By April 6, 2010
Hot off the press. (Or, passed along from JI’s friend Jacob B.) This looks fantastic.
What is Mormon Studies?
Transdisciplinary Inquiries into an Emerging Field
Claremont Mormon Studies Student Association
Spring 2010 Conference
By April 6, 2010
The Salt Lake Mormon Studies Student Association will host BCCer Jonathan Stapley on April 8, 2010 at 7 pm for a public lecture entitled, ?All These Years an Orphan?: Ritual Adoption in Mormon Theology and Practice.
By April 5, 2010
Part III in the JI’s ongoing series on secularism and religious education
In sifting through the thoughts that might be relevant to bring to this conversation, it quickly became clear that I wouldn?t be able to form any kind of comprehensive, useful model, or to get the satisfaction that comes with being able to see something as a whole. The differences that Matt articulated in the last post of the series run deep, and seem to impose considerable gulfs between all kinds of people that might try to talk about religion: we occupy largely different worlds. I also came to realize that the blog post is not terribly well suited to interdisciplinary analysis! All I can do here, I think, is try to illuminate a point of contact between the three broad categories we have been discussing ? secularism, religion, and education.
By April 2, 2010
This just in:
The Religious Studies Program is pleased to announce the ninth annual Eugene England Lecture on Thursday, April 15th from 7:00-8:30 p.m. (Liberal Arts Building, Room 101). Colleen McDannell, Sterling M. McMurrin Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Utah, will deliver remarks entitled “The Story Lives Here: Faith, History, and Instructional Mormon Media.” The lecture will examine the use of visual culture in American religions utilizing the new LDS Church History Department production of “The Story Lives Here.” The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Brian Birch at brian.birch@uvu.edu or Boyd Petersen at boyd.petersen@uvu.edu or visit www.uvu.edu/religiousstudies.
By April 1, 2010
Part II in the JI’s ongoing series on secularism and religious education.
I am recently, and demonstrably, interested in the ways in which Mormons think about what history is, and how it is manufactured, and why, exactly, we care so much about it. As you are probably aware, Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles recently delivered at Harvard Law School an address titled ?The Fundamental Premises of our Faith.? Generally speaking, he delivered, offering a reasonable primer of the basics of contemporary LDS doctrine and church life: from an embodied God and eternal progression to wards and to nobody?s surprise, marriage. But more than merely outlining the Gospel Principles manual, throughout the entire talk ? oftentimes glancingly, but occasionally explicitly ? Oaks enunciated a particular way of thinking about information, and from whence it is derived, and how it is organized into knowledge, and about how all these things relate to God that, I think, we can use to understand more deeply the position of those ranks of General Authorities of the church who have spoken most notoriously on the writing of church history in the past thirty years or so, on how the writing of Mormon history should be understood.
By March 31, 2010
We’d like to give Mark Staker a big thank you for participating. He elected to answer all the questions posed in the solicitation. Here we go:
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Thank you for the questions. They are all good questions and I?ve elected to give a stab at trying to answer them all.
Question 1
Many people assume that Joseph Smith basically took a back seat behind Sidney Rigdon during the first decade of the Church; that it wasn?t until after Liberty Jail and in the Nauvoo period that he really took the prominent public position as the face of the movement. By this, I mean being the chief expositor, giving many of the important public discourses, etc. Does your research on Kirtland confirm or challenge this idea?
By March 29, 2010
Taylor P. holds a MTS and receives a ThD (May, 2010) in New Testament and Early Christianity from Harvard Divinity School. His BA in Philosophy and Religious Studies is from Pace University. He currently works as the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Study of Religion at Harvard University. He is a founder of the Mormon Perspectives Series in Boston and a main organizer for two recent conferences for Latter-day Saints in Religious Studies.
Lisa Miller’s Newsweek article “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith” frames the need for religious eduction as driven by the fact that other people are religious.
By March 29, 2010
This strikes me as an especially pregnant time in the intellectual history of Mormonism. Mormon Studies is emerging as a solid field. Students are pursuing Mormon-themed scholarship, tracing intersections among fields with a well-established history, such as literature, history, and biblical studies, and exploring nascent fields such as theology. What is most interesting to me about Mormon Studies is the existence of a community of students gaining similar methodological tools for the study of religion in similar educational environments.
By March 28, 2010
Since Ardis Parshall said JI needed more posts like Jared’s…
Once when a member asked the typical question of what I wanted to study when I got home from my mission, my companion interjected, ?He?ll say he doesn?t know, but if you really press him, he?ll say he wants to be a historian.?
By March 26, 2010
The JI is pleased to welcome Mark Staker as the newest participant in the Scholarly Inquiry series. Mark, of course, is the author of the recently released Hearken O Ye People: The Historical Setting for Joseph Smith’s Ohio Revelations published by Kofford Books (see the table of contents and section overviews at Mark’s Hearken O Ye People blog).
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