The inability to conceive of its own devastation will tend to be the blind spot of any culture.”

                                                                                                —Jonathan Lear[1]

Chief Plenty Coups: Visions at the “End of History”

In the late 1920s, only a few years before his death, the great Crow chief Plenty Coups related his life’s history to his friend, the white ethnographer Frank Bird Linderman, who recorded that,

Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. ‘I have not told you half of what happened when I was young,’ he said, when urged to go on. ‘I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.’[2]

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Some Mormon Theology in Shusaku Endo’s Silence

Reading Endo’s Silence, recently made into a movie by Martin Scorsese, I was stuck by a mention of a Mormon theological concept. The story takes place in early seventeenth-century Japan, so it doesn’t mention Mormons specifically, but does mention a Mormon idea when discussing the theology of the Japanese Christians.

Silence focusses on Jesuit priests Rodrigues and Garrpe sailing to Japan after having heard that their mentor and hero, father Ferreira, had apostatized under torture. Silence is based on the history the harsh measures the Japanese government took toward crushing Japanese Christianity after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1638, driving Christianity there underground. Endo based the characters of Rodrigues and Ferreira on the actual Jesuit priests, Chiara and Ferreira, who did apostatize during the persecution. Endo himself came out of the Japanese Catholic community who saw the Japanese “Hidden Christians” as heroes and the apostate priests and not truly committed. Endo thus novelizes these Jesuits’ stories.

The Mormon theology comes in the buildup to the climax of the story after the Japanese capture Rodrigues and bring him to Ferreira so that Ferreira can convince Rodrigues to apostatize. Ferreira first begins by explaining the tortures he’s undergone before moving to his central arguments: “The one thing I know is that our religion does not take root in this country” (157). Rodrigues protests that the plant has been torn up and that Christianity flourished in Japan before the crackdown.

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JOB: Public Humanities Fellow at New York Historical Society

The New-York Historical Society invites candidates with a humanities MA or PhD to apply for the position of Public Humanities Fellow in connection with the traveling exhibit Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West, which opens at the New-York Historical Society in New York City in November 2022. 
We are looking for candidates with significant expertise in 19th century religion, particularly as it relates to Native American religion and spirituality. Applicants must have graduated from a humanities MA or PhD program (including public history and museum studies) within the last five years, and have a desire to practice publicly engaged scholarship. This is a two-year, full-time position, with the anticipated dates of Sept. 2021 through Aug. 2023, and the possibility of remote work during the first year. The position comes with a National Endowment for the Humanities stipend of $50,000 per year plus benefits. Some travel may be required.Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the position is filled. For more information and to apply for the fellowship, click here. 

2021 Joseph Smith Papers Conference

To commemorate the upcoming completion of the Revelations and Translations series, which includes the breadth of Joseph Smith’s revelation and translation projects, the Joseph Smith Papers Project will host the fifth annual Joseph Smith Papers Conference on September 10, 2021. The conference will be broadcast digitally to allow for both local and global participation from presenters and audience members. (This was also the format of the 2020 conference.) The theme for this year’s conference is “Joseph Smith and Sacred Text in Nineteenth-Century America.” 

This event is free to attend, but space is limited. Please register only if you plan to attend; your courtesy will help us keep this conference series free.

Find the program and registration links here: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/2021-joseph-smith-papers-conference-registration.

Workshop: Latter-day Saint Philosophy Project

Inaugural Latter-day Saint Philosophy Project Workshop

Conference Venue:

Brigham Young University, United States

Details

Call for Latter-day Saint Philosophy Incubator Workshop

We invite submission of abstracts for a hybrid workshop on any aspect of philosophy that engages with the Latter-day Saint faith. Each accepted speaker will give a 15-minute presentation of their work in progress, followed by a 25-30 minute question-and-answer session. The goal of this workshop is to help develop early-stage ideas into publishable form. We expect that submitted abstracts are for projects in this early stage of development, and hope the workshop can serve the authors in their aim to bring their ideas to fruition.

Submissions are open to all, but those by early career researchers and those developing ideas in underexplored areas of Latter-day Saint philosophy are especially welcome. Submissions may be sent to ldsphilosophyproject@gmail.com. They should be no longer than 500 words, prepared for blind review, and accompanied by a title page including author information. Abstracts should be submitted by July 14th, 2021, 11:59 PM Eastern Time. Accepted speakers will be notified by August 1st, 2021.

The conference will be held on Sept 17-18, 2021 at Brigham Young University.  We will accommodate speakers whose abstracts have been selected but cannot attend in person by enabling zoom presentations. Those with questions may contact us at ldsphilosophyproject@gmail.com.

What Hath Theory to Do With (Mormon) History?

This guest post comes from stephen b., a Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He writes about religion in public life, secularism, modernity, and the Progressive Era. He also hosts the Mormon Studies podcast Scholars & Saints.

While historians can do their work largely not reliant on “high theory,” theory can’t do its work without the contingency and specificity of history. In her book The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood talks about the embodied religious practices of Egyptian Muslim women in the piety movement of the Islamic Revival during the mid-1990s. By analyzing the conditions under which these women became subjects through embodied practices such as arguing, reading, memorizing, teaching, and so forth, Mahmood illustrated concretely why theories of agency and subject formation in the work of Judith Butler are problematic in the ways that they epistemologically exclude possibilities of agency that do not center on the feminist/liberal assumption that freedom is constitutive of agency (Nor do they acknowledge the need to ground, as Mahmood says, “a theory” in concrete examples).

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MHA 2021 Awards

Congratulations to all of the winners!

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2022 MHA CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS

Theme: Landscape, Art and Religion: The Intermountain West and the World

For its 57th Annual Conference in Logan, Utah, the Mormon History Association has joined forces with the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts to create a program that we hope will bring an art element into the sessions. We have selected a theme which we believe will evoke provocative historical papers and also suggest art topics, meaning all the arts: literature, visual art, music, film, theater, architecture, design, and so forth.

The theme, “Landscape, Art, and Religion: The Intermountain West and the World,” grows out of the assumption that the natural environment shapes culture and society. Social organization, the economy, and artistic expression are formed and directed by the landscapes in which they rest. During the first century of Mormon settlement, the intermountain landscape influenced many aspects of human life In the twentieth century, the Intermountain West remained the heartland of Latter-day Saint culture, but church members had to adapt to other landscapes, cultural and physical, as Mormonism expanded around the globe.

The program committee invites scholars young and old, local and global, to investigate all aspects of this theme. Because of the collaboration with the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, we hope many will take the occasion to explore artistic dimensions of society and culture. How are the riches and the tensions of Mormonism’s natural settings manifest in literature, music, the visual arts, film, and all the other art disciplines?

Of course, as always, sessions on all aspects of Mormon history are welcomed. We hope to attract the best current scholarship. Though individual papers will be given full consideration, proposals for complete sessions, whose participants reflect MHA’s ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion, are most likely to be accepted.

Please submit (1) a 300-word abstract for each paper or presentation and (2) a one-page CV for each presenter, including email and cell phone contact information Full session proposals should include the session title and a 150-word abstract outlining the session’s theme, along with a confirmed chair and commentator or moderator, as applicable. Individuals may only be included as presenters in one proposal per conference. Previously published papers are not eligible for presentation at MHA. Limited financial assistance for travel and lodging at the conference is available to student presenters and some international presenters. Proposals from international presenters or others who cannot attend the meeting in person will be considered for the online version of the conference.  All presenters—including poster session presenters and online presenters—must be MHA members and registered for the conference format (in-person or online) in which they present.

The deadline for proposals is November 15, 2021. Send proposals to the program co-chairs at logan2022@mormonhistoryassociation.org as a single PDF. Acknowledgment of receipt will be sent immediately. Notification of acceptance/rejection will be made by January 15, 2022.

Postdoctoral Fellowship: University of Virginia Mormon Studies

The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia invites candidates to apply for a post-doctoral Research Associate position. The Research Associate conducts research and supports academic and public events related to the study of religion. Duties will include administrative tasks in support of research activities, the Forum on Democracy and Religion, the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion, and the Mormon Studies Program. The Research Associate will coordinate public events and academic meetings and provide communications and budgetary support. The position may also involve teaching academic courses and an opportunity to present research. This job is ideal for someone who thrives in a higher education environment, has an interest in the study of religion, especially but not limited to American religion and Mormonism. [ADDED LATER: POSITION BEGINS ON 8/24/2021]

Requirements:

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