The following was printed in Times and Seasons, September 1, 1842. (more…)

Five years before the 1920s, a decade in which he did a least as much as John T. Scopes to instigate warfare between Protestant liberals and fundamentalists, and fifty years before Martin Luther King praised him as the greatest preacher of the century, the Baptist minister Harry Emerson Fosdick was appointed to the Jessup Chair in Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary. [1]

Fosdick was not really an original thinker, but he was a master teacher and popularizer. And, perhaps because of the agonies that he struggled through on his own route to faith, he had a powerful understanding of the anxieties that plagued his age. Because of the new Biblical criticism, Fosdick wrote,

The old use of the Bible became impossible to many preachers who, as much as ever was true of their fathers, believed in Jesus Christ as the world’s Saviour and wanted to proclaim his Gospel as the power of God unto salvation.[2]

In other words, these preachers – like Fosdick himself – believed passionately in God revealed in Christ. But they no longer accepted the accuracy of Biblical history. And they did not know what to do. (more…)

Harry Emerson Fosdick was among the most popular preachers and writers of the first half of the twentieth century. He’s particularly known for a trilogy of devotional works called “The Three Meanings:” The Meaning of Prayer, the Meaning of Faith, the Meaning of Service. These books have sold millions of copies; there are reports that Gandhi read them in prison; and they’re still in print today.

Despite Fosdick’s high profile,* however, it was the RLDS, not Harold B. Lee or J. Reuben Clark, who stepped up to the plate to represent Mormonism to Fosdick. (more…)

Before anything else, I want to wish everyone good luck or congratulations on their end of semester work–which ever option best fits your own situation. After having done my best to diagram the historical craft in my previous post and postulate what such observations might mean for the study of Mormon history, I have decided today to tackle the role of theory in historical inquiry. Once again, I am treating an extremely complex topic, but I hope to present my ideas in a clear and concise manner. As such, I will probably oversimplify some concepts for which I profoundly apologize-this topic has proven much more difficult than I initially thought. (more…)

One topic I find most interesting about Mormonism is the ability of the Latter-day Saints to create the sacred. (more…)

In honor of Earth Day, here is an excerpt from an 1860 sermon by Brigham Young. I’m intrigued by how his counsel to cultivate the earth figures into his eschatology. (more…)

By Margaret Young

I won’t give his real name. Apparently, he is a remarkable man, a supremely talented jazz musician who has played with Duke Ellington’s orchestra. He joined the Church before the priesthood revelation in 1978 and so, as an African American, he understood that he would not have the same privileges as white Mormons. The Era magazine (precursor to the Ensign) did a story about him, which inspired at least one other Black musician to stay in the Church during some difficult times. (more…)

This is not a verbatim report. It has been slightly reworked for clarity and smoothness from notes I took as I typed almost as fast as I could. Any errors in facts, or lack of grace in delivery are my responsibility. Enjoy! (more…)

If you live practically anywhere on the Wasatch Front, you are within range of one of Bill MacKinnon’s speaking engagements in his whirlwind book tour, promoting his latest publication, At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858, volume one of a two volume history of the Utah War and the tenth volume in the Kingdom in the West Series. (more…)

It is my pleasure to announce another big addition to the Juvenile Instructor…Matt Bowman. Matt joins Heidi, Stan, and myself as Bushman Summer Seminar alumni that blog at the JI. He joins us after a successful tenure at Mormon Mentality. Here’s what he has to say about himself.

Matt Bowman is a doctoral candidate in American religious history at Georgetown, and holds a master’s in American history from the University of Utah.  He’s interested in Christian theology, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and, occasionally dabbles in Mormon history, noir, and the movies.  He’s published in Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation, The Journal of Mormon History, the John Whitmer Journal, and the Utah Historical Quarterly.

Let’s welcome Matt. (more…)

“I held those remains before they were buried. I saw the bullet holes in the bones. Until that point, it was just what people had told you about the massacre, but when you saw the bodies it became real and undeniable.”

-Robert Paul Wilson, grandson of one of the surviving MMM children, cited in Novak, xiv.

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I hope this isn’t a topic that has been discussed here before. I have been thinking lately about what it means to practice academic history. The recent post and comments about the new Emma Smith film, in correlation with my seemingly never-ending journey along the path of professionalization, have caused me to ask myself if the history undertaken by trained historians is any different than the study of the past by others. I hope that I am not constructing a straw man, but it seems that some people in the church have developed a sort of hostility toward those that focus their academic studies on Mormonism. My personal opinion about such hostilities is that they represent a reflection of how non-historians don’t really understand historians and their methods. This misunderstanding causes them to label such historians as threats. (more…)

The following is a portion of my research from last summer’s Bushman seminar, in which I examined how Mormons between 1890 and 1940 vacillated between embracing and marginalizing their polygamous past.

With Protestants continuing to be suspicious of a possible attempt by the Latter-day Saints to bring back the practice of plural marriage, Mormons at times narrated their polygamous past leading up to the Manifesto to emphasize their loyalty to the nation. In this context, the potential to marginalize the importance of polygamy was evident. For example, in 1916 Talmage told a news reporter that “when the federal statutes prohibiting its practice were declared constitutional, plural marriage was forbidden by action of the Church, officially assembled in general conference.”[1] By arguing that Mormons immediately discontinued the practice of plural marriage when the anti-polygamy statutes were declared constitutional (more…)

All of us have by now been made aware of the new movie about Emma Smith. If you’re not up to speed about it yet, please see here for David G.’s excellent review. This post is concerned, not with the film itself, but with the discussion of polygamy that was included in an article in the 11 April edition of the Deseret News. (more…)

The latest in the Redd Center lecture series at BYU was given by Jared Farmer, Professor of History at SUNY-Stony Brook, who we had as a guest blogger here at our very own JI a week ago. Farmer spoke about his latest book, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, recently published by Harvard University Press. As David G. pointed out in his introduction a week ago, the book is a cultural and environmental history of Mt. Timpanogos and Utah Lake–the jewel and the bog, respectively, of Utah County. At least, that’s how they are popularly perceived in the valley today. But things were, at one time, quite different.
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A few months ago, while traveling on a rickety bus in Peru from Cusco to Puno, I read Craig Campbell’s Images of the New Jerusalem: Latter Day Saint Faction Interpretation of Independence, Missouri. (more…)

With the recent focus on the Texas polygamy raids, it seems only appropriate to share this lecture by B. Carmon Hardy which he gave at Benchmark Books April 20, 2007 on the occasion of the release of his Doing The Works of Abraham, the latest volume in the Kingdom In The West series. I was in attendance at this lecture. Unfortunately, Hardy lost his voice and was hard to make out at times. Again, thanks to Brent Brizzi for taking the time to provide these notes. (more…)

Two weeks ago, just after the completion of the Easter holiday, Elder Philip Gill, a Presiding Elder in the Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ, delivered the new church’s first Easter message to the world on YouTube.  For those not familiar with this organization, it was established in England in 2006, and recognizes Matthew Gill as a prophet and Joseph Smith’s rightful successor. (more…)

At least that’s the message that early twentieth-century Mormon author Nephi Anderson was trying to send in his short story “The Inevitable,” published in the Improvement Era in 1907. I think it is significant that Anderson wrote this story after the death of his first wife, Asenath Tillotson in 1904, and just before his second marriage to Maud Rebecca Symons in 1908. Questions of his marital status with his first wife and a potential second wife in the hereafter were likely on his mind.

Given the recent discussions around the ‘nacle concerning celestial polygamy, I thought I’d post this here so we can get some feel for the emergence of this idea in Mormon thought in the post-1890 era. It’s a bit long, but it’s a short story, so it should be a quick read for the curious. (more…)

Jared Farmer is the author of On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Book Cover), a cultural and environmental history of Mount Timpanogos and Utah Lake. The book is an outgrowth of his dissertation at Stanford University, where he studied under the preeminent historian of the American West, Richard White. Jared’s work is a fascinating example of cutting-edge approaches to place, memory, religion, and nature. His first book, Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country, examined the controversial transformation of Glen Canyon of the Colorado River into the reservoir Lake Powell. Jared has agreed to provide us with some tidbits from On Zion’s Mount.

Dear readers of The Juvenile Instructor, (more…)

Christopher has already ably outlined the morning session of today’s conference at UVU on Mormon schismatics. Here I will summarize the proceedings from the afternoon.

The afternoon session was comprised of three speakers on three different and important groups that traced their origins to Joseph Smith, Jr. R. Jean Addams presented on the Church of Christ, Temple Lot (Hedrickites), Vickie Cleverley Speek spoke about the Strangites, and Michael Van Wagenen summarized his research on the Wightites in Texas. Like the morning session, the three speakers first presented their individual papers and then combined for a panel and Q/A session. This format allowed for questions that examined the three groups in comparison to one another, which was one major objective of the conference.

R. Jean Addams is a history buff living in Washington state and his presentation was a summary of Hedrickite history f (more…)

Joseph Smith was killed in 1846 by a mob in Alton, Illinois, near the Illinois-Missouri border.  Unless I am mistaken, the foregoing statement is quite obviously false on two accounts (1846; Alton).  Yet, I was quite surprised to find that the source of this mistake is a well-known historian of U.S. religious history. (more…)

The following is a review of the morning session of the Eighth Annual Mormon Studies Conference at Utah Valley State College.  A review of the afternoon session is forthcoming here at the Juvenile Instructor.  

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