By January 11, 2010
Fresh from my inbox:
SUMMER SEMINAR ON JOSEPH SMITH
?The Foundations of Mormon Theology: The Nature of God and the Human?
Brigham Young University
June 1-July 9, 2010
By January 11, 2010
The Salt Lake Mormon Studies Student Association will host Steve Harper, Professor of Church History at BYU, on January 28, 2010 at 7 pm for a public lecture entitled: “Memory and the First Vision.” The lecture will be held on the University of Utah Campus in the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building, room 101 (main floor).
By January 10, 2010
I know this has been discussed around the blogernacle, but I just wanted to share a few historical anecdotes.
The first time I read the Nicene Creed (on my mission) I thought, ?do we really disagree with this?? This thought has only been compounded as I?ve studied Christian history.
By January 4, 2010
This is an attempt to think about Mormonism and Christian ideology in the course of American history. By Christian ideology here I think I mean assumptions or understandings so predominant at a given time that they can actually go unrecognized. In other words, I’m thinking about a silent (yet influential) common or shared sense. Although common sense might be pretty uniform at a given time, it turns out that it isn’t held in common over time. Hence, this is an effort to see how these conditions evolve over time and to demonstrate how, in the long run, that evolution can reveal the influence of the invisible. We find that predominant convictions turn over slowly, and they leave a wide trail behind them. It seems to me that Mormonism contains a number of interesting remainders as a result of being codified in a particular historical moment and amongst beliefs and convictions that just went without saying.
Part of the impetus for this informal post was a conversation I had with my grandfather ? Douglas Tobler, retired professor of European History ? a few months ago, not long after the passing of Bob Matthews. He reminded me then that he and Bob used to carpool from Lindon to work together at BYU. He related a conversation that they once had during their commute about Mormon conceptions of grace, and the reasons why grace has seen so little emphasis (especially in comparison with, say, born-again evangelicalism).
By January 4, 2010
If our New Year’s resolution had been to add another extraordinarily gifted blogger, then we would have already achieved our goal. Ardis S. has been providing fascinating details of a heretofore neglected topic (LDS perceptions of the Civil Rights Movement) for nearly a year now (see here archive here). Her innovative research and scholarly wit have left us no choice but to make her attachment to the blog more permanent—plus, whenever you have a chance to associate with a Cambridge-bound historian, you gotta do it. On a personal note, I’ve had the privilege of knowing Ardis not only as a budding historian but also as a wonderful friend and engaging Latter-day Saint; we were both students during the last semester of the Joseph Smith Academy in Nauvoo, Illinois (a now-defunct BYU study program).
Here is how Ardis describes herself:
I recently graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor of arts in History. This fall, I will attend the University of Cambridge, where I will study British perceptions of the US civil rights movement. I am currently an intern at the Church History Library. My research interests include the intersections between race, gender, and social history, and within LDS history I am particularly interested in race and the LDS Church.
Please join us in giving a hearty welcome to Ardis S.!
By January 2, 2010
[While I sit in the Pisa Airport finishing my Sunday School Lesson for tomorrow, I couldn’t help but share a point of convergence between the lesson and my recent scholarly research (I am currently working on the Christian response to Thomas Paine in the 1790s). What follows is not a fully drawn-out, or perhaps even thought-out, post, but rather a half-baked idea worthy of nothing more than a footnote for tomorrow’s SS class.]
The 1790s represented drastic change for western civilization. On one side of the Atlantic, the early American republic was beginning to forge into a stable nation; on the other side, an early-embraced revolution was evolving into dangerous anarchy in France.
By December 29, 2009
Over the holiday, I came across this bit of family history. It is a brief essay written by my paternal grandfather detailing the characteristics of his “dream girl.”
By December 23, 2009
I begin in the time-honored, much-ridiculed Mormon fashion of offering a disclaimer about my qualifications and a story about what happened when I was asked to give this talk.
The disclaimer: one of the great things about being an editor is that I never have to have any original thoughts. There may not be any good new ideas in this talk, in which case, all you have to do is submit some new papers to Dialogue so I can get my plagiarisms up-to-date. I?m also not trained as an historian, and the applicability of what training I have is highly questionable. I will therefore talk very fast so that we can get to the interesting part of the evening where you tell me about why I am wrong and what you are going to do about it.
By December 22, 2009
Over the past year, I have published several posts on JI about my research on how the civil rights movement was discussed in BYU?s student newspaper, the Daily Universe, during the 1950s and 1960s. I have recently begun studying a new aspect of this research that has proved particularly interesting and enlightening ? how civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was talked about in the pages of the Daily Universe in the latter part of the 1960s and then again in the 1980s as the national discussion on establishing a federal holiday in honor of King came to Utah. In the next few posts on JI, I will analyze how students discussed King?s role as a civil rights leader in 1968, 1969, and the 1980s.
By December 21, 2009
[Continued from Part I]
I sincerely appreciate the three respondents participating in this forum. I’m sure all the readers will agree that all three portions are well-written and enlightening.
Although these three are well-known around the bloggernacle, here are brief introductions: Robin Jensen is an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project, recently received his second master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his name can be found on the cover of the recent Revelations and Translations vol. 1. Samuel Brown is currently an Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Division Associate, Medical Ethics and Humanities, University of Utah. Jordan Watkins, theoretically a contributor here at JI, is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
© 2025 – Juvenile Instructor
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