Oz Behind the Curtain, Part 4: The Syllabus

Here’s the premise of this post: a syllabus should be more than a boring, text-laden legal contract. If you let it, it can also be 1) a thing of beauty, and 2) a tool to think with about your teaching and your students’ learning.

At this point I hope you can see why this post comes late in my series about course and syllabus design (you can read part 1, part 2 and part 3 plus a part 3a if you care about the nitty-gritty of governance and assessment). Actually putting the stuff into a document necessitates having stuff to put, and all the course planning should happen long before you decide what font to use and what color paper to print it on.

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Mormons and Politics at Columbia

On the fifteenth floor in a Columbia University building overlooking a majestic New York City skyline, some of the most well known scholars of Mormonism (–and me–) gathered to present papers on the role of Mormonism and American politics during this so-called ?Mormon Moment.? Professors and students from Columbia and other NYC-area universities, a handful of LDS missionaries (including a JIer?s parents!) and reps from local and international news outlets, braved unreliable elevators to bring the large lecture hall to capacity on both days of the conference.

According to co-organizer, Jana Riess, Columbia?s Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life had hoped to hold such an event for years. And with Romney?s train to the nomination in Tampa back on track?CNN just flashed that Romney won the Nevada Caucuses by twenty-three points?timing could not have been better. Dr. Riess, her co-organizer and former doctoral advisor, Randall Balmer, as well as the Institute?s staff, deserve heaps of praise for a smoothly run and stimulating event, the fruits of which will most certainly be enjoyed throughout this election season and beyond.

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Foxes and Hedgehogs in Mormon Historiography

Isaiah Berlin, one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, once wrote that there were two types of historians: the hedgehog and the fox. Taking the phrase from a throw-away statement of Greek poet Archilochus—“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”—Berlin creatively expanded the sentiment to explore two different approaches to the historical craft. On the one hand, foxes were those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle.” Hedgehogs, on the other, were those “who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel–a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” Berlin then attempted to organize all great historians, writers, and philosophers into these two camps: Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzche, Ibsen, and Proust are examples of hedgehogs, while Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, and Goethe are foxes.”[1] You get the picture.

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A Conference on How We Think About the Great Apostasy, Coming in March

Please join us for a conference titled ?Exploring Mormon Conceptions of Apostasy? to be held on March 1-2, 2012 at Brigham Young University.

The conference schedule is available at https://sites.google.com/site/mormonconceptionsofapostasy/.

The notion of an apostasy from the primitive gospel and the original church has been a key animating feature in Mormonism since its inception and in other ?religions of the book.? Apostasy as a concept, however, has proven to be tremendously fluid, with individual, institutional, communal, and historical meanings and applications all proliferating in religious thought throughout the ages. Fifteen faithful Mormon scholars from many scholarly backgrounds and methodologies, will explore the concept of apostasy in various historical and religious contexts as we consider how to narrate apostasy in ways that remain historically authentic and cohere with Mormon theology. Proceedings will be published by Greg Kofford Press in the series Perspectives on Mormon Theology.

This conference is organized by Miranda Wilcox, assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, with financial assistance from an Eliza R. Snow Faculty Grant.

Is Mormonism a “western” religion?

Over at the Religion in the American West blog, Laurie Maffly-Kipp has offered her thoughts to the above question. The whole post is worth reading—and it’d be great to generate some discussion on the topic over there—but I wanted to highlight a couple of points I found especially important.

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Teaching Mormonism at Georgetown-Introduction

Greetings, Juvenile Instructor readers! Matt B (one of your permabloggers) asked if I would be willing to do a bit of a guest stint as a blogger. I?m currently in a PhD program in systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, and teach as an instructor at Georgetown. Because I?m LDS, I?ve been asked to teach a class this semester on Mormonism, which I?ve titled ?Mormonism: A New World Religion.? This series of posts will be about my experience teaching the course. The title is supposed to have a bit of a double meaning. First, it?s a religion from the New World, one of the few (discounting the bewildering variety of Christianities) that originated in the New World. Second, sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has predicted that Mormonism will be the next world religion to emerge since Islam.

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Mormonism and “Historical/Traditional” Christianity

My dissertation committee felt I sort of gave them a bait and switch at my prospectus defense.  I had spent three years telling them I wanted to compare Mormonism to medieval Christianity (which I’m still doing) but for my prospectus I was now talking about Mormonism and Neoplatonism.  They found this all rather confusing and wanted brainstorm other angles I could take.  In the midst of all this, my medieval advisor exclaimed, “I know what your thesis should be.  It should be how Christian Mormonism is.  This is all thoroughly Christian, it’s just not Protestant.”

What is Christian depends on one’s point of view.  Medieval Christianity was very different from Protestantism.  As I’ve noted around here a few times, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 presents a very different picture of traditional Christianity than do Protestants.

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Book Review: Allison P. Coudert, Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America

Coudert, Allison P.  Religion, Magic , and Science in Early Modern Europe and America.  Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011.

This book made my head spin.  Coudert sets about attacking cherished ontologies and historiographical dogmas in ways I’m overwhelmingly in agreement with, but the book still left me dizzy.  Coudert comes out swinging and doesn’t let up.   Most brilliant is the way Coudert blends these categories with each other and the social history of the periods she covers.

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Religious History Classes Come With Instructions

This is Part 3 in my series on course & syllabus design (“Oz Behind the Curtain”); here are Part 1 and Part 2. I’ve also posted a Part 3a on governance and alignment, but since it’s kind of technical it’s only on my blog; see here if you want to get into those nitty-gritty details.

All my syllabi have some generalized instructions. I include some boilerplate stuff on every syllabus: use of phone and laptops in class, something about attendance and participation to the effect that just showing up is necessary but not sufficient, something about disability accommodations, and so on.

But for a course that studies religion, somehow, I feel there needs to be something more along the lines of ground rules.

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Notes on the Pew Survey.

Between October 25 and November 16 of last year, researchers for the Pew Forum interviewed 1,019 Americans who identified themselves as “Mormon.” That point is key.

There was surprise among the researchers and advisory board (including myself), and no doubt among the General Authorities when it turned out that 77% of Mormons in America attend church every week, because it is received common knowledge among most who care about such things that the actual rate of attendance (and tithepaying &etc) is nowhere near this high.

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