By December 18, 2008
James Twitchell. Shopping for God: How Christianity Went From in Your Heart to In Your Face. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. 324 pp.
James Twitchell, professor of English and Advertising at The University of Florida, explains on his website that his research interests include the effort to “interpret American culture in terms of commercialism.”
By December 15, 2008
I am making my way through Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. I’ve skimmed through most of it before, but because it is the primary text to be used for a course I’m TAing next semester, I’m taking my time and more thoroughly analyzing the book.
By December 13, 2008
I just finished The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin, 2006), an 800-page tome by Niall Ferguson, the Lawrence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. [Tisch and Hoover, an interesting pair of sponsors.] Ferguson recounts the violent first half of the 20th century with reference to nations (in the classical sense of “peoples” or, more modernly, ethnic groups) rather than states, but doesn’t leave much hope for improvement as we move through the first half of the 21st century. I’ll throw out a lifeline [hint: religion] in the closing paragraph.
By December 8, 2008
I realized after thinking about my previous post that I did not really summarize what scholars mean by defining Mormons as an “ethnic” group or “ethnicity.” Different historians have explained the idea in different ways. For example, Dean L. May’s explanation emphasizes the shared migratory experience of the pioneers and the voluntary spatial isolation represented by Mormon settlement in the West. [1] Jan Shipps similarly argues in her Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition that “by virtue of a common paradigmatic experience as well as isolation, [Latter-day Saints have acquired an ethnic identity so distinct that it sets the Saints apart in much the same fashion that ethnic identity sets the Jews apart. [2] Patricia Limerick outlines the components of Mormon ethnicity as “the creation of a community in which religious belief laid the foundations for a new worldview, a new pattern of family organization, a new set of ambitions, a new combination of common bonds and obligations, a new definition of separate peoplehood.” [3] All of these definitions sound very apt until you start to think about the process of defining and the ways that these definitions either include or exclude.
By December 5, 2008
The now-common question, “Are Mormons Christian?” (and it’s various derivations, i.e. “Is Mormonism Christian?”; “Are anti-Mormons Christian?”; etc) has generated significant discussion, thoughtful analysis, contentious argument, and unfortunately quite a bit of immaturity, pettiness, and frustration among Latter-day Saints, evangelical Christians, and interested apologists and scholars over the years.
By November 26, 2008
As an academic historian (in training), when I write about the dead for work or for the Juvenile Instructor, I don methodological goggles, like naturalism, skepticism, how-will-this-affect-my-careerism, and any-color-but-rose-ism. When finished, however, I remove those goggles, storing them safely on my utility belt for future use. Today, in this time of thanksgiving, I approach the blog and the dead we study with a set of lenses I normally use only in private or at church.
By November 20, 2008
All this talk about the imminent publication of the first volume in the Joseph Smith Papers’ Journal Series has brought back a lot of memories about my time spent on the Project, especially 2004-2005 when I worked specifically on this volume. The Scriptory Book, Joseph’s 1838 journal, contains some of our only contemporary references to the Danites from a pro-Mormon source. Another important contemporary document that sheds invaluable light on the organization is the Danite Constitution. We unfortunately haven’t found the original text, so determining authorship by examining the handwriting is not an option. Scholars have speculated that either Sampson Avard or Sidney Rigdon wrote it, but it’s really too difficult to know at this point. I may at some point write a post giving a more detailed discussion about what we know about the Constitution, but for the time being here’s a transcript of it. What strikes me the most about it is the rich republican language as well as the obvious reference to the Declaration of Independence.
Whereas, in all bodies laws are necessary for the permanency, safety and well-being of society, we, the members of the society of the Daughter of Zion, do agree to regulate ourselves under such laws as, in righteousness shall be deemed necessary for the preservation of our holy religion, and of our most sacred rights, and the rights of our wives and children. But, to be explicit on the subject, it is especially our object to support and defend the rights conferred on us by our venerable sires, who purchased them with the pledges of their lives and fortunes, and their sacred honors. And now, to pro
By November 17, 2008
Having recently completed my Preliminary exams, and thus ended my self-imposed blogging moratorium, I have decided to put up a first offering in a series of posts regarding the ethnicity paradigm and Mormon identity.
By November 17, 2008
“You go live in Utah.”
– Point guard Derek Harper to reporters, explaining why he refused to report to the Utah Jazz after being traded to the Salt Lake team
I’ve been alarmed to note that a particularly symbolic cultural recalibration that the Monson administration has wrought has gone largely overlooked.[1] We used to have a church president who visited the locker rooms of the BYU football team in order to instruct the players not to “muff it.” Today, however, the team that reaps the undoubtedly vast rewards of prophetic beneficence is the Utah Jazz. [2]
Now, granted, Thomas Monson may be indifferent to the larger circles of meaning rotating around his choice of entertainment, and nothing more than a pro basketball fan. These are not unusual creatures along the Wasatch Front However, as will be further explored below, the cultural significance of their presence there is often missed. So it behooves us to think a bit more deeply about the sport and its particular manifestations in the geographical and cultural landscapes of Mormondom.
By November 15, 2008
I just finished Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001) by Daniel Richter, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. This fine book (a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer in history) tells early American history from an entirely different perspective, that of Native Americans looking east as scattered groups of Europeans make visits, then trade, then settle, fight, and spread along the Atlantic seaboard and beyond. More than just being good history, Facing East also helps the LDS reader appreciate the religious and cultural lens through which early Mormons, like other early Americans, viewed North American Indians. Below are comments on some of the more interesting examples of this I found in the book.
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