By Ben PJanuary 7, 2013
If you don’t subscribe to Dialogue yet, repent now and change your ways before the day of judgement arrives.
In case you missed it during the business that is the holiday season, the winter issue of Dialogue appeared on its website. As its lead article, our own Steve Taysom offers a fabulous look at one of the new and provocative theories in religious studies: Robert Orsi’s “abundant events.” This theory should be familiar with Mormons studies practitioners and Dialogue readers since Orsi, Richard Bushman, and Susanna Morrill did an interview about it in Dialogue‘s fall 2011 issue. Put simply, Orsi’s theory starts with the problem that plagues many scholars: what does one do with supernatural events that are claimed by the religious people one studies? Or as Steve summarizes, “how do scholars of religion account for experiences that are simultaneously irrational and real?” (4-5) Orsi’s response is to construct a conceptual category that both avoids the reductionism of skeptical scholars while still providing a framework in which the importance of the claimed experience can still be analyzed. Taysom examines the theory and sees how it works when applied to the study of Mormonism’s gold plates.
To summarize Steve’s fantastic article, I’ll gist his main argument, critiques, and conclusion, and then highlight what I think are the two most important aspects of the work. After giving a helpful summary of both the academic summary of religion as well as Orsi’s theory of “abundant events,” Taysom engages the benefits and pitfalls of such an approach. The biggest benefit, according to Taysom, is that “Orsi is attempting to create categories that bring religious experience into the ‘real’ world rather than attempting to fence them off” (5). But Taysom’s biggest critique is that Orsi never really explains whether it is the event or the narrative of said event that carries so much weight within a faith tradition. He is not willing to agree with Orsi that “abundant events…seem to exist and act independent of mundane historical agents” (9). For Taysom, it is the later narratives of the event that influence how people act and react, not the original event itself. “I can conclude,” writes Taysom, “that Orsi’s theory of abundant events is useful to the study of religion in general, and Mormonism in particular, only to the extent that it recognizes, accepts, or explains, in an explicit and clear manner, the role of narrative in the process of making the events ‘real'” (10).
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By Edje JeterJanuary 6, 2013
Before Christmas I wrote a few posts about the death of missionaries or their close relations and how those deaths were handled institutionally. In this post I will discuss how the missionaries reacted to the death of the President of the Church, Lorenzo Snow, on 1901 Oct 10.
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By Edje JeterDecember 30, 2012
New Year?s Eve and Day did not prompt much celebration among missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission. The end of the calendar year did, however, inspire a degree of introspection, some resolutions, and many reports for office missionaries to write.
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By AmandaDecember 28, 2012
About a week ago, I landed in Honolulu on a research trip for my dissertation. Although I have been studying Mormon history in the Pacific for about three years, it was my first trip to Hawai?i and the Pacific. Initially, this post was going to be about the Polynesian Cultural Center but after my week in Hawai?i, I have decided to write a much more general reflection about being an American and an American who studies Mormon history in the Pacific traveling in the islands.
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By Edje JeterDecember 23, 2012
Christmas was a big deal to missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission. Every missionary in this study wrote about Christmas (or Xmas [1]) at least once, which distinguishes it from other holidays. [2] Christmas stands out in the diaries for the degree that it involved missionaries, local Mormons, local non-Mormons, and missionaries? friends and family back home. Like other celebrations in the diaries, Christmas experiences exhibited a rural / urban divide.
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By Tona HDecember 20, 2012
I?ve just finished teaching my fall course on American religious pluralism—in fact, I was supposed to post about this yesterday but I?m still grading their final exams and submitting grades. It?s that time of year to think about what worked and what didn?t, and how I might do things differently next time.
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By Steve FlemingDecember 17, 2012
In 1670, two months after her husband died, Jane Lead had her first of many remarkable visions. Lead said she was out for a walk and thinking about Wisdom [1] in the Bible, when
there came upon me an overshadowing bright Cloud, and in the midst of it the Figure of a Woman, most richly adorned with transparent Gold, her hair hanging down and her Face as the terrible Crystal for brightness, but her Countenance was sweet and mild. At which sight I was somewhat amazed, but immediately this Voice came, saying, Behold, I am God?s Eternal Virgin-Wisdom, whom thou hast been enquiring after; I am to unseal the Treasures of God?s deep Wisdom unto thee, and will be as Rebecca was unto Jacob, a true Natural Mother; for out of my Womb thou shalt be brought forth after the manner of a Spirit, Conceived and Born again. [2]
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By Edje JeterDecember 16, 2012
I have rescheduled the previously-announced post on death in favor of something more light-hearted and seasonal. Below is Sister Amelia Carling?s 1901 Dec 05, Thursday, diary entry. Carling, with companion Sarah Giles, was a missionary in north-eastern Kansas. They were staying with a church member, Sister Hedges (first name not given). Elder Judd was another missionary.
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By Andrea R-MDecember 14, 2012
“Mark what I say: the woman who quarrels with her clothes, and puts on the dress of a man, is like the man who throws off his fur gown and dresses like John the Baptist: they are followed, as surely as the night follows the day, by bands of wild women and men who refuse to wear any clothes at all.” — The Inquisitor, St. Joan (Penguin Books, 1982).
George Bernard Shaw?s interpretation of the life of Joan of Arc reminds us of an element of Joan?s influence– her straining of a woman’s role by dressing like a man– that caused such discomfort for her contemporaries and partly led to her excommunication and execution in 1431. The zealous reactions to Joan’s gendered nonconformity in the 1400s allow us to think about similar ways that modern faith communities are also stretched by challenges to their gender expectations.
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By ChristopherDecember 13, 2012
I’ve watched with interest the ongoing debates this week over the proposed “Wear Pants to Church Day” spearheaded by a group of Mormon feminists. I’ve little desire to wade into the treacherous waters that conversation has become, but thanks to our resident Strangite expert Robin Jensen, I now know that the history of Mormon women and the controversial wearing of pants extends back much earlier than the late 20th century.
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