Is the Jewish Comparison a Helpful One?

Note: the following books and article discussed are no by no me representative of the studies that look at Judaism and Mormonism in contrast. They are studies I happened to come across in my early days of reading about Mormon history. For example, I do not discuss Armand Mauss?s  All Abraham?s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (2003) because it was simply not a book I read until later in grad school. Also, while I am very interested in the discussing about Mormonism as an ethnicity, I don?t feel too qualified to discuss in such a brief post. Plus, it?s already been covered here at JI back in 2008 here and here.

During my seventy-two hour self-imposed house arrest during the latest snowpocalypse here in Michigan and the POLAR VORTEX!!! (OK those will be my only references to the weather), I had extra time to develop my first lecture for the American Jewish History class I am teaching this semester. I had the chance to sit through the class a few years and was very interested by one of the questions posed to the class: are Jews a nation, ethnicity, religion, race, or all of the above? The question is a provocative one and assumedly has varying answers depending on what sort of group you asking and what region/area you are asking it in.  I am sure there may be different answers in a religious studies class versus a history class, as well. I don?t remember they?re being a specific reached consensus on the answer from the class I sat in on, but I do remember they?re being arguments and understandings for a variety of answers.

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Help! Designing a Writing Course: Model Texts and Topic Suggestions

Next week, I am going to be attending a course on how to teach writing in preparation for teaching English 125, Writing and Academy Inquiry next fall. The goal of the course is to teach students how to write in a variety of genres and to create complex, analytic arguments. Although most of the graduate students teaching the course are English PhDs, every year they ask a few PhD candidates from other departments to teach a section. Hence – me! One of our first assignments is to bring in an example of excellent writing from our field. I am torn about what to bring in. My first thought was Linda King Newell and Valeen Avery’s Mormon Enigma, which has a tenderness to it rarely seen in academy writing. But then, I saw Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre in stack of books a friend was assigning to her undergraduates next fall. After talking with the JI folks on the backlist, I decided that it might be fun to turn to the bloggernacle for ideas. What do you think are the best written books in both Mormon history and history in general? Also, what should I teach? Part of me wants to do a course on witchcraft and religion but I’ve also thought having the students research and write histories of Mormonism in Michigan. The topic could be almost anything. A friend of mine who works on Catholicism in Italy taught his on “Death and Dying.” Morbid, I know!

I’m looking forward to any and all suggestions.

My Toolkit

In chatting with some of the JI crew about what sorts of tools we use in research and writing, I thought it might be interesting to post about how we do things. I consider myself fairly technically proficient. I can design and maintain websites and have some coding experience. But as you will see in my research and writing, I am perhaps a little old-school.

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup ? Welcome to 2014

Here is the first Mormon Studies Roundup of the year — a summary of news, research and announcements.

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The JI Kids Go to the AHA

Hi everyone,

The Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association will take place in Washington D.C., from January 2 – 5, 2014. It will be meeting jointly with the American Society of Church Historians. Several JIers will be presenting. The dates, times, and descriptions (when available) of their presentations are as follows:

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Breastfeeding at the AHA: Nursing Mothers and Academic Conferences

Note: I haven?t been purposefully lewd in this post, but if you find discussions of women?s body parts and nursing uncomfortable, you should 1) probably never have a kid and 2) not read this post.

A few days ago, I decided to look at the program for the 2014 Meeting of the American Historical Association where I?ll be presenting in a few weeks. One of the things that surprised me was that they have a nursing room. As a mother of an almost entirely breastfed infant (no formula but she ate her first spoonful of pureed carrots the other day), my first thought was SCORE! Honestly, I have been to too many conferences that offered little to no support for young mothers in attendance. Typically, you are on your own to find a plug-in for your breast pump that is anywhere near the conference sessions, and the conference hotel may or not have a refrigerator to store pumped milk. The conference schedule is also usually too jam-packed to allow you to attend more than one session in a row without being so full that your breasts hurt.

As I look forward to AHA, I thought it might be helpful to me and other nursing mothers to create a document full of advice for new moms who may be attending their first conference.

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A Review of Sheri Dew’s “Women and the Priesthood”

Sheri Dew?s recently released Women and the Priesthood: What One Mormon Woman Believes (Deseret 2013) comes on the heels of an eventful year for liberal Mormon women. The day(s) of Pants, the petitions for women to pray in conference, and the launching of Ordain Women?s official site, among other events, have provoked widespread discussion on the well-worn but still dimly understood topic of women and the priesthood.

Women and the Priesthood, despite the title, isn?t so much an attempt to answer questions about women?s lack of priesthood authority (ordination), the nature of the priesthood, or the relationship between gender and the priesthood, so much as it is an attempt to discuss women?s general status and participation in the Church. This is important to note, since readers approaching the book with the former questions in mind will most likely be disappointed. Dew dedicates only one chapter to the topic of women and the priesthood, packed between seven other ?contextual? or ?foundation-laying? chapters, which highlight ways women should understand their eternal role, identity, and relationship to God and the Church.

It is clear early on that Dew?s imagined audience is split between those who think women have no significance in the Church (i.e. uninformed outsiders or members who are missing the picture) and those wishing to defend women?s current position in LDS belief and practice. As a result of this polarization, a considerable population is excluded: active, faithful members who are uneasy with or puzzled about the relationships between women, gender, and the priesthood, as currently practiced or discussed by the Church.

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Death and Loss in La’ie

A few years ago at a meeting of the Mormon History Association, Lisa Tait suggested that I read Susa Young Gates? novel The Little Missionary. It was a barely fictionalized account of Susa?s experiences as a missionary wife in L??ie, a small Mormon community in Hawai?i focused on the production of sugar cane. Lisa felt that the novel would offer me insight into daily life on the plantation ? the difficulty of eating Hawaiian food, the close relationships that developed between the men and women stationed there, and the gossip that sometimes circulated around the small community. It wasn?t until a few days ago, however, that I finally found the novel, which had been serialized in the Juvenile Instructor, and began to read.

Most of the novel is a light, cheerful exploration of the difficulties that white women as missionaries. Using a Mary Jane character, Susa describes the nausea that had greeted her on her way to the islands and the initial distrust of her children towards poi, mangos, and other Hawaiian foods. She also describes meeting the Hawaiian queen and watching Hawaiian Mormons pounding kapa cloth. Not all of the novel, however, has a jovial tone. While she was living in Hawai?i, two of her sons died of ?diphtheritric croup.?

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Mormon Studies in Unexpected Places: Volume 1 – Veronica Mars

What follows is the first entry in what I intend to be an occasional, not-at-all regular, sporadic series here at the Juvenile Instructor: Mormon Studies in Unexpected Places. The basic idea is fairly straightforward: to identify instances in which Mormon Studies authors and/or their books, articles, etc. make an unexpected appearance in popular culture, political discourse, etc. 

In the third-to-last episode of the final season of Veronica Mars, a television show that aired from 2004-2007 on the CW about a witty, sarcastic, and smart high school student (and, in the final season, college freshman) who helps her private investigator dad solve crimes, the show’s eponymous star (played by Kristen Bell) is browsing the stacks in the fictional Hearst College’s library. There, she runs into her on-again, off-again boyfriend Logan Echolls, and somewhat sarcastically asks if he is “boning up on [his] South American culture? Conversational Portuguese, perhaps?” (a reference to Logan’s planned upcoming summer surf trip to Brazil.)

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Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup: The “Really?!” Edition

My world is crashing down around me. Things I never thought would happen are happening: A federal court has declared that Utah?s anti-polygamy law is unconstitutional and the LDS Church has produced a statement admitting that the priesthood ban was largely the result of nineteenth-century racism. The Salt Lake Tribune lauded the church for its decision to publish the essay as part of a series answering questions about its beliefs. In Religion and Politics, Max Mueller was similarly optimistic about the effects of the essay. He sees the document as the repudiating the church?s racist past and officially addressing the ban?s origins in statements by leaders like Brigham Young. For him, it is a monumental document that represents the beginnings of a sea change in the church?s positions on race. Other commenters have been less optimistic. Gina Colvin argued on her blog that the priesthood ban and ideas that African Americans had been less valiant in the preexistence had been taught as doctrine and as such, deserved to be addressed in General Conference rather than in a letter hidden on the church?s website. In a podcast with Dan Wotherspoon, Margaret Young, and Janan Graham, she further argued that the essay had been written from the perspective of the institutional church and failed to provide readers with the stories and voices of those who had been marginalized by the priesthood ban. Colvin has not been the statement?s only critic. At Young Mormon Feminists, Nick Lindsey suggests that the document creates a fiction that church leaders were always working towards racial equality rather than participating in and furthering racist discourses that relegated African Americans to the margins of Mormon society. KUTV released a fairly tempered article suggesting that the church?s statement was the result of a desire to answer questions that were arising because of information available on the Internet. Although the article did not address claims that the document represented a change in the church?s position on the priesthood ban, its analysis was less jubilant some of the others that have addressed the issue this week.

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