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.

In keeping with these past objectives, we invite graduate students in religious studies and related disciplines (including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, ethics, history, and others) to consider Mormonism’s intellectual prospects. The Latter-day Saints are now a powerful institutional presence on the American scene, but they are not likely to have a significant intellectual presence in the Academy until scholarship and intellectuality are more fully integrated into Mormon life. An inquiry into the intellectual prospects of Mormonism must then address many questions. Such considerations may include, but are not limited to, the following inquiries:

*How can we describe the changing nature of Mormon thought in the current era?

*Where are the centers of intellectual creativity among Mormon scholars and thinkers today?

*Will Mormon theology ever win the respect of other theologians?

*Can the work of Mormon theologians be of any value to ordinary Latter-day Saints?

*What theorists are of value in explicating Mormon thought?

*What is the state of Mormon theorizing about an embodied God? Is it registering with other Christian thinkers?

*Does Mormonism have anything to say to the world other than “join us?”

*Are we making any headway on theorizing Mormon praxis?

*Can ordinary Mormons make their peace with modern biblical scholarship? How can this be accomplished?

*What is the role of Mormon scholars in integrating scriptural scholarship into Mormon life?

*How can Mormons combat the “nice people–wacky religion” syndrome?

*Does inter-faith dialogue dilute or intensify Mormon thought?

*Why should Mormons participate in theological dialogue with non-Mormons?

*Is a Mormon background a handicap or a help in getting a job in a non-Mormon institution?

Panelist papers should last approximately 10 minutes. Short proposals (no more than 250 words) should be sent to Ariel Bybee Laughton (ariel.laughton@gmail.com) by October 1, 2010. Presenters will be notified by December 1, 2010. Conference participants will be eligible to apply for financial assistance with travel and lodging expenses.

Following these arguments, the word ‘fundamentalist’ does not apply for the same reasons that “Mormon” does not. The logic is: you can’t be a fundamentalist X if you are shut out of participation in X in the first place. As the scholar and critic of the fundamentalist Mormons Brian Hales puts it, “Critics of the ‘fundamentalist Mormons’ argue that they do not qualify for the title because they do not adhere to the fundamental teachings of Joseph Smith.” In Hinckley’s words, “This Church has nothing whatever to do with those practicing polygamy. They are not members of this Church. Most of them have never been members.” Therefore, he continues, “There is no such thing as a ‘Mormon Fundamentalist.’ It is a contradiction to use the two words together.”

The problem with this position is that it elects to pick its fight on the Mormon fundamentalists’ home court. Hales’s argument rests upon the premise that fundamentalist Mormons emphasize certain of Joseph Smith’s teachings but reject others, and have developed new doctrines since they became a self-aware movement. But this challenges the fundamentalists by first granting them their presuppositions – that is, that to be a fundamentalist is to cling as closely as possible to whatever the original teachings of a faith might be. Hales rests his case on the presumption that they do not. This is not only a tactical error, but an interpretive one as well.

It’s more useful, I think, to define fundamentalism not in terms of doctrinal oneupsmanship, but rather, as an impulse, an orientation, a way of understanding what it is to practice and believe religion. In the tremendously apologetic (because they seem to view it as presumptuous to try to turn fundamentalism into a cross-cultural, multi-religious phenomenon in the first place, though they rightly point out that everybody’s already doing this anyway) introduction to their series Fundamentalisms, R. Scott Appleby and Martin Marty point out that “fundamentalism” is most useful to describe the way a religious community views itself in relation to the world around it, and the word they use more than any other is “fight.”[1] Fundamentalists differ from conservatives or traditionalists in that they perceive certain aspects of their core identity under threat from outside forces: cultural, institutional, intellectual, and they react by circling the wagons, by forthrightly challenging corruption and insisting upon purity, by emphasizing difference rather than pursuing engagement. And to do this, they sometimes – nay, frequently – innovate in practice, theology, and institution. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Studies of multiple other fundamentalists movements – George Marsden on the granddaddy of them all, Protestant fundamentalism, Ian Lustick on Jewish fundamentalism, Bernard Lewis on Islamic fundamentalism – reveals that innovation, innovation in service of the idealized fundamentalist community, rests near the heart of any movement. This means that noteworthy features of fundamentalism, like theories of scriptural inerrancy, apocalypticism, a revisionist sacred history – and Mormon fundamentalism’s developed theologies of priesthood and polygamy – are symptoms rather than causes, and certainly not internal contradictions.

Ultimately, it seems to me that Hales’s argument emerges from the same place as Hinckley’s; that is, a desire to exile Mormon fundamentalism from the Restoration movement of Joseph Smith. There’s good reason for this; the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, beset by tawdry child abuse scandals, in particular is nobody’s idea of a beloved denominational cousin. But at the same time there’s a natural academic desire to be evenhanded here, to kick back at Hales and Hinckley’s perspectives as ultimately devotional rather than academic, and therefore inimical to scholars’ ability to rise above denominational turf wars and apologetic bickering and evince respect for beliefs we may not share. This is not meant, then, as a presumptuous assertion of academia over some straw man of denominational provincialism, but rather an observation that these sorts of conversations are always, ultimately, ongoing.

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[1] Martin Marty and R Scott Appleby, “Introduction,” Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991) vii-xiv.

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.

In “The Fundamental Premises,” Oaks says, “We seek after knowledge, but we do so in a special way because we believe there are two dimensions of knowledge, material and spiritual. We seek knowledge in the material dimension by scientific inquiry and in the spiritual dimension by revelation.” (He’s repeated this position frequently; in his famous “alternate voices” talk in 1989 that scared Mormons away from Sunstone symposiums and book clubs, Oaks claimed that “The acquisition of knowledge by revelation . . . is the fundamental method for those who seek to know God and the doctrines of his gospel. In this area of knowledge, scholarship and reason are insufficient.”[2]) And of course, both Oaks and Boyd K. Packer, president of the Quorum of the Twelve, have uttered slight variances of what has become an infamous phrase: referring to the work of historians who uncovered blemishes and inconsistencies in the Mormon past, Packer said, “There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.” Oaks uttered the phrase originally in a talk entitled “Reading Church History,” and again repeated it to the documentarian Helen Whitney, saying “that people ought to be careful in what they publish because not everything that’s true is useful. See a person in context; don’t depreciate their effectiveness in one area because they have some misbehavior in another area.”[3] I’m interested in the ways in which these two sets of quotations are connected.

What I want to point out here are the precise qualifiers Oaks and Packer offer. They are not saying that no history is good; they are not trying to hide from the past. On the contrary, they are precisely aware of how essential history is, which is why they are so anxious that their position be understood. Rather, what some read as their blithe disregard for history is rather a set of assumptions about how history is known and how history should be written that does not jive with the standards of professional, academic history, because they reflect allegiance to an intellectual system that only Mormons accept in total.

Some people froth at the mouth at the temerity religious people have to believe that knowledge works in ways differently than as outlined in the set of standards and procedures by which the academy functions.[4] Indeed, the identification of the fruits of empiricism and rationality with genuine “knowledge” is so deep and intuitive to so many that presumably smart people like Richard Dawkins seem baffled at the fact that many Americans continue to cite reasons that cannot be measured or documented for their belief in things like God and Santa Claus.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, for its purposes. The rules of academic history intentionally narrow the realm of acceptable evidence precisely so smart people with different premises can have intelligible conversations. In a lot of ways this has been remarkably successful; academic history has not only produced a great amount of good stories, but has also probably explained why we are who (and what, and where) we are as well as any other sort of history. The rules of academic history have saved us from a lot of demonstrable errors and willful distortion; they force us to take things like context, and rigorous evaluation of sources, and Richard Hofstadter, seriously. This is a good thing. Being required to participate in a conversation that begun long before you are born and will continue long after you die makes the historian humble about her claims and careful about how she makes them. These are virtues; hubris is the first thing beaten out of you in graduate school.

However, it remains that academic history is only one type of talking about the human experience; a particular way of grappling with the great and elusive chameleon that is the past. Saying that it’s the best way depends on what you expect the past to accomplish. And among the particular premises of academic history is not the expectation that it will tell us about God.

Oaks, Packer, and their nemeses in the academy can actually all climb on that bandwagon. Shortly after castigating a particular young man’s dissertation committee for raising their collective eyebrows when the student credited bishops with the spiritual power of discernment in his dissertation, Packer mused, “I must not be too critical of those professors. They do not know of the things of the Spirit.” They are well aware that their ways of history are not quite those of the academy – and this makes professional history not so much misguided as inadequate to illustrate the reality they live in.

So Packer claimed, “There is no such thing as an accurate, objective history of the Church without consideration of the spiritual powers that attend this work.” Words like “accurate” and “objective” here don’t mean the same thing that they do to academics, who associate them with things like empiricism and positivism. What Packer is doing here is signaling the different ways in which he understands epistemology, the different ways in which people gain knowledge about the past. And that difference is predicated on what he expects the past to do.

More, from the same speech (the often-spoken-of-in-dread-tones “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect”): Packer expresses confusion about historians who “seem to take great pride in publishing something new.” This is not a priority for history as Packer sees it; new knowledge is less important than illustrating what is already known. This is why “Teaching some things that are true, prematurely or at the wrong time, can invite sorrow and heartbreak instead of the joy intended to accompany learning.” History to Packer has power. It’s not valuable to him for the same reasons that it’s valuable to professional historians; he does not want knowledge for knowledge’s own sake, or even knowledge for the sake of better understanding how humans work, precisely because he doesn’t believe that history is most basically the illustration of human agency in action. Rather, the power of history is precisely correlated with the extent to which it illustrates the principles of religion around which his life orbits. Indeed, he calls upon scholars to, as they write history, be “obliged to give preference to and protect all that is represented in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we have made covenants to do it.” [5]

Back to Oaks. It should be clear by now that the way he and Packer think about history depends upon the distinction he draws between knowledge given by revelation and knowledge derived from human faculties. It’s upon the claim to this special revelation, of course, that Mormonism rests its claim to distinctiveness and particular authority. But the claim is also the wellspring of the particular narratives of Mormon sacred history. Thus, history writing, for the leaders of the Latter-day Saints, should erect the product of human reason upon the foundations of divine; use the tools of the former to reveal more fully the salvific claims of the latter.

That distinction puts Oaks directly in a line of Mormon theologians that includes BH Roberts, among others, who also insisted that the fullest knowledge of God came through revelation rather than the exercise of human faculty of thought or reason or observation. [6] This, of course, It also placed Roberts – and his contemporary intellectual descendants – in opposition to the liberal theology ascendant in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.

Liberal theologians maintained above all else that God was properly understood to be not transcendent to but immanent in the creation – that he revealed himself in the things of world (song of a bird, blue blue sky, Alma 30:44, etc) rather than only through the abstract _difference_ of the Creator from his creation. If immanence theology was accurate, then God’s intentions, characteristics, and self-revelation could be discovered through examining the world. And indeed, for liberals, scientists exploring evolution were unfolding the means of the God’s creative actions, the growing gentility of Victorian culture signaled the coming Kingdom of God, and the beauty of God’s love apprehended through art. They were, naturally, quite optimistic about humanity’s potential and capabilities. [7]

So are Mormons, interestingly enough. While distinction between humanity and the divine (what Terryl Givens calls “sacred distance”) absolutely evaporated for the liberals, placing apprehension of the divine within the reach of human ways of knowing, Mormon insistence upon the distinction between these two types of knowledge meant that their tendencies in that direction stopped shorter than historians may often assume. [8] At least in these ways, Mormon thinkers remained – and remain –sympathetic with conservative Christians who insist that God’s revelations, particularly in Scripture, provide knowledge about the cosmos inaccessible in any other form. The oddity of this particular configuration of transcendence and immanence is probably worth further historical mucking about.

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[1] Dallin Oaks, “The fundamental premises of our faith,” 26 February 2010, http://www.newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/fundamental-premises-of-our-faith-talk-given-by-elder-dallin-h-oaks-at-harvard-law-school

[2] Dallin H. Oaks, “Alternate Voices,” Ensign, May 1989, 27

[3] Boyd K. Packer, “The mantle is far far greater than the intellect,” BYU Studies 21:3, 5; Oaks interview with Helen Whitney, 20 July 2007; http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/elder-oaks-interview-transcript-from-pbs-documentary. Ironically, “Reading Church History” has been removed from LDS.org; Oaks quoted some of the talk, however, in Dallin H. Oaks, “Recent Events Involving Church History and Forged Documents,” Ensign, Oct 1987, 63.

[4] See, for instance, that anti-Mormon classic; the Tanner’s Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? (Salt Lake City: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987) 14. Or just plug the phrase into a search engine.

[5] All Packer quotations here are from Packer, “Mantle,” 4-6. Italics original. He also claims that the dissertation committee frowned on qualifiers like “Mormons believe that bishops receive inspiration,” which seems implausible; that’s perfectly good phenomenology.

[6] See, for instance, Roberts’s Defense of the Faith and the Saints v 1 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News 1912) 504.

[7] The best single volume history of liberal theology in this period is William Hutchison, The Modernist impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971); see particularly 2-6. Also, Garry Dorrien, The making of American liberal theology: idealism, realism and modernity (Louisville: WJK, 2002). These liberal thinkers owe some debt to German idealism (particularly Hegel’s arguments about the manifestation of God as Absolute in history), but more deeply and directly, to the romantic movement in general and its emphasis upon the power of human sentiment to discern Truth with a capital T in the contemplation of medieval ruins and waterfalls and other such sublimities of the nature around them.

[8] Interestingly enough, Leopold von Ranke, the great advocate of historical empiricism, had tendencies toward both romanticism and immanence. He stressed the importance of primary sources, of evaluating the reliability of claims about the past based upon how well such claims could be documented in evidence. But he also believed that the past would reveal, ultimately, the guiding will of God for each people, and hence that professional history could discern the characteristics of the divine. For him, all knowledge was essentially of one sort. On this, see George Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown: CT: Wesleyan, 1968) 63-4.

Fair enough. It’s been amply demonstrated by now that Beck is largely ignorant of the deep, deep roots that the phrase “social justice” has in the soil of Christian theology. To cite merely one example: In 1891 the landmark papal encyclical Rerum Novarum argued the phrase demanded “some opportune remedy . . . for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.” [1] But the Catholics did more than merely say it would be nice to relieve the squalor of the poor – they rooted the call to do so in a theology of natural rights; an anthropology which insisted that humanity’s true worth lay not in possessions and earthly success, but in moral virtue gained through the metaphysical encounter with Christ in his Atonement; and the conviction that humanity bound together by the mystical bonds of the Church was a single body rather than a collection of individuals. These ways of defining “social justice” are not historical or legal or economic but theological. They imagine human society as first the kingdom of God, and only secondarily a community based on democracy or capitalism or whatnot. And theology is not Glenn Beck’s native tongue.

To cite another: Martin Luther King, Jr, an underrated theologian, argues in his book Stride Toward Freedom that “no historian or sociologist could understand” the meetings that led to the Montgomery bus boycott. This was because, King argued, “history is guided by spirit, not matter.” The imperatives which guided the civil rights movement were to him not simply political; rather, the political manifestations of the Movement were the outworking of God’s grace in human history. The transformation of America from a segregated to a desegregated society was not a political activity but a religious one, and it happened not because of the political but the religious imagination of the African American community.[2]

Beck’s great failure, then, is his insistence on reading religion through the lens of his politics, or perhaps his confidence that the two are so perfectly blended that the seams are invisible and the language of one blends effortlessly into that of the other. This is the mark of a man too at ease in the world. His demand that Christians whose churches subscribe to “social justice” should abandon their denominations indicates that Glenn Beck’s cosmos seems entirely framed by his conspiratorial politics, and that he may, perhaps, have trouble thinking outside the box.

But this is the sort of gotcha that’s quite easy to play. One could, without much trouble, find Beck’s scarlet letters emblazoned on the dress of virtually every Christian denomination in America (including his own). And of course in a larger sense it’s generally easy to catch Beck dabbling in inconsistency, hyperbole, and all sorts of related fallacies. This is, though, where we come to the second failure of imagination.

Jim Wallis’s response to Beck consists, more or less, of ‘nuh-uh.’ And that’s a fatal slip. He insists that “social, economic, and racial justice are at the heart of the gospel,” which is nice, and may even be true. But that’s a thesis statement, not a conclusion, an argument, not evidence. This is, unfortunately, typical of Wallis, who frequently uses religious words like “Biblical” and “grace” while talking about contemporary politics. He argues quite frequently that Jesus commanded us to care for the poor, so if we are to be Christians, we must therefore pursue the planks of what appears to be a fairly typical Democratic political platform. Wallis favors penalizing big banks, promoting grassroots poverty relief programs, immigration reform to benefit poor immigrants, campaign finance laws and so on. This is fine, as far as it goes. But it does not actually go very far.

Wallis, and other advocates for something called the “religious left” seem to be trapped in much the same paradigm that Beck is – that is, they tend to use religious language within an already existing economic and political paradigm. Their religious imagination is structured by contemporary American politics; religion matters to them to the extent that it translates into political positions. This guy is not only a pretty good example of one who wields religious language as a weapon in ongoing partisan warfare; he cites a lone, paltry, out of context verse in Isaiah to justify his pro-choice policies – showing mad prooftexting skills that any fundamentalist would be proud of. The frequently vacuous Sally Quinn, and more, the entire Washington Post/Newsweek “On Faith” website which Quinn helps to edit, stand as a shining monument to this failure of imagination. “Religion” for whoever it is that maintains the front page of On Faith, is primarily “Whatever religious people are doing vis-a-vis the controversial political issue of the day.” “Religion” for Sally Quinn means “Whatever religious activity or language I can muster to lend gravitas and impressive-sounding Biblical language to my left-wing politics and vague and sentimental sense of cultural inclusivity.” Witness, for instance, her poorly-thought-out recommendation that the Obamas become Episcopalian in order to better promote Sally Quinn’s cultural politics.

This is catastrophically depressing. The savagely brilliant religious imaginations that Martin Luther King, or Walter Rauschenbusch, or Dorothy Day mobilized behind social reform worked because of their comprehensiveness. They began with a vision of the world in part inspired by but not bound to the contexts they found themselves in. And the social reforms they advocated for were not merely an end in themselves, or to satisfy our basic human impulse toward charity, or to pursue greater egalitarianism as a self-contained good. Rather, their calls for social reform were bound inexorably into the most basic and primal aims of Christianity – to, through the atoning acts of Christ, attain for humanity salvation. Their theologies of social transformation were based upon their imagination of the Kingdom of God. They were radical, then, in the best sense, not merely political. They knew that the world that Christ calls us to is not the world we live in; that the things Christ asks of us cannot be fully embodied in the tools of politics. One does not get that same sense of the incarnation of Christ in the politics of Jim Wallis. And that, because, like those of Beck, they are simply politics.

So, I feel an incessant, nagging suspicion that perhaps Beck’s salvo is a justified one. This is not to endorse his somewhat staggering ignorance, bluster, and paranoia; indeed, Beck suffers acutely from the same problem he diagnoses; he believes God is on his side rather than engaging in that constant struggle that should afflict every Christian – worrying that he is on God’s. It is, though, to point out that as in every age, idolatry may be the most pervasive sin of our own.

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[1] Rerum Novarum, section 3.
[2] Martin Luther King, Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story (New York: Harper, 1958) 64, 92.

Mitch Horowitz has written an often gleefully fascinating book. Horowitz is editor in chief of the Tarcher imprint of Penguin Books, which publishes volumes on topics like the Mayan apocalypse, interpreting your own dreams, “energy medicine,” the “Human Potential Movement,” the investing secrets of King Solomon, and other such esoterica. He built a career writing for such classic publications as The Fortean Times, each issue a veritable encyclopedia of frogs falling from the sky, crop circles, and cryptozoology. The journal is named for Charles Fort, the World War I era prophet who wrote vast compendia of strange phenomena with titles like Lo! and The Book of the Damned, and is generally credited with coming up with the idea of alien abduction, coining the term ‘teleportation,’ and, crucially, suggesting that there are vast untapped powers available to the human mind–powers that can make you rich, find your keys, and let you see into the future.

In this volume, Horowitz argues that Charles Fort is not, in fact, a crank but rather that Fort had his finger on the American zeitgeist. Horowitz makes his case thus: “Whether the occult changed America, or the other way around, certainly this much is clear: The encounter between America and occultism resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture. This new culture extolled religious egalitarianism and responded perhaps more than any other movement in history to the inner needs and search of the individual. At work and at church, on television and in bookstores, there was no avoiding it: occult America had prevailed.” (258)

Horowitz believes that what he calls the “occult” was a radically optimistic movement in America, built around a very American exaltation of “an unlikely ethic of social progress and individual betterment” (3). It flourished outside the folds of the churches, driven forward by the eccentricities, genius, and spiritual hunger of individuals as diverse as the dentist’s wife Mary Baker Eddy, the cobbler’s son Andrew Jackson Davis, and the druggist Frank B. Robinson–self-made prophets with followings of thousands all. And it was this very confidence in the potential of the average American to access and understand esoteric spiritual knowledge and to use it for individual betterment and empowerment which makes the occult, according to Horowitz, America’s true religion.

Befitting such an argument, the bulk of Horowitz’s book consists of mini-biographies of figures like the ones above. The great Depression-era psychic, theologian, medium, and healer Edgar Cayce gets his own chapter, which emphasizes the coherent structure of Cayce’s mystic thought and argues: “If there was an inner, or occult, philosophy behind the world’s historic faiths, Cayce had come as close as any modern person to defining it” (235). Similar homage is paid to Manly Hall, the eccentric genius who sat for most of his twenties in the New York Public Library’s Reading Room, composing a vast work reconciling virtually every genre of esoteric thought; to Timothy Drew, the North Carolinian who renamed himself Noble Drew Ali and invented “Moorish Science”; and the magician Paul Foster Case, whose 1909 encounter with a mysterious person calling himself the “Master of Wisdom” propelled him into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and eventually into developing a systematic theory of the Tarot.

Yet, despite the tantalizing promises of the dust jacket that Horowitz will explore the “supernatural passions that marked the career of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith,” he uses a cursory three-page recapitulation of D. Michael Quinn’s Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (2nd edition, Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998) primarily as a springboard into a subject that seems to interest him more: Masonry.

This sort of frenetic leap from oddball to oddball embodies the basic weaknesses of Horowitz’s book. First, it is weirdly organized. Awareness that Horowitz seems to have intended a chronological approach only gradually emerges after the reader has been spun through two opening chapters which leap from person to person and movement to movement with only the barest thread of argument or transition tying them together. The first chapter after the introduction is entitled “The Psychic Highway,” referring to the Burned-Over District of antebellum upstate New York. In considering this location, Horowitz in the span of thirty pages deals with, in order, the Shakers, the mysterious “Dark Day” in 1780 when the sun failed to rise, various Indian mythologies, the Millerites, the Mormons, Masonry, the resurrected Quaker prophetess Jemima Wilkinson, Mesmerism, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the great Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis. One’s head spins, and Horowitz’s book seems so bursting with facts and besotted with the obscure and quirky that it threatens to come apart at the seams.

The second chapter is not much better. Fuzzily titled “Mystic Americans,” it begins with the late nineteenth century, vaguely Hindu Theosophical movement, leaps back in time to Transcendentalism and the occult traditions of Europe, touches on Mary Todd Lincoln’s enjoyment of séances, and concludes with the psychic proclivities of the late nineteenth-century feminist Victoria Woodhull. Parsing a coherent argument or narrative thread out of such a patchwork is difficult.

Fortunately, Horowitz then calms down and most of the following chapters have a great deal more focus, though his propensity toward narrating the lives of such fascinating figures as Henry Wallace (Theosophist and Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president for one term) or William Fuld (the stodgy Presbyterian who made the Ouija board into a board game), rather than drawing out evidence to support his argument continually threatens to dismember the book into a collection of anecdotes.

This tendency also illustrates Horowitz’s second great weakness. One gets the sneaking sense that “occult” means anything Horowitz finds novel, interesting, or appropriately weird. At one point, he defines it as that which “deals with the inner aspect of religion; the mystical doorways of realization and the secret ways of knowing. Classical occultism regards itself as an initiatory spiritual tradition” (8). This is, though charmingly mystical itself, not a terribly precise definition. Indeed, monastic Roman Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism might well qualify. Elsewhere, occultism emerges as that which deals with the spiritual or hidden world and how it affects the present and material. That definition is clearer, sort of. However, such obscurity allows Horowitz to place Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy in the same pages with the Maharishi Maresh Yogi, which is an achievement not to be sneezed at.

MATTHEW BOWMAN is a graduate student in American religious history at Georgetown University, the assistant editor of Dialogue: a journal of Mormon Thought, and author of several articles on Mormon and evangelical history.

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”).

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.

Jonathan Edwards, who still somehow manages to be underestimated, spent much of 1739 writing a thirty part sermon series (why don’t we have these?) that eventually, when gathered together with his notes, crossreferences, and plans for expansion became his unfinished masterpiece, A history of the work of Redemption. [1] Edwards was distressed that many of his contemporaries seemed to understand history as a series of causes springing from human effects; as the temporal manifestation of human decision making – and, for many of these interlocutors, destined toward progress as humans learned the lessons of the past, cultivated the virtues of their predecessors, and avoided their faults. The space of history was thus the space where human beings worked out their own possibilities. As David Hume, for instance, wrote, history should “distinguish exactly what is owing to chance and what proceeds from causes,” and that once this was known, “a state which should apply itself to the encouragement of the one would be more assured of success than one which should cultivate the other.”[2] Edward Gibbon exemplified this form of history, assailing Christianity itself for smothering the humanist virtues of Rome. Further, he built his work on his determination “to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals.” [3]

Gibbon’s confidence that better sources inevitably led to better truth, because they would provide greater insight into human motivation, would have seemed to Edwards to miss the point entirely; the New England divine subscribed instead to Augustine’s explanation for the rise and fall of the Empire – that human discipline, failures, and successes were at best proximate illustrations of the will of God, made manifest in the material. [4] Events themselves were of less import than that to which they gestured; the accuracy of their reproduction in historical narrative secondary to the eternal meaning of which they were particular avatars. Instead of locating the key turning points in history around economic or political developments, the sorts of facts that could be documented in primary sources, the Work identified instead “special seasons of mercy,” consisting of revivals, times of conversion, and other religious events, as the pivots that drove redemption history forward. [5] Later, the great Lutheran thinker Paul Tillich would provide a modified version of this notion, presenting history divided between the quantitative mundane time of humanity and the qualitative moments of kairos, when the eternal ruptured into the temporal. [6]

But rather than Tillich’s compromise, the centerpiece of Edwards’s argument in his great work was that theology and history were inseparable; that there was no moment in time in which God’s guiding force was absent. He described the Work as a new way of thinking about God; a “body of divinity . . . thrown into the form of a history.”[7] The historical realm existed because God had elected to work out the redemption of mankind in temporal space; therefore, history was to be understood as the projection of God’s will in the form of time, a sort of divine drama that illustrated God’s mercy for human comprehension. It was inevitably teleological, and thus the sort of causality that Gibbon and others located in human agency was not only trivial, but theologically problematic.

II

Leopold von Ranke, the German often cited as the patron of the modern historical method, the man who famously declared that if all the evidence were assembled, the past could be perfectly known, also believed that such a perfect record would reveal undimmed the face of God in history. But unlike Edwards, who was perhaps the best Calvinist in American religion, Ranke was a Hegelian. Edwards believed that God’s hand in history overwhelmed human agency; Ranke believed that the progress of human history itself manifested the immanent divine will.[8] Edwards believed that the variety of history practiced by Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, and other Enlightenment historians, with its emphasis upon sources and human agency, obscured rather than dimmed our understanding, because it could shine no light upon the cosmic forces that made up actual reality and transcended the paltry progressions of human history. Ranke, though he embraced a metaphysics of the past, rooted his history firmly in the agency of humanity.

But the Americans who adopted Ranke’s exhaustive methods in the late nineteenth century, his stress upon sources, footnotes, and original sources, discarded his broader historical theory in favor of his emphasis upon human action. They stressed that the sources revealed nothing but themselves.[9] They were Baconians, building from particulars to generalities, relying upon empirical sources only, and, more than anything, shunning a priori hypotheses about transcendent forces of any kind. They called themselves scientists, believing that keeping an open mind and assembling sufficient evidence would eventually lead to comprehensive and definitive results. While many historians embraced arguments that placed their own civilization at the end of a long road of historical development, they shunned Edwards’s “superstitious” convictions about how history worked, reliant upon seemingly a priori assumptions and non-verifiable evidence to demonstrate that God, chaotically, intervened in the orderly progression of cause and effect. And while no serious historian today is as optimistic as Ranke, believing that sufficient evidence can create perfect knowledge of the past, nor as confident as his “scientific” successors in the possibility of definitive results, their methods linger.

The tension between empirical history and divine agency played out most dramatically in the Roman Catholic church at the end of the nineteenth century, when a group of thinkers called the Catholic Modernists, most prominently Albert Loisy and George Tyrrell, argued that dogma – the core principles of the faith, that authoritative knowledge of God granted through revelation rather than human reason – was subject to the influence of history; that it might evolve over time, and different ages taught different things based upon their circumstance. [10] This seemed to strike to the heart of orthodox belief in the sovereignty of God over history, giving human agency power over the divine’s ability to reveal itself and subordinating sacred history to the scientific history of Ranke’s American disciples. Pius X silenced the Modernists in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, which asserted that “God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject.” [11] The divine could not be located through the references, citations, and primary sources of the Enlightenment.

III

The modern historical profession descends from Gibbon and Ranke; it is a method of knowing, and more, a language, equipped to communicate particular things. Gibbon on one hand, and Pius X on the other, drew lines circumscribing what it is capable of describing, and continue to stare suspiciously over the barricades at each other. We can see this in salvos each side flings at the other.

Those who seek to do professional history sometimes sneer at evangelicals convinced that dispensationalist readings of the Bible reveal God’s intentions for human futures, or at Mormon apostles who declare about their own faith’s past that “some things that are true are not very useful,” and express bafflement at historians’ desire to “publish something new” instead of simply acknowledging God’s hand in the world. [12] To a historian raised to treasure scraps of primary sources this is heresy, but it expresses no sentiment Jonathan Edwards would not have approved of, and there is no shortage of academic admirers who will defend ardently the complexity and power of that man’s mind. But of course, he is safely dead, and we can therefore pretend his peculiar readings of history bear no claim upon us beyond their curiosity.

On the other hand, of course, we might say that the popes and apostles are defending a form of history that does not, according to modern standards, hold up. It fails to meet the empirical measure of truth which many of us (looking at you, Dawkins) have come to identify that completely with truth itself, but on a more serious level it denies the basic notions of the human condition that underlie modern history. If we have learned anything from the past that historians give us it is that human choices matter, and to surrender our claim over our own fates – for modern academic history is nothing if it is not a resounding assertion of human agency – is to turn our backs on our own nobility. It is to deny that we have anything to teach ourselves, to say that our mistakes and our triumphs are equally meaningless. And of course, Edwards would, with iron nerve, assent to that. But for us it is harder.

I am soon to be a professional historian, and that because I find meaning in it. And that is precisely it; our responsibility is to understand not only the past, but to recognize the variant powers different ways of telling about it, different categories of understanding it, hold over human minds. Religious historians particularly must recognize that the vast part of humanity does not live in the clean and sterile time of modern historical method; rather, the bulk of humanity today and in the past live in what some critics call with derision “faith-promoting history.” The sacred intrudes in their world, God is present to them, and cause and effect does not work in ways that history as we write it has room to hold. If we are to tell their stories, we must understand the cycles of their time.

That is, there was for Edwards a Calvinist way of history, centered upon God’s sovereignty and imagining this world as a stage on which the drama of redemption is enacted. There was for Pius X a Catholic way of history, in which the eternal divine and the human meet in the traditions of the Church. And when Dallin Oaks or Boyd Packer speak of the past in terms that make historians recoil – the infamous true but not useful formulation – they may be enunciating a Mormon way of history.

So. How might professional historians assimilate these notions? For the past three decades, Edwards’s descendents – George Marsden and Mark Noll, among others – have been writing evangelical history – that is, both history of evangelicalism and history with evangelical characteristics. Though they have abandoned Edwards’s fatalism, his aesthetic and mood persists; their work is suspicious of human pride, doubtful about human ability to understand God, and skeptical of certainty of any form in their tradition; their narrative, though they do not use these words, is the tragic and even sinful corruption of religious humility. [13] More boldly, Robert Orsi is the most prominent Catholic historian calling for a reconsideration of the presence of the sacred in human life, wondering “what words or categories of interpretation are there for phenomena” like Marian apparitions, answered prayers, or divine appearance – things which, demonstrably, vast swaths of humanity believe influence their decisions and behavior. For Orsi, the point here is relationship; listening; influence; presence. [14] What Mormon historians should find in these examples is nothing so petty as proof, one way or the other – for indeed, as Leo knew (and Orsi too) the language of modern history is useful for many things, but documentation of the supernatural is not one of them. To live in both worlds is to live with constructive tension, to recognize that the tools of the one cannot fully grasp the other. But that tension is, and must be, always one of dynamic engagement. History is an ongoing conversation, not a definitive proclamation; this is what the scientific disciplines of Ranke failed to grasp. And as Mormons began to think about what our own ways of history might be like, the demand that sacred history makes upon the secular should force our own historians into dialogue.

_____________________
1) Much of what I have to say about Edwards particularly has been influenced by Avihu Zakai, Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton, 2003)
2) David Hume, “Of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences,” in Essays: moral political and iterary (London: Longmans, 1898) 174, 176.
3) Gibbon, History of the decline and fall of the Roman empire (NY Macmillan 1914) xlvi.
4) For Augustine’s arguments, see City of God IV:33.
5) A History of the work of Redemption. John Wilson.,ed (New Haven: Yale, 1989) 143.
6) Paul Tillich A history of Christian thought (Harper 1968) 1
7) Jonathan Edwards, Work, 62.
8 ) See, for instance, Ranke, The Theory and Practice of history, trans, George Iggers (Indianapolis: University of Indiana, 1973) 119.
9) On this transition, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the objectivity question and the American historical profession (NY: Cambridge, 1988) 33-35.
10)John Henry Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) eloquently reconciled historicism with the unfolding of “doctrine” – systematic organization of knowledge about God – but dogma was a different issue entirely.
11) Pascendi dominici gregis, XLIX.
12) Boyd K. Packer, “The mantle is far, far greater than the intellect,” BYU Studies 21:3, 5.
13) For more on this see my long ago blog post here.
14) Robert Orsi, “Abundant history: Marian apparitions as alternative modernity,” Historically Speaking September/October 2008, 13; see also his Between Heaven and Earth: the religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them (Princeton: Princeton, 2004) 5-6.

I had a previous student, now a 3rd year law student, contact me to see if I had suggestions for her. She’s writing a paper on polygamy and feminism in Islam, and is looking for anything that would be parallel in America. I can send her to the usual suspects for 19th century LDS polygamy–Sarah Barringer Gordon, others?–but I wonder if you know whether there is contemporary theory I might point her to. I just assume that FLDS folks don’t consider themselves feminist or write/speak from that perspective, but maybe that’s a misconception?

I must say, the historiography here for the nineteenth century is pretty well grounded, though there is of course much more to be done, we’ve got at least some work to fall back on. I pointed this reader toward Battle for the Ballot, and Madsen’s book on Emmeline Wells. But the twentieth century remains a vast undiscovered country. Jessie Embry’s done a bit of work on contemporary polygamy, and I suspect that more relevant information may come from sociology or religious studies, rather than history.

The facts are these: A few days back, Roman Polanski, the auteur who created Repulsion, Chinatown, and Rosemary’s Baby – some of the finest works of the sixties and seventies, the golden age of film – was detained when he arrived at the Swiss border. He had planned to attend a film festival in Zurich, where he would receive a lifetime achievement award and assorted other plaudits and means of adulation from his colleagues. Instead he may end up extradited to the sort of California jail where they put movie folk. This is because thirty-two years ago in Los Angeles Polanski drugged and raped a thirteen year old girl. He served slightly more than a month in a California state prison for psychiatric observation and agreed to a relatively lenient plea bargain, but fled the United States for his native Poland and then France when his judge, after perhaps inappropriately consulting with the prosecutors, gave indications that he might throw the bargain out.

There has been a great deal of horrified forehead slapping and moralistic beard tugging not only about Polanski and his sins, but also about the weird fact that a lot of people seem to feel not only that he should be let off the hook, but, additionally, that this position is manifestly self-evident and should seem reasonable to all human beings. The ranks here include (unfortunately for those of us who are not fans of generalizations about Hollywood), well, some of Hollywood, including not only known flakes like Woody Allen and Whoopi Goldberg, but otherwise seemingly thoughtful and interesting people like Martin Scorsese – who has fascinating things to say about the influence of Catholicism on his work – and Tilda Swinton.[1] It also includes apparently the French intelligentsia (which again does not help with the anti-broad brush campaign).

I am not here to praise the campaign to exonerate Polanski, but neither am I interested in closing ranks with the forehead slappers. Rather, I’m interested in reading this whole ugly little ball of wax not as further evidence that America/Hollywood is provincial/louche but rather as a cultural debate about evil and human nature. What is it, exactly, in the metaphysical anthropology of Debra Winger (whose charming turn in Forget Paris you may remember) that has her so formidably convinced that Polanski deserves release? [2] What is fascinating about her is not what she says; it’s what inspires her to say what she says. It’s what she believes about Roman Polanski’s soul, and why. And conversely, how is it that her desire to see Polanski freed and – pivotally – start making movies again is so utterly incomprehensible to so many of the rest of us? The fundamental point here is that people – even Roman Polanski – are complicated, so I’m not interested in dismissing great swaths of humanity as morally vagrant. Rather, I want to frame this theologically. [3]

II.

One of the great strengths of the best traditional Christian theology is its ability to assimilate and express paradox in a meaningful way, most particularly the balance of divine and mortal in the person of Christ. The separate propositions that Christ is fully mortal and that Christ is fully divine: each communicate particular knowledge about Jesus, but the dynamic tension generated in the paradox of asserting that both are true gestures to deeper meanings about the relationship between God and humanity.

A more useful tension for the purposes of talking about Roman Polanski, however, is the one embedded in ourselves. That is, as Paul said, desparingly,

I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:18-19) [4]

It’s the horrifyingly simple truth that we don’t understand ourselves. We can’t explain why we do far too much of what we actually do. We barely glimpse the far horizons of our own motivations. And the hideous paradox here is as Paul recognizes; we all perform evil deeds knowing the good, and indeed, even worse, knowing the very nature of evil and embracing it anyway, in a ghastly, grinning nihilism.

Here is Augustine, despairing to God over his theft of a pear:

Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error — not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself. (Confessions, 2.4.9)

And this means, that, as Paul and Augustine and Calvin and Luther all recognized, there is something of our nature beyond our mastery, and even our knowledge. CS Lewis calls it being ‘bent;’ a weak fissure that runs through our souls, our wills, and our minds. [5] Augustine calls it concupiscence, seeing it even in the selfish grasping of a child. He also calls it original sin. Sin alienates us not only from God, not only from our fellow humans, but from ourselves; sin is that part of us that we have barely a nodding relationship with. If we controlled it – really controlled it; if law and law’s predicates were of themselves enough – we would none of us do evil. But we do, and so they’re not. And that’s also why law can never be a perfect predictor of the morality of an action. And why – apologies to Elder Oaks – law can never be a perfect metaphor for religion. (For more on that, see footnote 3.)

The paradox, though, lies in Luther’s phrase: “simul iustus, et peccator;” the believer is simultaneously justified and a sinner; simultaneously righteous before God and a fallen human. Or, as Reinhold Niebuhr slightly tweaked the notion, man is simultaneously the imago dei and the creature; simultaneously fallen, but capable of imagining transcendence, imperfect, but capable of imagining perfection. [6] Even in ourselves.

III.

Polanski. The great fault, I would argue, in the metaphysical anthropology of Debra Winger and company is their inability to grasp this paradox. They see Polanski the artist; a master of emotional nuance, the man whose camera rested with grace and care on Faye Dunaway’s pain in Chinatown, who showed almost palpable sympathy for the families wrenched apart in the Holocaust in The Pianist. This man – the man whom Adrien Brody, upon becoming the youngest winner of the Best Actor Oscar under Polanski’s guidance, called “gifted” and time spent with him “a huge gift,” whom Sigourney Weaver called “very sweet and very strong.” This man could not be a rapist; rapists are evil, and the Polanski they know is good.

And so do we all, says Niebuhr, sin. The individual “overestimates the completeness of his knowledge and even more the self-sufficiency of his existence.” [7] We convince ourselves that life can be absolute; that rapists and other bad people are the easily identifiable Other, not those we know, and not those we love, and certainly not ourselves. And, indeed, those who conflate the magnificence of Polanski’s art with the special condition of his soul are dancing on the brink of idolatry.

But on the flip side, there’s a caution here for the rest of us as well; those of us who see in Polanski the sinner that we are not, those of us who equate religion with law and judge juridical faultlessness to be unblemished righteousness. Polanski’s demons rage inside each one of us, and to shrink so far from the stench of their breath that we can imagine they have a hold only upon him is to put ourselves in danger of dividing our own souls they way Polanski’s defenders divide his. To invoke what may seem a final paradox, the first of Luther’s 95 theses commands us: “The whole life of the believer should be repentance.” Amen.

———-
1. Patrick Goldstein, however, helpfully points out that the real Hollywood powers – studio chiefs and producers, the Spielbergs, the James Camerons, the Grazers – are not touching this one.

2. Winger, who chaired the film festival Polanski was toodling off to in Switzerland, had this to say: “We came to honor Roman Polanski as a great artist, but under these sudden and arcane circumstances, we can only think of him today as a human being . . . we await his release, and his next masterwork.”

3. The question of whether Roman Polanski is an evil man is separate from, but related to, the issue of whether Polanski should be extradited, face a new sentencing, have an new trial, and so on. If he did not ultimately sever it, Martin Luther rendered the relationship between law and righteousness tenuous at best, maintaining that God alone ruled over the soul, and that “where temporal power presumes to prescribe laws for the soul, it encroaches upon God’s government and only misleads and destroys.” Rather, Luther proposed his doctrine of two governments: “the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people; and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and the wicked so that they are obliged to keep the peace outwardly.” [i] Protestantism’s pessimism about the human condition combined with its doctrines of grace has left the West with a notion of the law as utilitarian: it exists mainly to prevent us from doing destructive things to each other.[ii] It does not act as God’s policeman or seek to promote virtue; when it tries to do these things it promptly and sometimes spectacularly crashes into ditches.

This argument was sufficiently novel that Thomas Jefferson picked it up, and it’s remained fairly influential in American legal circles, so far as this humble historian of American religion can tell. Legal positivism made the distinction explicit, separating the law consciously from metaphysical claims about good and evil; legal realism, an enormously influential if diffuse and often confusing movement, maintains that the law has more to do with the practical predilections of the people involved in any given legal situation than it does with abstract theoretical or philosophical notions. Thus: what is illegal and what is theologically evil are, and should be, two different things.

i. “Secular Authority,” in John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther, Selections (New York: Doubleday, 1961) 370.

ii. For more on this, particularly among the Calvinists, the nerds among you might enjoy John Witte’s The Reformation of Rights: law, religion and human rights in early modern Calvinism. (New York: Cambridge, 2008). Calvin basically adopted Luther’s two kingdoms model, and drew a distinction between “biblical principles” and “biblical laws.” Earthly governments should seek to emulate the first, but could not hope to enforce the second.

4. I spoke about these verses at greater length in the opening section of this post.

5. That’s in Out of the Silent Planet.

6. The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:150-159; also 164: “Implicit in the human situation of freedom and man’s capacity to transcend himself and his world is his inability to construct a world of meaning without finding a source and key to the structure of meaning which transcends the world beyond his own capacity to transcend it.”

7. Nature and Destiny, 1:138.

Call for Papers for SHEAR 2010

Rochester, New York

“Contested Terrain and the Early Republic,” the 32nd annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, will be hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology, July 22-25, 2010. The Program Committee invites proposals for sessions and papers exploring all aspects of the history and culture of the early American republic, together with its northern and southern borderlands and international connections, c. 1776-1860. Proposals that reflect the application of new methodologies or perspectives, or that explore new approaches to teaching and to public history are welcome. Given the conference’s location, we particularly encourage papers and panels that address such themes as the emergence of markets and communications; Native American history; Canada and the Great Lakes region; the 1812 War; religious awakenings; slavery, abolition, the underground railroad, and reform movements; women’s rights; urbanization; consumption; visual culture and the origins of photography. We welcome participants from outside the traditional boundaries of the field.

The Program Committee will consider proposals for individual papers and for full sessions; panels with no more than two papers and two commentators are preferred. We also welcome workshops with pre-circulated papers, or sessions in which panelists assess the state of debate on a topic. Each proposal should include a brief abstract of the session, together with a one-page abstract of each paper and a short C.V. for each participant, including the chair and commentator(s). It should also specify any special requirements, such as audio-visual equipment, outlets, or facilities for disability. Any scholar interested in acting as a session chair or commentator should submit a short C.V. Please note that all program participants will be required to register for the conference. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2009.

Please send submissions to the Program Committee Chair:

Christopher Clark

Department of History

University of Connecticut

Wood Hall, 241 Glenbrook Road, U-2103

Storrs, CT 06269-2103, U. S. A.

c.clark@uconn.edu