“The Intellectual Prospects for Mormonism”: The Third Biennial Faith and Knowledge Conference for LDS Graduate Students in Religion

Duke University/University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
February 2011

The Faith and Knowledge conference series was established in 2006 to bring together LDS graduate students in religious studies and related disciplines in order to explore the intellectual interactions between religious faith and scholarship. In past conferences, graduate students have been invited to reflect upon aspects of their own personal intellectual reconciliations—or their own failures to do so—between church and academy, and to offer fruitful solutions to fellow students undergoing similar intellectual journeys. (more…)

A lot of people would say no, (more…)

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. (more…)

Look, in lots of ways, Glenn Beck is a loon. A loon poorly informed by history, at that. But plowing through the veritable scads of secondary material on my dissertation topic (Protestant fundamentalism) has driven one particular truth pretty well home to me: there’s nothing so destructive to a piece of academic writing as a slightly concealed sneer on an author’s face. Concluding that any particular individual or group is so hopelessly drenched in wingnuttery or disappointing political positions or slavish and bewildering adherence to the blindingly goofy that they are no longer worthy of intelligent analysis is to abdicate the responsibility to understand ourselves that the humanities as a discipline lays upon us. Heck, even for activists (as opposed to scholars), to malign and snarl and taunt the representatives of a cause one finds objectionable is to make the classic mistake of treating the symptom as the disease. Which is why I was not terribly impressed with Jim Wallis’s response to Glenn Beck’s by now blaringly well covered advice to Christians: that they should investigate their faith for the dread and dire words “social justice,” (aka, “Progressivism” (Beck’s definition); aka collectiivsm; aka fascism; aka hurting puppies) and if that mark of the beast should be located, flee for the hills. (more…)

This review, in a slightly different format, will appear in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Mormon History. Grateful acknowledgment to Boyd Petersen, that publication’s book review editor, for permission to publish here is hereby pronounced.

Mitch Horowitz has written an often gleefully fascinating book. (more…)

We’re pleased to welcome a distinguished and honorable new guest blogger to the fold. Put your hands together for Max.

Max Perry Mueller is a PhD candidate in American religious history at Harvard University, focusing on nineteenth century Mormonism and African American religious history. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S.) and Carleton College. His current research project involves early black Mormon pioneers to Salt Lake. He is excited to find interlocutors on all things Mormon, especially issues of race in the Restored Church (to which, quoting Booker T. Washington following his own 1913 visit to Utah, he has “not yet converted”).

I

One of Max Weber’s more evocative phrases is the “disenchantment of the world.” I like it because it does not refer only to the numbing birth of bloodless bureaucracy, to humans in increasingly rationalized aggregate, but also to us as individuals of mind and creativity. The lucid organization of the world as a place human comprehension might master changed our vision, our psyche, and our imagination. The Enlightenment was thus a revolution of the aesthetic and the numinous as much as of knowledge and epistemology.

I want to talk a little bit about how this applies to history, by which I mean not only the sort of narratives and analyses of the past that humans accept as authoritative, but the extent to which we ascribe existential meaning and use to them. We today expect history to be constructed according to a certain set of principles, ways of running the wiring and cranking the engine that we learned from the Enlightenment. But here, I want to float the notion that history may not be a car in the first place.
(more…)

The following emerges from the office of one of our readers, who currently teaches American history at a university in a state that rhymes with ‘Nassachusetts.’
(more…)

I.

The facts are these: (more…)

Given our blog’s audience, this year’s theme and location seems oddly appropriate. Feel free to use the thread to assemble panels.

Call for Papers for SHEAR 2010 (more…)

This review, originally appearing in a slightly different version in Mormon Historical Studies 10:1, is reprinted here with the kind permission of Alex Baugh and Jacob Olmstead, editor and book reviews editor, respectively.

It is a mark of the fascination that Joseph Smith inspires in students of religion and religious history (the present author not excepted) to the present day that, despite the plentitude of biographies, specialized studies, movies, hymns, visual art and all the rest that his life has evoked even only in the past sixty years, this volume is still welcome. (more…)

I.
First, definitions.

(And already, you know this will be long.)

(more…)

Please welcome our new guest blogger.

Brittany has an MA in Victorian Studies from the University of Leicester (U.K.) and BA in Humanities from BYU. She takes special interest in nineteenth-century life writings (diaries, autobiographies, correspondence) and Utah women’s history. Brittany is currently editing the life writings of Ruth May Fox, which will be published by the University of Utah Press in 2010. She works at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City and likes to do fun stuff–especially if it involves the outdoors, travel, literature, and being with friends and fam. And Red Robin hamburgers.

This morning, several hundred members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gathered on the steps of Salt Lake City’s Matheson Courthouse and on the lawn of the Salt Lake City and County Building across the street to express their dismay that District Judge Denise Lindberg was considering ordering the United Effort Plan trust, which contains a great deal of church property, dismantled and sold.

(more…)

Mormon History Association
2010 Independence Missouri Conference
Call for Papers
The Home and the Homeland:
Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions

The forty-fifth annual conference of the Mormon History Association will be held May 27-30, 2010, at the Kansas City Sports Complex Hotel in Kansas City, MO. It has been twenty-five years since the last MHA conference was held in Missouri. The 2010 theme, “The Home and the Homeland: Families in Diverse Mormon Traditions” recognizes the family as a central social and religious institution within Mormon traditions. (more…)

I have in the past devoted significant wordiage to the subtle intersections between the religiocultural paradoxes of the Wasatch Front, the deeper ideologies of the Mormon mind, and pro basketball. These arguments, one hopes, have made the world such a place that the reasons why Lance Allred’s new book should be immediately embraced by all students of such things are always already self-evident. But in case they are not, I here offer a few lines of explication.
(more…)

This summer the JI hopes to host a number of fascinating and informative guest bloggers; our first is Jacob Baker, who blogs normally here and who also eats a mean calzone.

Jacob is a PhD student in Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University. He has published essays on Mormon theology, philosophy, and history in Dialogue and Element: The Journal for the Society of Mormon Philosophy and Theology and is currently working as editor of a collection of essays by Mormon and non-Mormon scholars on Mormon philosophy and theology (somehow he’ll need to learn write and care about non-Mormon topics if he is ever to get a job). Though ridiculously ignorant of history and historiographical methodology, he feels honored to be a former Bushman fellow (2007) and sit in wonderment and awe at the feet of Matt B., Stan T., and David G. (Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens were pretty good too). Most importantly, he he is married to the former Amanda Nielson and has 3 children.

Over the past week, four contributors to the Juvenile Instructor have toured, given tours, researched in, peered through the windows of, and otherwise participated in the opening of the new LDS Church History Library and Archives. Their experiences, ruminations, and ponderables are below.

(more…)

This post inaugurates a new series at the Juvenile Instructor, featuring brief conversations reassessing the significance of major works of Mormon history.
(more…)

I

There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this conference, and every inch of it deserved. Not a cubic zirconium among the presentations, and more than one absolute diamond (Laurie Maffly-Kipp on preparation; Richard Cohen on the Hebrew temple). This was an impressive and a diverse kaleidoscope, and the most interesting thing was the way, one after another, each speaker demonstrated the point Jeanne Halgren Kilde made – that talking about sacred space, at its essence, is talking about the way we experience religion. Space matters because people do things in it.
(more…)