Dave's Mormon Inquiry

More books on Reed Smoot

I just read through the careful transcription (posted at the Juvenile Transcriptor) of a recent presentation by the authors of two recent books on the Smoot hearings. The Smoot hearings are getting some historical attention lately — I suspect Kathleen Flake's book gets some of the credit for this.

And JI deserves kudos for posting other recent transcriptions as well: a Robert Millet presentation at a book signing event talking about his new book Bridging The Divide, The Continuing Conversation Between a Mormon and an Evangelical, and a Richard Bushman presentation given at Weber State entitled "Rough Stone Rolling and the Intellectual Prospects for Mormonism." It's great that presentations like these can be made available to a wider interested audience.

Where Are They Now?

From Wednesday's Deseret News, on George P. Lee, formerly an LDS Seventy: "Prosecutors in southern Utah have dismissed criminal charges against an excommunicated general authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." See full story here.

Elect Lady or Mormon Enigma?

Or both? The SL Trib carried a recent story announcing the production of a new film, "Emma Smith: My Story," scheduled for release in spring of 2008. The article notes that it will be filmed at the LDS Motion Picture Studio in Provo, so I doubt that Emma's full enigmatic story will get told. And it is described as a "feature film" rather than a documentary, suggesting that the script will, uh, massage the facts a bit in order to correlate enhance the storyline and rewrite sharpen the characters. But who knows? I actually like the new Joseph Smith movie. Maybe this one will be a pleasant surprise as well.

A Long-Awaited Manual

Dallas at the newly upgraded TML has a short post on the new Teachings of Joseph Smith manual which will be used for instruction in LDS priesthood and Relief Society classes for the next two years, starting in January 2008. It is now on sale for $3 at LDS Distribution Centers. It features the newly upgraded portrait of Joseph Smith on the cover. If the Bushman biography was Rough Stone Rolling, the new manual might be called Buff Tones Beaming. An impressive sight.

The Devilish Details of Inoculation

Well, my earlier prospective discussion of the Sunstone session on the Bloggernacle went so well, I'll try one on "inoculation." That's shorthand for the idea that if active Mormons get a stronger dose of an "unsanitized" presentation of LDS history, they are less likely, when confronted with a presentation on Mountain Meadows or polygamy or peepstones/seerstones, to run from the building screaming "I've been duped! I feel so betrayed! I want a refund on my tithing!" Here's my position in one sentence: Inoculation looks good on paper, but the devil is in the details, little things like who, what, where, when, and how.

Peterson on Rough Stone Rolling

It has been a long time since I've posted a link and discussed an online essay, so here goes: Daniel C. Peterson's "Reflections and Reactions to Rough Stone Rolling and Related Matters," the Editor's Introduction to the current issue of the FARMS Review. Peterson touches on several of the reviews of RSR and Bushman's disappointment at how unwilling many of them were to treat the book as a serious scholarly biography. Others who at least granted that much nevertheless often took the view that no believing Mormon could write a scholarly biography of Joseph Smith.

The Utah War: Nine Conclusions

The Spring 2007 issue of Dialogue includes a 40-page article entitled "Loose in the Stacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy," by William P. MacKinnon, a historian who has published several prior articles on the Utah War. The link is to an online version of the article posted at the Dialogue site, for those of you who aren't yet subscribers. This seems like an appropriate topic for a Memorial Day post (seeing I couldn't spin the three episodes of Band of Brothers I watched this morning into a DMI post). I'll start with one paragraph giving my own view of the new importance of the Utah War and Mountain Meadows, then summarize MacKinnon's nine summary conclusions about his lifelong research on the topic.

More on the Utah War

I recently attended a presentation on the Utah War by historian David Bigler. For background on the Utah War of 1857-58, see my earlier post; this post will give a few of the interesting details in Bigler's presentation that adds to the basic story. He called it the United States' "First Civil War" (although it was the Mormons' third war). My notes are a little sketchy; for more complete coverage, see his book Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896, a history of 19th-century Utah that (I'm told) doesn't pull any punches.

The Utah War

I've got three posts lined up on the Utah War of 1857-58 and the unfortunate occurrence at Mountain Meadows. This post is a general overview that will be a set-up for the posts to follow. Here are two links that give excellent short essays on the Utah War: "The Utah War," an article by Richard D. Poll in the online Utah History Encyclopedia; and "Utah Expedition," also by Poll, from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. A related article is "The LDS Reformation of 1856-57," by Paul H. Peterson, also from the Encyclopdia.

Welcomed Into Zion

I'd like to start doing Sunday posts with a little different flavor, either borrowing from talks or lessons prepared for class or just whipping up something mildly edifying on the spot. I'll do some posts on Paul and his letters later in the year. For now, I'll share a passage I ran across in connection with President Hinckley's talk The Faith to Move Mountains from the October 2006 Conference. He recounted the story of how Brigham Young, in October 1856, sent out rescue caravans to find and feed migrating Saints stranded in snowy Wyoming and escort them back to Salt Lake City. I looked up the relevant material in Allen and Leonard's The Story of the Latter-day Saints. Quite a tale.

A Sense of Community

Here's a second post based on The American West: A New Interpretive History (see the first post), another attempt to link LDS history with Western History in three paragraphs or less. I'll summarize the material from Chapter 12, "A Search For Community," that shows how singularly successful Mormons in Utah were at building community in the West. It was a much different approach than that of the stereotypical pioneer family: "Rural life in the great open spaces of the trans-Mississippi West was filled with hard work, monotony, and often stultifying isolation." Not for the Mormons, who embraced hard work but not monotony or isolation. The resulting sense of community carried through to the extended Church of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Democratic Religion

Earlier I posted on Republican Religion, which touched on the tenor of religion immediately following the Revolutionary War. In this post I review what happened to the American religious scene during the first third of the 19th century, right up to the founding of the LDS Church in 1830. I'm using material from Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800-1830, particularly the second chapter, entitled "Christianizing the Republic."

Three Takes on Mormon History

As I see it, history offers a more promising avenue for understanding Mormonism than doctrinal speculation (in all its varieties). History offers the advantage of talking about things that actually happened — it's more than just a clever word game. But what do you do with Mormon history? What does it mean? It seems to tell us something relevant about Mormonism and about our own religious identity, but what exactly does it or can it tell us?

Going West With the Mormons

I'm halfway through The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), an award-winning retelling of how the West was won. Hint: it's not a pretty picture. While Mormon pioneers get mentioned briefly, the book is more valuable (to the LDS reader) as a summary of just how violent and unfriendly 19th-century America was to those who weren't white and Protestant. It wasn't just the Mormons that got the short end of the stick. But in this post I'll focus on the concept of Mormons as a frontier people. In what way are the Mormons a frontier people, you ask?

Republican Religion

I'm talking about 18th-century republicans — the Revolutionary War kind of republicanism. I just finished The American Revolution: A History (2002) by Gordon S. Wood. It includes ten pages on "Republican Religion" that speak directly to the religious background of Joseph Smith, Jr., and his parents. Seems like a topic worth sharing.

Orwell's Encounter With Mormonism

I was hoping for something interesting when I clicked on this post at M-Star last week claiming a link between George Orwell and Mormonism, but it was a hoax. Okay, call it a clever hook — something I would never do. But then, lo and behold, just the next day I stumbled across the following passage in Down and Out in Paris and London recounting Orwell's actual encounter with two Mormon missionaries in interwar England.

Mountain Meadows Posts

Millennial Star posted a summary of remarks on the Mountain Meadows Massacre ("MM") by historian Thomas Alexander at this year's Leonard J. Arrington Lecture at the USU. Alexander's lecture (and the M-Star post) highlighted several investigations of MM conducted by LDS leaders themselves. Here are links to a few prior posts of interest related to Mountain Meadows:

• Reflections on Mountain Meadows (comments on my own visit to the site, with links to readable images of two of the plaques erected at various memorials at the site).
• Let the Past Be Reopened (comments by Justin summarizing twelve key points about MM made by historian Ron Walker at the MHA conference in May 2006. Walker is the author of the highly anticipated but ever-forthcoming book about MM).
• Mountain Meadows in the Supreme Court (Nate Oman's notes on a 1914 US Supreme Court case brought by the estate of one of the victims of MM under the Indian Depredation Act of 1891).
• Yauguts (Steve Evans juxtaposes the events of 9/11/2001 and 9/11/1857),

Did I miss any?

Stakes, Chapels, and Parking Lots

I'm going to milk one more post from Shipps' Soujourner in the Promised Land, culled from another long-titled article, "The Scattering of the Gathering and the Gathering of the Scattered: The Mid-Twentieth-Century Mormon Diaspora," presented as chapter 13 in the book. I won't summarize the article as much as share a few of the factual details that filled in a chapter of 20th-century LDS history I hadn't really grasped before.

An Approach to Religious History

I am going to discuss Jan Shipps' essay "Remembering, Recovering, and Inventing What Being a People of God Means: Reflections on Method in the Scholarly Writing of Religious History," chapter 8 in her Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (U of Illinois, 2000). While there are scattered comments relating to LDS history in the essay, it treats the writing and framing of religious history in more general terms. Although it is not hard to apply it to LDS history, I'll save most of the "Mo app" for a second post. Here, I'll just summarize two or three of the concepts Shipps develops in the essay. Sorry, couldn't find an online version of the essay. Someday everything will be online, but for now you'll just have to find the book to read the essay in full.

Oh How Lovely Was the Meeting

Camp-Meeting, that is — the one Joseph attended near Palmyra on a beautiful spring weekend in 1820. At least that's how D. Michael Quinn recounts the story in an article just posted at the Dialogue website, Joseph Smith's Experience of a Methodist Camp-Meeting in 1820. That title sounds rather pedestrian ... except for the fact that for close to forty years many historians have relied on the work of minister-researcher Wesley P. Walters to conclude that there was no such camp-meeting or revival near Joseph Smith's home in 1820. At the very least, Quinn's new paper will force a careful reassessment of Walters' work on this critical point.

A Spectre Haunting Mormonism

In the David O. McKay era, a spectre was indeed haunting Mormonism — the spectre of Communism. And it wasn't just whispered about in the halls, it was shouted from the podium, particularly by Apostle Ezra Taft Benson, as recounted in "Confrontation with Communism," Chapter 12 of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (all quotes are from Chapter 12 of the book). It was depicted as a conspiracy to undermine everything good about America and the Church. As we now know, it turned out that nationalism and ethnic strife eventually swamped political Communism. But no one knew that's how it was going to turn out. For most Americans and the vast majority of Mormons during the McKay years (1951-70), Communism was the avowed enemy of the West, immovably opposed to truth, justice, and the American way.

On Historiography

For this week's online essay, go read Historiography, at Concordia University's Dept. of History website. It's a quick introduction to issues that historians grapple with in writing history, along with an overview of historical writing in the West from Herodotus and Thucydides to Bancroft and Turner. I'll give a couple of quotes. First, what are "historical facts"?

Except for the special circumstance in which historians record events they themselves have witnessed, historical facts can only be known through intermediary sources. ... The relation between evidence and fact, however, is rarely simple and direct. The evidence may be biased or mistaken, fragmentary, or nearly unintelligible after long periods of cultural or linguistic change. Historians, therefore, have to assess their evidence with a critical eye.

So history is dependent on sources which, when viewed through the critical eye of an informed historian, are the basis for (tentative) statements of historical fact. Facts aren't foundational, they emerge.

Plural Marriages, 1890-1904

As this week's online essay, go read D. Michael Quinn's "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904," Dialogue, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1985):9-105. The link is to the copy of the article at Dialogue's archive reader, which I don't find particularly easy to use, but at least it's all online and it's free. Can't really argue with that, can you? A little subtraction will tell you the article is 96 pages long, which sounds imposing. But half of that is footnotes and the article itself is not difficult reading. It's not like 96 pages of RSR. After I finish the article myself I might come back and add a longer discussion to this post. Until then, here's an excerpt (from p. 15 of the article) explaining why it so tough to really get a handle on the LDS doctrine and practice of plural marriage:

The 1890-1904 period is only the middle section in a complex history of plural marriage among the Latter-day Sainst from 1830 to the present. Understanding this history is complicated by illegality of plural marriage, by the resulting secrecy connected with its practice, by the fact that polygamy has been the center of a sectarian battleground throughout Mormonism's history, and finally by the problem of the meaning and application of "truth" in Mormon theology and practice as they relate to plural marriage.

Your First LDS History Book

What was the first good LDS history book you read? The first book that made you sit up and say, "Hmm, never heard that before," or maybe just "Okay, now I see how it all fits together." My first eye-opener was Klaus Hansen's Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God & the Council of Fifty in Mormon History. (With a title like that, it had to be good.) I checked it out from the BYU Library, as I recall (it was in with the regular books, not the Locked Case or Special Collections). It covered Joseph's formation of the Council of Fifty as a governing body for the temporal "kingdom" or society of the Saints (and any friendly neighbors who were also part of that society), including his ordination as king to direct that political entity. I recall that Hansen did note that some of the members of the Council were not LDS, which was an unexpected detail. For more details and references on the Council of Fifty (and some criticism of its treatment in Hansen's book), see J. Stapley's excellent BCC post, Theodemocracy.

So, what was the first really interesting LDS history book you read?

Just the Facts, Ma'am

For this week's online essay, go read Historiography, a short essay at the Concordia University Department of History's website. It's a nice follow-up to my earlier post Faithful History, and I'll use it to bring out a couple of the points touched on in that post by Richard L. Bushman.

Faithful History

The ongoing debate over the proper approach to writing LDS history can almost be pared down to a debate over the definition of the term "faithful history." Here are four sources for understanding this debate: (1) Richard L. Bushman's 1969 essay entitled "Faithful History," in Dialogue 4 (Winter 1969):11-28; (2) a 1992 Signature book, Faithful History, which includes Bushman's 1969 essay as well as fifteen others by various authors representing the entire specturm of LDS scholarly opinion on the subject (here's the book's Table of Contents); (3) a 1981 speech by Elder Boyd K. Packer to CES instructors, entitled "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater that the Intellect," published in BYU Studies 21 (Summer 1981):259-78; and (4) a historian's response to Packer's talk, D. Michael Quinn's "On Being a Mormon Historian" (included in the Signature book), a rather personal essay detailing Quinn's experience navigating the tricky waters of LDS historiography as a history professor at BYU. In the balance of this post I'll give a few comments on each of these four sources.

Mormon Militarism?

This will wind up last week's topic (see here and here) by reviewing the recent remarks of BYU professor Richard Bennett (to a gathering in Southern California) on militias in pre-Civil War America and the significance of militias in understanding the LDS experience in Missouri, Illinois, and Utah in the 19th century. He did an earlier book, Mormons at the Missouri: Winter Quarters, 1846-52 (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2004). His more recent research on militias, to be published in an upcoming book, goes a long way toward making several messy episodes (Zion's Camp, the Missouri War of 1838 and the Danites, the Nauvoo Legion, and the Utah War of 1857 and Mountain Meadows) more understandable. It also helps to counter the occasional characterizations of LDS attempts at self-defense as evidence of Mormon militarism.

Nauvoo Legion

As this week's online essay (and as a follow-up to yesterday's post) go read the Nauvoo Legion article from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. It notes:

As part of the state militia, the Nauvoo Legion was at the disposal of the governor of Illinois "for the public defense, and the execution of the laws of the State or of the United States." Significantly, it was also at the disposal of the mayor of Nauvoo for "executing the laws and ordinances of the city corporation" (HC 4:244).

Not an ideal arrangement, but at least the Nauvoo Legion was an offically organized unit of the Illinois militia.

Weekend Warriors

It's not hard to find something mildly relevant when Googling a topic of interest, but every once in a while you strike gold. Here's a gem I just stumbled across: the Utah Army National Guard history page. It starts: The Utah National Guard was formally organized March 24, 1894, however its predecessor, the Nauvoo Legion, dates back to 1849. I wouldn't have expected the Utah National Guard to claim the Nauvoo Legion as its official predecessor. And it gets more interesting from there.

Joseph's Three Biggest Accomplishments

This is Part 2 of my review of Richard Bushman's public comments to a small gathering in Southern California last month. In Part 1, I summarized Bushman's explanation of his approach and method, which placed Joseph as one prophetic figure in what he called the "grand tradition" (and he's thinking of a modern tradition, not an ancient one). In Part 2, I'll summarize what Bushman described (with a broad brush) as Joseph's three biggest accomplishments. Despite a flurry of B'nacle posts on various Bushman topics, I have found his short lecture that I'm summarizing in these two posts to be the best introduction to Rough Stone Rolling that I've come across. I hope some readers find it useful.

Adventures of a Church Historian

I just completed Adventures of a Church Historian, Leonard Arrington's professional memoir that focuses on his tenure as LDS Church Historian from 1972 to 1982. He speaks frankly about both the challenges and the accomplishments of the History Division of the LDS Historical Department during the period when he was directly involved with it. The book is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in LDS history, both to get an informed account of the "official" LDS position vis-a-vis the writing of history by trained LDS historians and to get a sense of how much Arrington and his co-workers managed to accomplish.

City on a Hill

The Puritans didn't just emigrate to New England, they aimed to establish a new society. This is best expressed in John Winthop's famous sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered on the ship that took him and his fellow believers across the Atlantic in 1630. I'll pull out a couple of quotes that convey his vision of an ideal Christian society, then compare it to the Mormon vision of Zion announced by Joseph Smith.

Bushman on Mormon History

I heard Richard L. Bushman speak to a small audience last week about his new biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. In this post I'll summarize his remarks about his approach and method for writing a biography of Joseph Smith, touching on the ways in which he seems to move the paradigm for writing 19th-century Mormon history forward. In a later post I'll summarize the substantive points he made about Joseph Smith.

Understanding RLDS

We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming ... The current Dialogue has a piece entitled "The Remnant Church: An RLDS Schismatic Group Finds a Prophet of Joseph's Seed," by William D. Russell, an RLDS scholar. It is available online here, but you really ought to subscribe and get your own copy (so you can read all the other articles, etc.). There is also a lengthy interview between Russell and Dialogue's editor posted at BCC (which prompted some heated intra-RLDS exchanges in the comments that probably torpedoed a more balanced discussion). Utah LDS know surprisingly little about RLDS thinking. At the same time, RLDS are even less understandable to mainstream Christians, for whom reformed or reorganized Mormonism is simply incomprehensible, so Utah LDS are really the only target audience for RLDS apologetics. We're the only ones who will listen.

Reflections on Mountain Meadows

Today is September 11, 2005, now denoted "Patriot Day" on US calendars. On the same day 148 years ago, 120 men, women, and children died in Southern Utah. This unseemly confluence of synchronicity spurred a lengthy essay by Steve over at BCC. Some time ago I posted my own reflections on the topic at BCC, entitled A Visit to Mountain Meadows, based on my visit to the site in early 2004. Here are the last three paragraphs of my earlier post:

Mormon Cities

I just finished The City: A Global History (2005), by Joel Kotkin, a short survey of the city in history. Knowing Kotkin had discussed Mormons with some interest in a previous book entitled Tribes (Mormons are a modern tribe), I hoped there might be some discussion in City of one of the Mormon cities, maybe Nauvoo or Salt Lake City. No luck. That's too bad, since they would be a fine addition to his discussion. Below, I'll note Kotkin's three characteristics of a city, then note how the Mormon cities exemplify one of them. That's one of the less-remarked features of LDS culture and history: Mormons are city buiders (or at least were, in the 19th century). I don't know any other modern denominations that can make that claim. Mormons built Far West, Missouri; Nauvoo, Illinois (which became the second-biggest city in Illinois for a brief period); and Salt Lake City, essentially Nauvoo transplanted to the Salt Lake Valley. Try naming an Evangelical city. In the second half of the 19th century, Mormons colonized a broad swath of the West, termed "the Mormon Corridor," and founded hundreds of settlements, many of which grew into towns and some into cities. Mormons build cities.

Shipps on Remini

For this week's online essay of the week, go read Jan Shipps' review of the short biography of Joseph Smith by Robert Remini (Penguin Lives, Viking, 2002) (Shipp's review is entitled "A Bird's-Eye View of the Mormon Prophet"). It's an interesting review: she is rather critical of his attempt to situate Joseph within the social and religious currents of antebellum America, an approach that certainly derived from Remini's strengths as an accomplished historian of that period. That was, in fact, exactly what I liked about Remini's book (see my review at the old weblog), especially given the tendency of other JS biographers and commentators to ignore what else was happening in America during "the Joseph Smith years."

The Joseph Smith Project

The way things are going, this could be bigger than The Alan Parsons Project. BYU Newsnet published a short article giving a welcome overview of this ongoing effort to publish all of Joseph Smith's writings, every last document. It is a great way to get documents out of musty, inaccessible archives and into the hands of interested readers like you and me. Not that we'll ever read even a fraction of the 5000+ documents they are compiling, but it's nice to know we could if we wanted to! See also recent posts on the project at Mormon Wasp, here and here.

Bushman at Session 1

Meridian posted a summary of the first session of the recent Joseph Smith Symposium at the Library of Congress. The article is the first of a series of balanced overviews of the conference sessions. They're a nice way to review the conference without having to sit through the whole video archive. Richard L. Bushman (emeritus history prof at Columbia) was the primary presenter at the first session, with responses by Robert V. Remini (emeritus history prof at Chicago), Richard T. Hughes (history prof at Pepperdine), and Grant Underwood (history prof at BYU).

McKay and Modern Mormonism

Julie at T&S provides a short review of the newly published biography of President David O. McKay, now on my "must read soon" list. I have been alternating my Book of the Month selections between what, for lack of better terms, I will call "Signature books" and "sympathetic" treatments of LDS history. I just finished Arrington's Brigham Young (sympathetic); I'm now reading The Prophet Puzzle (Signature; see upper left). Next I'll move into the 20th century, with a quick reread of Alexander's Mormonism in Transition (sympathetic), then Quinn's biography of J. Reuben Clark (Signature), and finally the new Prince biography of David O. McKay (blunt but sympathetic).

Knowing Mormon History

For this week's online essay, try Knowing History, and Knowing Who We Are, by David McCullough (a repost at Meridian Magazine). McCullough, of course, provided the narrator's voice for Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War. I see his photo, I hear "the voice." Here's a line from the first paragraph: "Lord Bolingbroke, who was an 18th century political philosopher, said that history is philosophy taught with examples." Here are a few notes I made applying McCullough's thoughts to Mormon history.

Dangerous History

For this week's online essay, go read Dangerous History: Exploring the Role of Mormon Women, by Jan Shipps. Originally published in 1993, it was recently republished as part of Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (U of Illinois Press, 2000), a collection of essays by Shipps. And I came to the article by way of an FMH post on the problem of LDS women's history, via a link from Justin's current BT post. How can history be a problem, you say? Isn't history sort of a given that we all have to more or less live with? Isn't history just water under the bridge?

Black Pioneers

The Daily Herald has an excellent article in today's edition, entitled Black Pioneers. The article also includes sidebar biographies of two black LDS pioneers, Green Flake (who may have been driving Brigham's wagon when he first viewed the Salt Lake Valley and said something like "This is the place") and Elijah Abel (famously ordained an elder in 1836). The SL Trib also has a similar article, covering a talk given on Saturday by U of U history professor Ronald Coleman. And the ever-diligent Mormon Wasp has posts up on both pieces, here and here.

A Joseph for the 21st Century

For this week's online essay, go read A Joseph Smith for the 21st Century, in three installments over at Meridian (Justin at Mormon Wasp also has a short post on it too). This is a reprint of an article Bushman published recently in BYU Studies. Below are links and comments for all three parts.

Joseph Smith Biography

As Sunday School continues to cover the initial chapters of "the Joseph Smith story," I think a good Sunday School post will be to highlight the most recent complete Joseph Smith biography and give links to several short biographical essays I'm aware of that are available online. The book is Joseph Smith (Viking, 2002, in the Penguin Lives series) by Robert Remini, a noted non-LDS scholar who has published respected biographies of other 19th-century Americans (see my review of Remini's book). Remini's effort is notable for being short and up-to-date, produced by an acknowledged historian, and one which is, for the most part, acceptable to both apologists and critics.

The American Religion

For this week's online essay, go read Becoming the American Religion: The Place of Mormonism in the Development of American Religious Historiography, by Stephen J. Fleming. It appears in the Spring 2003 volume of Mormon Historical Studies, a journal published by the Mormon Historical Sites Foundation (thanks to Clark for the link). Mormonism now rivals Puritanism as the most studied American religious movement, and the author notes with some irony that "Mormonism's current status in American religious historiography is remarkable, given the religion's former position." I think this whole topic (how Mormonism fits into the field of American religion) will receive increased attention as "Mormon Studies" programs, run by scholars not parsons, are established at a variety of non-LDS universities.

Ten Reasons to Study Church History

I'm kicking off a new category, Church History, for posts related to the new year's Sunday School curriculum, and have renamed the old category as "Book of Mormon." I will also summarize some random notes I have on a self-designed introductory lesson entitled "Ten Reasons to Study Church History" to motivate the less interested. In no particular order, here are ten reasons, some of which are illustrated with quotes from Pres. Hinckley's Teachings book (Deseret, 1997).