By April 21, 2013
In last week?s post I looked at the public linguistic context for the phrase, ?faithful, discreet sisters,? in Sister Carling?s mission call. This week I look at her private writings.
By April 19, 2013
This week, I am traveling throughout New Zealand and Tahiti, partially as a vacation and partially as an initial foray into two of the countries that I write about in my dissertation. As someone who works on Mormon missionaries in the South Pacific and Great Britain, I spend a lot of time reading the journals, diaries, and letters of Protestant missionaries who have encountered Mormons in their mission stations and among their congregations. Sometimes their comments are unsurprising ? the usual vituperative rants about golden plates and polygamy that you would expect to find in the writings of any non-Mormon who had encountered Mormon missionaries for the first time. At other times, the letters and diaries that I read can be surprising in their lack of interest and nonchalance about the appearance of sudden appearance of Mormonism.
By April 18, 2013
The Digital Public Library of America, a project that has been in development for a few years, is now live on the Internet. The DPLA follows in the footsteps of Europeana, a similar initiative in the EU that brings together diverse collections throughout the European Union’s libraries, archives, and museums. One way of thinking about the DPLA is to see it as a super-catalog of materials spread across the contiguous United States in thousands of local, state, and federal institutions. The current “beta” version of the site already has 2+ million records aggregated from “hubs” such as the Digital Library of Georgia, Kentucky Digital Library, Minnesota Digital Library, ArtStor, Biodiversity Heritage Library, National Archives and Records Administration, New York Public Library, University of Virginia, Mountain West Digital Library, etc. Additional partners are being announced almost daily. So pump yourself up and get searching!
By April 17, 2013
Desperate times (the expected dearth of posts at the end of the semester) call for desperate measures (narcissistically posting about our own scholarship).
Parley Pratt, whose theology was as rugged as his looks.
In summer 2009, I participated in the Mormon Scholars Summer Seminar, that year led by Terryl Givens and Matt Grow, where I had the opportunity to study the writings of the Pratt brothers. While my seminar paper was on Parley Pratt’s theology of embodiment, which soon evolved into a larger article on early Mormon theologies of embodiment in general, the topic with which I became particularly transfixed was how Joseph Smith’s teachings were adapted and appropriated during the first few years after his death. At first, I was interested in the very parochial nature of the issue—the specifics of theological development, who said what and when, and what ideas were forgotten, emphasized, or even created anew. But I then became even more interested in broader questions: how were Smith’s ideas interpreted in the first place within a specific cultural environment, and how did Smith’s successors utilize that environment when molding their own theology? And further, what does that process tell us about the development of religious traditions in general, and the progression of religion in antebellum America in particular?
By April 16, 2013
I make it out to the US most summers, but when I don’t, there is one thing I miss more than absolutely anything: a baseball game. I have many fond memories of exciting baseball games in the heat of summer, cheering on my beloved Oakland A’s or San Francisco Giants (we’re equal opportunity Bay Area supporters at my house). And since April is the month of Opening Day, I thought I’d round up something about Mormons and baseball.
By April 15, 2013
The first official, female, Mormon missionary was set apart on 1898 March 27. Ten days later, George Q Cannon, First Counselor in the First Presidency, spoke at General Conference. As presented in the conference report, he spent 2 out of 14.5 columns on the decision to call female missionaries. Below I give a five-hundred-word summary for those of you in a hurry and then the unbroken thirteen-hundred-word excerpt.
By April 14, 2013
Sister Carling?s mission call identifies ?faithful, discreet sisters? as candidates for missionary service. [1] Perhaps I have an idiosyncratic definition, but I think ?discreet? is ?prudently silent and/or unobtrusive,? [2] which seems odd as a primary descriptor for go-ye-into-all-the-world missionaries—and doubly so parallel to the ?faithful, energetic elders? in males? mission letters. [3] Below I will attempt to contextualize the idea of ?discreet? female, Mormon missionaries in the Progressive Era. [4]
By April 12, 2013
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at the University of Michigan on what benefits there might be to considering Utah as a settler colonial space. As part of a section on the political implications of adopting such a posture, I included some photos of the Lamanite Generation, a group of BYU students who toured the United States as part of an all-native choir. Afterwards, one of my friends who studies twentieth-century American Indian history came up to me. She was horrified: ?That?s when the American Indian Movement was happening. Hadn?t they heard of it??
I didn?t know the answer. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was a radical movement founded in the late 1960s that protested the poverty and violence that was endemic among native communities in the twentieth century. They staged massive protests that insisted that Americans recognize that its treaties with native tribes were not being honored and that many of the most iconic buildings and monuments in the United States were on land that, by treaty, belonged to American Indians.
By April 11, 2013
This is the part of the year when posting slows down here at JI, as the end of another semester–and the prospect of final papers, grading, committee duties, etc.–cuts into our precious blogging time.
But scholarship still presses forward! This week, I received a review copy of Matthew Kester’s new and exciting Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the West, just released by Oxford University Press. Kester, a professor and archivist at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, explores a group of Hawaiin converts who joined the Mormon church, immigrated to Utah, established their own community in the middle of Deseret’s desert, yet eventually moved back to their homeland after the Laie Temple was built. I remember first hearing about this story when working on the Church’s Historic Sites Committee, and Benjamin Pykles, who also works on Mormon notions of space and has written an excellent book on Nauvoo, gave a presentation on the topic. Just the image of native Hawaiins building their own oasis in the desert is fascinating, and the story becomes even more interesting as you peel back the layers.
By April 9, 2013
[The following is a guest post from our good friend and former co-blogger Kris Wright.]
In the first sentence of the introduction to Women and Things 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies, editors Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin write
This volume takes as its object of investigation the overlooked and often despised categories of women?s decorative arts and homecraft activities as sites of important cultural and social work.[1]
I will admit that when I read that, I thought it might be a bit of hyperbole ? neglected, yes, but despised? That seemed like an exaggeration. However after listening to President Elaine S. Dalton?s Conference address, ?We Are Daughters of Our Heavenly Father? and observing some of the online reaction to it, I am starting to wonder if despised is actually a good descriptor. Such reaction can shed light on why modern historians ignore Mormon women or have a difficult time integrating them into their work.
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Recent Comments
Steve Fleming on BH Roberts on Plato: “Interesting, Jack. But just to reiterate, I think JS saw the SUPPRESSION of Platonic ideas as creating the loss of truth and not the addition.…”
Jack on BH Roberts on Plato: “Thanks for your insights--you've really got me thinking. I can't get away from the notion that the formation of the Great and Abominable church was an…”
Steve Fleming on BH Roberts on Plato: “In the intro to DC 76 in JS's 1838 history, JS said, "From sundry revelations which had been received, it was apparent that many important…”
Jack on BH Roberts on Plato: “"I’ve argued that God’s corporality isn’t that clear in the NT, so it seems to me that asserting that claims of God’s immateriality happened AFTER…”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “The burden of proof is on the claim of there BEING Nephites. From a scholarly point of view, the burden of proof is on the…”
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