By March 10, 2014
A couple of years ago, I was reading David Hall?s edited volume Lived Religion, and ruminated a bit on my reading along with a request for suggested volumes. For practice month here at the JI (deep in my heart it is really ritual/liturgy month), I wanted to similarly open up with a discussion of two books that have influenced my current study of Mormon liturgy, and then ask for your advice.
By March 9, 2014
Hello and welcome to this week’s Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup! As always, if we missed something, please let us know in the comments.
If you’re looking for a great volume to teach material religion, Samira K. Mehta has a review of A History of Religion in 5 ½ Objects.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf spoke at the BYU Church History and Doctrine/LDS Church History Department’s Symposium. He told the audience, among other things, “Truth and transparency complement each other,” he said. “We always need to remember that transparency and openness keep us clear of the negative side effects of secrecy or the cliché of faith-promoting rumors.” Jana Reiss also has an excellent writeup on what she calls “this breath of fresh air.” If you attended the symposium, let us know your thoughts on the speakers!
Neylan McBaine is calling for women’s experiences working with ward and stake leadership for a future book project. If you have any experiences, positive or negative, please be sure to let Neylan know. Her project is sure to be useful in the academic sphere for those interested in Mormon religious practice.
Along those same lines, the New York Times published another article on Mormon women. The article addresses, among other things, holding children during baby blessings and the confession/church court process (and its lack of women in the process for other women). The LDS Church’s Newsroom blog re-blogged the first piece in its “Getting It Right Series.” It’ll be interesting to see if this one is as well.
The Society for the History of Women in the Americas is is hosting a writing workshop for postgraduate students on Wednesday 11th December at UCL, Institute of the Americas. Those interested should e-mail the organizers; their address is found in the link.
“The Bible in American Life” is a national study by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. The purpose of the study is to understand better how Americans use the Bible in their personal daily lives and how other influences, including religious communities and the Internet, shape individuals’ use of scripture. Apparently most Americans agree with J. Reuben Clark, whether they care or not, and use the KJV more than any other translation of the Bible.
If you’re in the UK April 3-5, you can hear our own Christopher present on itinerant Methodist preachers in British North America and the Carribean. For those interested in Mormons, be sure to check out Benjamin Lindquist?s presentation on “Mission, Migration, and Memory: Childhood and the Latter-Day Saints’ Trek to Salt Lake City.”
Finally, Matthew Garrett, who has shared his thoughts on the convergence of Mormon and Native American History, was interviewed this week about the Indian Placement Program in the 1970s. It was not discontinued until 2000 when the last student graduated.
Let us know what we missed. We would also love to hear about your experience at the symposium!
By March 5, 2014
Cooking? situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other?The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation.[1]
Bread is the only food that I have ever prepared that was alive when I placed it in the oven. Unlike other edibles that we cook, bread contains the breath of life. It takes in air, it changes form and it grows and shrinks. Food writers and historians assert that ?entire civilizations are implied in a loaf of bread? ? humans, plants, micro-organisms, agriculture, technologies, social structures and economies are all kneaded together.[2] Bread-making is a process of transformation which is perhaps why it has been so tied to religious practice. In 19th century Utah, its role as a staple meant that its preparation was an important part of daily life. It was also an essential part of Mormon ritual that was invested with significance as a symbol of death, resurrection, priesthood and covenants.
By March 3, 2014
The study of American religion ain’t what it used to be. Not so many decades ago, most scholars had a rather, shall we say, circumscribed view of what it meant to do religious history. Most were preoccupied with the development of religious institutions (in other words, white Protestant churches), with the elite leaders who led those institutions, and sometimes with the formal theological agendas that those leaders articulated. All of those conventions, however, have been overturned more or less recently, and scholarship today is much more inclusive, more democratic, and more attuned to dimensions of the human experience. Much of the old model, as we now can clearly see, rested on Protestant notions about the nature of what constituted “religion” to begin with, and so the process of revision has entailed coming to grips with these subtending assumptions.
By March 2, 2014
The main news items for this week are all the up coming events. Matt McBride is giving a lecture on early Mormon female missionaries for the John A. Witsoe Lecture Series this Tuesday, March 4, in Logan. This Thursday and Friday is the Church History Symposium on The Worldwide Church: The Global Reach of Mormonism. Thursday at BYU; Friday in Salt Lake. BYU also has a full slate of events planned for women’s history month. And speaking of Mormon academic conferences, registration for this year’s MHA in San Antonio is now open.
A new gospel-topics entry was posted on the church’s website: this time on Mormon ideas about deification. ABC ran an article on it. Furthermore, the New York Times ran an article on Mormon women, and this article from the Huffington Post didn’t focus on Mormonism per se but did give us a nice picture of the temple.
The big news, of course, is that Jimmer is now playing for the Bulls.
Finally, Savannah Reid, an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, is doing research on Mormon womanhood for her senior capstone and needs people to take this survey.
By February 28, 2014
In 1964, D. P. Walker declared that scholars have neglected ?the revival of interest in the early, pre-Nicene Fathers of the Church,? Origen in particular.[1] In his book, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment, Walker details the centrality of Origen to the rise of Universalism in the late seventeenth century.
In that same year, Francis Yates published her much more influential Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Yates?s work overshadowed Walker?s, not only his brilliant Decline of Hell, but his equally competent Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (1958) and The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (1972). Whereas Walker emphasized the importance of Plato, Christian Platonism, and the Fathers, Yates overshadowed all this with her hermetic thesis that treated Western esotericism as something other to Christianity and focused on the Corpus Hermeticum, a text of limited importance to that tradition.
By February 24, 2014
Note: The description of the Salt Lake City lesbian community comes from Vern and Bonnie Bullough?s ?Lesbian in the 1920s and 1930s: A Newfound Study,? which appeared in the Summer 1977 issue of Signs.
As part of a course I am taking on public history, we are writing an application to make the Henry Gerber house in Chicago a National Historic Landmark. Gerber was a German immigrant who founded the first gay rights organization in Chicago in the 1930s. He was a cantankerous man who was exasperated by the inability of his organization to attract people more respectable than a laundry queen, an impoverished preacher, and an employee of the railroad. When I took the class, I assumed that it would have very little to do with my dissertation research, which focuses on nineteenth-century Mormon missionary work. I was surprised when a historical consultant, who was visiting class to help us strategies ways to maximize the chances that the application would be accepted, mentioned that there had been a lesbian club in Salt Lake City in the 1920s.
I looked up surprised and asked, ?Really??
By February 23, 2014
For your enjoyment, this week’s edition of the MSWR.
By February 19, 2014
In one of the most exciting days of the year for Mormon history geeks, the Mormon History Association posted a preliminary program for the 2014 conference (pdf), which will take place June 5-8 in San Antonio, Texas. I’ll let you read through it all and find whatever niche papers you are most excited about, but below you will find the plenary addresses along with the papers being delivered by your ol’ pals here at JI.
By February 18, 2014
Last week a new Doctrine and Covenants seminary manual popped up on lds.org. My pragmatic self tends to try and manage expectations with new manuals, but I was pleased to see a new chapter on “The Utah War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre” with most of the chapter focusing on the massacre. The prior seminary manual (2001) included nary a mention of the massacre.[1] This manual also includes a quite extensive chapter on plural marriage (extensive in comparison to other chapters).
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