Ministering, Home Teaching, and Visiting Teaching

?Home teaching has been described as the pivot around which all other church activities are to be correlated.?

• Marion G. Romney, ?Church Correlation: Address to Seminary and Institute Faculty,? June 22, 1964. Church History Library and Archives.

For a hundred years, the practice of what was first called ?ward teaching? and later ?home teaching? saw two Mormon men visit families in their congregation, carrying to them a message from church leadership and reporting back on any needs they found. ?Visiting teaching,? for decades after the founding of the Relief Society in 1842, saw women of the Relief Society engage in a similar practice.

It is hard to underestimate the importance of home teaching to the initial vision of the framers of the Mormon correlation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Exploring the reasons for its importance shed some light on the announcement at the church?s General Conference this past weekend that home and visiting teaching are to be replaced with ?ministering.?

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Author’s Response: Mueller’s *Race and the Making of the Mormon People*

Below is Max Perry Mueller’s response to JI’s roundtable on his book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People.

Thanks to the JI crew, especially to Jessica Nelson, Ryan T, and J Stuart for their thoughtful comments on my book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People. It?s a great honor and an immense pleasure to interact with readers who have read one?s work so deeply and carefully.

Each of the roundtable?s comments/critiques focuses on one or both of two of the major interventions of my book: the first is to theorize ?whiteness? and ?race? more broadly; the second is to theorize the ?archive.? And my response?or, better put, self-critique?is to remind us (me!) not to think too literally about race or the archive. That is, the book tries (intentionally) to have it both ways: that race and the archive are ?real??as in literal, tangible things and/or experiences?as well as ?metaphors??as in literary signifiers of signified (imagined/constructed) things.

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Series Preview: Introductions to Mormon Thought (University of Illinois Press)

A few months ago I had lunch with Joseph Spencer, a professor of ancient scripture at BYU and author of a number of books on Mormon theology and scripture. Our conversation there led us to what has been formally announced: a new book series, titled Introductions to Mormon Thought, which the University of Illinois Press will be publishing in coming years. Below, a description that Joe and I have worked up.

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Call for Applications: Face-to-Face Mentorship Event

The Mormon History Association will be hosting a mentorship event this year at our annual June conference and is seeking applications from students and early career scholars to participate. Successful applicants will be paired with an advanced scholar in Mormon history and discuss their research interests and career trajectory. We welcome applications not only from those seeking traditional academic appointments but those interested in digital humanities, publishing, and public history. This is an amazing opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation and to receive specific advice about your unique place in the field of Mormon history.

The goals of the event are:

• to introduce current research and receive feedback
• to support students with information and advice on their career goals
• to foster talent early career scholars in the field of Mormon history
• to help inform people about career options

Each applicant should be clear about their accomplishments thus far, their research interests, and what they could gain from this event. Applications should be up to 500-700 words and should include:

• key research questions and methodology of the applicant’s research
• scholarship that informs the applicant’s research
• professional goals and trajectory
• optional: identify up to five people in the field of Mormon history who the applicant feels would be helpful mentors and briefly state why *hint* check the MHA program to see who will be attending the conference
• Up-to-date CV

Applications will be reviewed by members of the MHA Board.

Please direct questions and applications to Hannah Jung (or in the comment section below) , MHA Student Representative, at  mha.face2face@gmail.com. Deadline for applications is May 1st.

Guest Post: Indigenous Voices from San Juan Discuss Bears Ears at the Charles Redd Center

Shí éí Bilagáanaa nishli dóó Kinyaa?áanii báshíshchíín. Bilagáanaa dashicheii dóó Tsinaajinii dashinálí. Ákót?éego asdzáá nishli. I am white and born for the Towering House Clan. My maternal grandfather was white and my paternal grandfather was of the Black-streaked Woods People Clan. In this way, I am a woman.

My name is Farina King. I am Assistant Professor of History and an affiliate of the Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Department at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

I am primarily writing to spread the news about an upcoming event, related to questions about monuments and the ongoing issues concerning Bears Ears, that I have been helping to organize with the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at BYU.

The Redd Center will host a special panel at BYU on April 5 at 7 pm in the B092 JFSB on campus, which features diverse Native American voices and perspectives of Bears Ears from San Juan County, Utah. 

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Contextualizing quorum changes

Quorum. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

First, let’s take a step back, but not all the way back. Mostly because this isn’t a book. Let’s go to 1964. At this time, each stake and mission generally included a High Priests quorum, at least one Elders quorum and at least one Seventies quorum. In the years leading up to this time, church policy was that if there were not at least 49 elders (a majority of the scriptural 96–D&C 107:89) then a “unit” en lieu of a quorum was to be organized. But why would that matter? I imagine that the majority of Elders quorums in the church today don’t have 49 members. The answer goes back to the definition of what a quorum is, namely, “the number (such as a majority) of officers or members of a body that when duly assembled is legally competent to transact business” (to quote Miriam-Webster).

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Job Ad: Joseph Smith Papers, Full-Time Research Assistant

Thanks to benchmarkbooks.com for the image!

Research Assistant, Joseph Smith Papers (Church History Department)

PURPOSES

The Church History Department announces an opening for a Research Assistant with the Joseph Smith Papers project. The successful candidate will assist the Joseph Smith Papers in the Publications Division of the Church History Department with historical and textual research for volumes in the Papers? Documents series. This is an exciting and unique opportunity for someone interested in pursuing a career in history. We are looking for a motivated, energetic, and skilled individual to join our team.

This is a full-time position expected to last for the duration of the Joseph Smith Papers Project (set to conclude in 2022).

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Roundtable: Stuart on Mueller’s *Race and the Making of the Mormon People*

You can read the first and second posts in this roundtable HERE and HERE.

Max Mueller should be commended for his analysis of race and the creation of the Latter-day Saint “archive” in Race and the Making of the Mormon People. Mueller takes the Book of Mormon seriously and considers texts that aren’t considered within broader methodological arguments about the LDS Church’s creation of race in the nineteenth century. I think that Mueller’s attention to patriarchal blessings is worth highlighting (which I do below); I also think that his use of literary methodologies opens new avenues for research in Mormon history. Mueller’s book is the first monograph to engage Mormonism’s race-making project(s) through the interdisciplinary lenses of religious studies. Race and the Making of the Mormon People will occupy a central place in the part conversation surrounding Mormonism and race for the foreseeable future.

Mueller analyzes several patriarchal blessings in Race and the Making of the Mormon People, particularly an African American woman named Jane Manning James’ two blessings.[i] He rightly tries to get into James’ mind as well as the mind of the patriarchs that bestowed those blessings on her head. While Mueller’s book is not a study of “lived religion,” he presents plausible readings of the blessing for both James and suggests how these documents helped place James squarely within the “Mormon archive.” He persuasively argues that James may have seen herself as an heir of what Mueller calls “white universalism,” meaning that everyone’s default pigmentation is white and that she had claim to the highest liturgical practices of Mormonism. Mueller’s innovative inclusion of patriarchal blessings should be taken up by others. I’m not aware of any other sources that offer as much potential for simultaneously presenting the leadership’s and the laity’s understanding of race from the same document.

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Roundtable: Tobler on Mueller’s *Race and the Making of the Mormon People*

I’m happy to confirm reports that readers of Max Mueller’s recent book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, which we are discussing this week, will find a rich, multilayered, and searching account of theologies and important narratives of race in early Mormonism. This is a serious book, and a critical contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the functions of race in the Mormon tradition. As Mueller claims, it is one of the first to consider questions of race and Mormonism from the inside out. This means that it nicely complements recent scholarship like that of Paul Reeve and others, which has generally taken the opposite tack. Perhaps the most innovative element of the book, in my view, is how it brings consideration of both “red” (Native American) and “black” (African-American) constructions of race together. In some ways, the early Mormon logic of race in relation to these two groups seems incongruous, but Mueller works hard to show there are important aspects of continuity, as well. He has categorically synthesized early Mormon conceptions of race as well as anyone might expect to do.

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Roundtable: Nelson on *Race and the Making of the Mormon People*

This is the first of three posts on Max Perry Mueller’s Race and the Making of the Mormon People. Today’s post comes from Jessica Nelson, who recently completed an MS in history at Utah State University. She is interested in race and Mormonism in the twentieth century and loves riding her stationary bike. 

Max Perry Mueller?s book Race and the Making of the Mormon People actively and deliberately engages with the Book of Mormon. This is significant, and I hope that other scholars will follow suit and take the words of the Book of Mormon?along with its 19th century context and what it represents to Mormonism?seriously in their work. Mueller rightly demonstrates that the Book of Mormon?s stories of racial lineages are critically important to understanding racial constructs in early Mormonism.

Readers familiar with the Book of Mormon will be able to recognize that Mueller carefully read Mormonism?s foundational text. After finishing Mueller?s conclusion, however, I am left wondering how useful textual analysis and literary criticisms of the Book of Mormon are to fully understand race in nineteenth-century Mormonism. How central are Mormon scriptures to Mormon conceptions of racial otherness and whiteness? Can the Nephites as ?white? people within the Book of Mormon be problematized any more than the simplistic way that Mueller references them? Did nineteenth-century white Mormons even think of the Nephites as ?white? like they were? The Book of Mormon is inherently problematic as primary source material, but evaluating Mueller?s claims begs further examination of scripture and the characters in it.

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