JI Resources on Blacks and the Priesthood

[Last week’s Bott controversy (See the Slate article by JI’s Max Mueller) generated not one but two official statements from the LDS Church. With all the discussion around the net on the issue of blacks and the priesthood, I’m posting this updated list of JI posts on the subject for your reference.]

Juvenile Instructor Posts

Paul Reeve’s excellent guest post about Bott’s remarks and dishonoring Elijah Abel’s legacy. This should be required reading. Here’s a sample:

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Repudiating Racism: A Black Latter-day Saint’s Response

This week’s events have produced some of the most succinct, thoughtful and probing essays on the history and implications of race and Mormonism perhaps yet written: here, here, here, and here.  Indeed, I love that we indignant white folks have raised our voices against the doggedly persistent and  painfully antiquated racial ideologies within our religion. Truly, I do.  I love that we?ve circled the wagons, that we?ve stormed the castle walls (pardon all of my martial metaphors, but they seem appropriate considering the climate.)  Our esprit de corps is admirable and convincing.  The problem is that some of our intellectualizing has perhaps had the counter-effect of privileging the white voices in our community over others who need to be heard from just as much, or moreso.  To that end, I present for your consideration the story and words of a a former student of mine, an African-American convert to the Church and a returned missionary– I’ll call her “Kris” . . . . well, because that’s actually her name.  Four years ago,  as a recent graduate in history, she took an internship in a neighboring state and attended the local singles’ ward.  One Sunday . . . . indeed, let’s give privilege to Kris’s voice, in a letter that she penned to her stake president following a disturbing incident in her ward.

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Guest Post: Professor Bott, Elijah Abel, and a Plea from the Past

Paul Reeve is an associate professor in history at the University of Utah.  He is the author of the award winning Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (2007), co-editor with Ardis Parshall of Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia  (2010), and co-editor with Michael Van Wagenen of Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore (2011). He is the co-editor with Jared T. of H-Mormon, an H-Net group set to launch in the next few weeks. His current book, Religion of a Different Color explores the racialization of Mormons and is under contract with Oxford University Press. Please join us in giving Paul a warm welcome!

There have already been a number of excellent responses to Professor Bott?s racist remarks to the Washington Post.  I write not in an effort to dog pile on Professor Bott, but in the hope of honoring what I believe was the intent of an unknown writer of an important document in Mormon racial history, Elijah Abel?s obituary (Deseret News, vol. 33, no. 50 (31 December 1884), 800). 

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Kindred Spirits: The 19th Century Origins of Mormon Posthumous Celebrity Baptism

Given the ongoing public discussion of the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead, and particularly how this ritual been conducted by Latter-day Saints in behalf of notable public, ?celebrity? figures, it seemed appropriate to post a piece of my ongoing research into this singular religious concept. Specifically, here I note the emergence of the doctrine and practice of baptism for the dead and how it initially came to be performed on behalf of celebrity figures. Of course, the development of baptism for the dead fits into a number of larger contexts, including currents of developing Mormon theology in Nauvoo (as Sam Brown?s new book shows), and into a broader culture where Christian baptism was a common but diversely understood and valued practice. So this post doesn?t explain how baptism for the dead came into being, but it does describe how, once the practice was established, it first came to be a way for Mormons of claiming those whom they saw as the deserving dead beyond their family and personal friends.

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Teaching Official Declaration 2

This is a guest post from Rachel Cope, professor of religion at Brigham Young University.

As a Mormon, I believe, first and foremost, in the atoning sacrifice of the Savior, and I recognize my need to submit to his grace. I also believe that Joseph Smith?a prophetic figure?had visions, restored gospel truths, and translated a sacred text by the power of God. Consequently, doctrine seeps into my understanding of history, and history is intertwined throughout my doctrinal perspectives. Reverence and trust, rather than skepticism and doubt, dominate my view of the past. How history is written and interpreted, then, is important to me as a woman of faith who also happens to be a Professor of Religion at Brigham Young University.

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Lucy Emily Woodruff Smith’s 1893-94 Diary: What it Reveals about Lucy, her Husband, and Ourselves, Part I

With the increased attention to George Albert Smith since his turn in the line-up of Prophets for the 2012 Relief Society and Priesthood curriculum, President Smith has captured the imagination of LDS members for his vulnerability, his personal struggles with chronic mental and physical illness, and his perceptibly gentle and compassionate nature.  Indeed, his very flawed humanness has made him recently a kind of accessible hero-prophet?one with whom some Mormons feel a more intense kinship.  With that keen interest, it?s timely to talk about his wife, Lucy.

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New Guest Blogger: Andrea Radke-Moss

Please join us in welcoming our latest guest blogger: Andrea Radke-Moss.

Andrea G. Radke-Moss is a professor of history at Brigham Young University-Idaho, but currently on a two-year leave of absence to be home with her two later-in-life babies. Her book, Bright Enoch, a history of coeducation at land-grant universities in the 19th century West, was published with the University of Nebraska Press in 2008. Since then, she has published numerous chapters on women in the Great Plains, Mormon women at the Chicago World’s Fair, and women in higher education in the West. She is a contributor to the current Women of Faith series by Deseret Book. She is currently researching elite Mormon women’s and men’ birthday celebrations in the 19th-century, and Mormon women’s experiences with violence in Missouri.

Thoughts on Gender in Mormon Theology – stemming from Mormon and Protestant Encounters

Rachael has a BA in history from Brigham Young University, is currently slaving away working in a law office in Washington DC, and is waiting to hear back about graduate schools this Fall. This post ushers in her guest-posting stint with JI.

?Gender is a modern invention,? Kathleen Flake declared yesterday at the Crossroads conference. Any logical discussion of the question of gender in Mormon theology was therefore declared ?impossible.? At least that?s how I and dozens of others understood her response that wasn?t a response to my query on the subject.

Today at Stake Conference, Elder Scott spoke of the sanctity of womanhood, and the need for men to appreciate and affirm women who ?magnify? the divine endowment of feminine traits they have been given.

Clearly, the theological place and meaning of gender is a massively tangled bramble bush of an issue, and this post is in no way meant to resolve the question I posed to Kathleen Flake yesterday as to what exactly constitutes ?femininity? and ?masculinity? in our eternal identity, and what implications these notions can have beyond the mortal realm and particularly in exaltation. This matter, of course, also has direct bearing on the controversy surrounding traditional and same-sex marriage, and I firmly believe that the Church needs a clear explanation of what gender is and why the particular synthesis of one man and one woman is the divinely ordained model, in order to offer more compelling defenses (theologically, at least) for traditional marriage. (I won?t countenance polygamy in this discussion as a potential arrangement in the afterlife. We can argue about that premise in another post).

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Reminder and Webcast Information: “At the Crossroads, Again: Mormon and Protestant Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries”

As a reminder to those interested, this weekend (Friday and Saturday, Feb. 24-25) at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy is sponsoring what is being billed as a “groundbreaking event” intended to “facilitate a conversation of the ‘mind and heart’ that will set the standard for how members of religious communities can discuss differences in a way that does not compromise intellect or integrity, but is also sincere and empathetic.” Entitled “At the Crossroads, Again: Mormon and Methodist Protestant Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries,”* featured presenters include a number of well-known and recognized scholars of Mormon and Protestant history, theology, hymnody, politics, gender and sexuality, and social activism, including David Campbell, David McAllister-Wilson, Kristine Haglund, Eileen Guenther, Terryl Givens, Kathleen Flake, Elaine Heath, Robert Bennett, and Warner Woodworth, plus many more. A full schedule is available here and brief biographies of the several presenters here.

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“Mormon” Dissent: Gestures to the Past and my own Mormon Story

Update on “The Mormon Body Project:”  I found skinny jeans.  Anyone who wants pictures can visit: http://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/the-skinny-on-the-hunt-for-skinny-jeans/

Last week, I attended a presentation at Benchmark Books by Will Bagley, Polly Aird, and Jeff Nichols on their new book Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West.  They regaled the audience with stories of Ann Godge, a wife of John D. Lee who claimed that the Danites lived on top of caves and were willing to kill their own sons for infractions, Brigham Young Hampton, who tried to entrap several of Utah?s Gentile government officials in a prostitution ring and was instead arrested for running a brothel, and Charles Derry who could not bear the Mormon Reformation and was marginalized within his community.

As they were speaking I began to reflect on the stakes might be in labeling such people as Mormon dissenters.  Although these men and women had all once belonged to the Mormon faith, many of them had renounced Mormonism and considered themselves to exist in opposition to the church.  On the one hand, classifying them as Mormon dissidents seems to be a political statement that forces historians of the Mormon religious tradition to take voices of dissent seriously and to recognize them as belonging to the same history as men like Brigham Young and Joseph Fielding Smith.  One of the claims that Bagley, Aird, and Nichols made that night was that historians need to recognize the difficulties that everyday Mormons encountered as they tried to apply the principles of their faith to their lives.  While some people struggled through and remained within the faith, others decided to leave or to become figures of opposition.  Bagley, Aird, and Nichols want us to recognize that both options were valid.  On the other hand, to call someone like Godge Mormon does violence to the way that she saw herself.  Godge would have rejected the description and vehemently denied that it remained a part of her identity even after she had denounced the faith.  As historians, we need to think about the implications and politics of choosing certain descriptors for the people whose lives we are choosing to tell.

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