A Photographic Tour of JI at MHA 2013 (Plus Tweets!)

First, this link will take you to a storified post that includes a majority of the tweets from the conference. The format is obviously brief, but it helps capture immidiate reactions and poignant ideas. I have tried to both keep them chronological as well as organize them whenever they get too populated. And as you can see, the tweets slow down rather quickly after the first day.

I’m not offering any cogent thoughts on the conference—on the best papers, the biggest ideas, the common themes—mostly because my brain is still recovering from lots of great discussions and brilliant presentations. (Hopefully we’ll have more reflective posts in due time.) But for now, I can share pictures with brief captions. We sadly don’t have pictures of every JIer—but we came close. And all the great quality pictures come from Andrea RM; the crappy quality pictures come from my phone.

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Southwestern States Mission: Germans and Other Europeans

The Southwestern States Mission during the time of this study included significant populations of French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking citizens. A variety of other languages were also spoken. For the missionaries in this study (mostly in Texas), German was the most common non-English language encountered, followed by Polish. [1]

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2013 MHA Award Winners

JIers clean house.

As announced at this evening’s Awards Banquet in Layton, Utah:

Best Undergraduate Paper

? Joseph R. Stuart, “The Time Has Come: The Context and Post Script of the 1890 Woodruff Manifesto.” Brigham Young University

 Best Graduate Paper

? Benjamin Park, “Early Mormonism and the Paradoxes of Democratic Religiosity in Jacksonian America,” University of Cambridge

Best Thesis Award

? Matthew Lund, ?The Vox Populi is the Vox Dei: American Localism and the Mormon Expulsion from Jackson County, Missouri,? Utah State University

Best Dissertation Award

? Richard D. Ouellette, ?The Mormon Temple Lot Case: Space, Memory, and Identity in a Divided New Religion,? University of Texas at Austin

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Series Introduction: International Mormonism Month in June at JI

One of my advisor?s favorite questions to ask during our preliminary exams is whether Mormonism should be considered an American religion, given the number of British converts to Mormonism and their emigration to the United States.  Because I work on Mormonism, I wasn?t asked the question and instead had to field questions on the role of violence in the American Revolution and Puritan ideas about the family.  Apparently, most students hem-and-haw in response to the question about the Americanness of Mormonism.  One of my friends asked jokingly if she could use her lifeline and phone a friend ? me.  The question is supposed to force students to think about what it means for something to be an American religion, what the potential effects of early Mormon missionary work may have been on the church?s theology, and how Mormon was perceived outside of the confines of the United States.

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Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture,

For those of you not familiar with it, the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture, headquartered at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), is a leading “research and public outreach institute that supports the ongoing scholarly discussion of the nature, terms, and dynamics of religion in America.” Among others things, they sponsor and host academic conferences, publish the bianual Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, and host a seminar for Young Scholars in American Religion (whose roster of mentors and seminarians reads like a who’s who of the best and brightest in the field).  

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Reminder: Mormon Women’s History Tea and Discussion Group

This is a just a quick reminder that a group of lovely lady historians and their friends will be meeting at the Marie Callender’s in Layton to discuss Mormon women’s history.  The group met for the first time last year and had a fantastic discussion of the role of material culture in women’s lives and in our historical reconstruction of them.

This year, we will be discussing:

An Article by Eliza R. Snow, which appeared in the Woman’s Exponent (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4tyhi78x48uedd6/ElizaRSnow_AnAddress_WEx_1873-09-15_v2n8p62-63.pdf?v=0mcns)

Neylan MacBaine’s presentation from FAIR (http://www.fairlds.org/fair-conferences/2012-fair-conference/2012-to-do-the-business-of-the-church-a-cooperative-paradigm#en16)

Lisa Thomas Clayton?s essay on revelation from Mormon Women Have Their Say, edited by Claudia Bushman ( http://www.amazon.com/Mormon-Women-Have-Their-Say/dp/1589584945/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370193985&sr=8-1&keywords=mormon+women+have+their+say)

It’s okay if you don’t get to all of the articles, but we ask that each participant make a concerted effort to have read at least two of the articles.

For the original JI announcement, see: http://www.juvenileinstructor.org/mormon-womens-history-tea-and-discussion-group-announcement/

We will meet at 4 p.m., Thursday, June 6th.  Note the slight change in time and venue.

Southwestern States Mission: The Trip from Utah to Texas

Later today I will start driving from southeastern Texas to Utah for the 2013 MHA Conference in Layton. Many JI writers and readers are in the same metaphoric boat this week, so I have chosen to write about the reverse trip: how missionaries travelled from Salt Lake City (SLC) to their assigned areas in Texas. [1]

Mission

The only time my wife and I went out to the movies in our 4 and a half years in Santa Barbara was to see Waiting for Superman.  My wife, Lee, had seen it the weekend before but wanted me to go with her because she wanted to be able to talk about it with me.  Lee works for the New Tech Network, a non-profit organization that is involved in school reform, and was therefore very interested in a movie that addressed those issues.

Seeing this movie about the plight of education in the US in general and urban schools in particular was a rather jarring experience for me because a number of years earlier I had taught high school in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles.  So I had an up-close view of what those schools were like (they struggle) and what kind of education the kids got there.  This was a rather painful memory since, because I walked into the classroom with no training (and very little aptitude, I soon discovered), I struggled mightily and delivered a very poor product to my students.  Thus I knew first hand of the educational struggles of urban children that the movie was documenting.  Again, this was a rather painful memory that also felt like a personal failure and I wondered what could possibly be done to address this problem.

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Guest Post: Martyn Oliver, “Made in America”

PLEASE NOTE: All issues with the images below are the result of Cristine’s lack of technical prowess.

I?m pleased once again to present a guest post from another colleague whose work explores images of minorities in American culture, Martyn Oliver. Martyn is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. He holds a BA from the University of Puget Sound, and earned his PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University. Martyn?s work explores the construction of religious identity with particular emphasis on how Western literature depicts Islam and Muslims. 

I?m going to have to start with a confession: I don?t really know a whole lot about Mormons or the LDS Church. Aside from a few ex-Mormon friends and a very strange night in Paris? Charles de Gaulle airport, [1] my encounter with Mormonism both personally and professionally has been frighteningly thin.

So it?s been with great interest that I?ve followed The Juvenile Instructor during this month on Many Images of Mormonism. Crissy has this wonderful habit of inviting folk to do things they don?t know they can do and then convincing them they?re perfect for the task. Needless to say, I?ve been trying to figure out what her nefarious scheme is for me this time around.

To get right to it, she asked me to contribute something for y?all because I study Islam and the religious traditions of Central Asia, often in terms of how these traditions conform to or challenge our preconceptions about them, or in terms of how ?foreign? religions are depicted in the West (by which I don?t mean cowboys, I mean white folk?we should be honest about what the ?West? implies).

Anyhow, I?ve got this idea brewing: there?s an obvious tension within Mormonism, which you all have begun to spell out in fascinating detail, between the maintenance of?for lack of a better term?Mormon exceptionalism and Mormonism as authentically American. Without intending to gloss over the many subtleties of this situation, it seems that by and large there has been a push (as illustrated by Erin Anderson?s reprinting of Calvin Grondahl?s cartoon) for Mormons to be the ?most? American, and in the process not only contort themselves into rigid caricatures, but also implicitly illustrate the foibles of American self-perception. To put it another way, they try and out-WASP the WASP?s.

From my view, this is a mistake. If Mormonism really wanted to make common cause with a group of fellow Americans who are both religiously peculiar while still being deeply and inherently American, the obvious choice is clear. They should cozy up with what was once the Nation of Islam.

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John Wesley Jones’s Pantoscope of California, Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons (1852)

Jones’s Great Pantoscope of California. Broadside, ca. 1852 from Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (Yale UP, 2002), 50.

Another post in the Mormonism’s Many Images series.

In late 1852 and 1853, a new and dazzling show debuted on the stages of Boston and New York. Playing to eager audiences, including the ?elite and intellectual,? John Wesley Jones?s Pantoscope of California. Nebraska, Utah, and the Mormons became something of a sensation, running briskly for more than a year and garnering almost uniform praise from critics. It was, an advertisement boasted, the ?LARGEST PAINTING IN THE WORLD,? produced at the astronomical cost of $40,000. Audiences were thrilled by its stunning reproductive detail of the landscape; indeed, Jones claimed that his work was empirical, it was based on 1,500 newfangled daguerreotype images of the American West he and a crew had taken exclusively for that purpose. [1]

Jones?s Pantoscope belonged to the passing nineteenth-century genre of the ?panorama,? and to an age of experimentation with audiovisual entertainment. The absorbing experiences of radio and film were still decades away and popular entertainment remained confined to the stage theater. Panoramas took a variety of forms, but they often constituted ?moving pictures? in the most literal sense. Enormous canvas paintings produced by teams of artists?some reportedly miles long and covering hundreds of thousands of square feet?were rolled across the stage, moving across the audience?s line of sight from one giant spool to another. Accompanied by music and narration, these exhibitions simulated the experience of travel: they were ?designed to convey a sense of movement across space and time? in a uncommonly realistic visual world. For contemporary audiences, this was a new and delightful vicarious experience. Like the telegraph and the steamboat, the panorama was, some proclaimed, a ?wonderful invention for annihilating time and space.? [2]

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