It has been awhile since I posted links to an online essay, so here goes: The Theology of Memory: Mormon Historical Consciousness, by Steven L. Olsen from a 2007 FARMS Review. It's an easy read and raises some interesting questions.
No doubt Kant would be genuinely surprised that science has had an easier time exploring "the starry heavens above" than comprehending "the moral law within." But progress is being made. For this week's online essay, go read Steven Pinker's article "The Moral Instinct," a long essay published in the New York Times (hat tip: Concurring Opinions). As posted, it has 8 segments to it, but I finally discovered the "one page" and "print" options in a small box at the top of the first page -- very nice. Thank you NYT.
Claudia Bushman presented on "Lives of Mormon Women" a couple of years ago at the FAIR Conference, which posted the talk online. It's a good piece for my online essay of the week, a remarkably even-handed summary of the the female half of the LDS Church circa 2006. One thing she notes is the rise of the single LDS woman:
In the congregations in New York City, there are many beautiful, charming, intelligent, amazingly talented single women doing good things, taking their lives seriously. But at church every Sunday they hear lessons that talk of the glories of marriage. We have to recognize that these exceptions are becoming the mainstream. The world is changing and so is the Church.
For a long overdue online essay of the week, you simply must go read the New York Times Magazine essay on Mormonism and politics, "What Is It About Mormonism?", by Noah Feldman, a Harvard law prof. First line: "Our post-denominational age should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president, or at least the Republican nominee." Ah yes, it should be, shouldn't it?
That's more or less the headline of a note posted at the Newsroom (at LDS.org) concerning an article in The Christian Century entitled "A Mormon president? The LDS difference." I'll make the article my online essay of the week. The article is written by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, a religion prof at UNC. The Newsroom really likes the article.
Continue reading "A Scholar's View of Mormons in Politics" »
For this week's online essay, go read "The Mormon Retreat From Science," the editors' introduction to a collection of essays published by Signature in 1993 under the title The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism. The editors are Gene Sessions, a historian, and Craig Oberg, a microbiologist, both at Weber State University. The essay chronicles the open-minded attitude towards science of 19th-century LDS leaders like Joseph and Brigham; the expressly pro-science view of early 20th-century LDS leaders like Talmage, Widtsoe, and Roberts; and the increasingly anti-science tilt of recent LDS leaders, most notably Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie.
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.
I interrupt this vacation to note the passing of Richard Rorty last week. For an informative essay discussing one aspect of Rorty's thinking, go read "How Richard Rorty Found Religion" from the May 2004 issue of First Things. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. For a more straightforward summary of Rorty's life, see the New York Times obituary.
Or so it seems. For this week's online essay, go read "Atheists With Attitude," a New Yorker piece by Anthony Gottlieb (also noted at this GR post). At the very least, it's nice to read an essay on religion that doesn't take Mormons to task; we don't even get mentioned in this one. How refreshing. I've posted on Sam Harris and Dawkins before (both covered in the essay), so this seems like a fair follow-up post. The essay does make the increasingly evident point that 9-11 has been a flashpoint for the public emergence of an anti-religious ideology. It somehow legitimizes attacks on religion ... all religion. Funny how secularists can paint Islam as a violent and evil religion, while many Christians bend over backwards to depict authentic Islam as a religion of peace. Yet those same secularists also claim the mantle of rational tolerance, while branding Christians as intolerant fanatics. These views seem strangely out of synch with the facts.
Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks.
Religion is a light in the fog.
-- Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians
So is theology more like philosophy or religion? Is it a walk on slippery rocks or a light in the fog? Is it the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture, or a reasoned inquiry seeking the principles that define spiritual truth? For an LDS view on this interesting question, go read the EOM article "Theology," authored by Louis C. Midgley, this week's online essay.
I stumbled onto the following article, which I'll make this week's online essay, a few weeks back: The Book of Mormon, Historicity, and Faith by Robert Millet of BYU. It is from Volume 2, No. 2 (Fall 1993) of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, a production of the Maxwell Institute. Millet takes a more ecumenical view of some issues than other LDS scholars, so I was curious what new views he would bring to the historicity discussion.
For this week's online essay, go read Stephen Prothero's Belief Unbracketed: A Case for the Religion Scholar to Reveal More of Where He or She Is Coming From, posted at the Harvard Divinity School website. Hint: it's short, twenty modern paragraphs (that's about five 18th-century paragraphs; we're less patient than our ancestors). Prothero, of course, is the author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003), a penetrating work of religious cultural history that I read about half of two years ago over Christmas vacation and that I fully intend to finish someday. And I was just getting to the good part ...
Not new and improved, just new. For this week's online essay, go read Mohler's The New Atheism?, posted a couple of months ago when everyone was talking about the new books by Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. He is responding to a Wired article entitled The New Atheism: The Church of the Non-Believers, in which each of the Big Three are interviewed.
A generation ago, Elder Packer delivered a classic General Conference address: Spiritual Crocodiles. In his address to BYU students earlier this week entitled Lehi's Dream and You, Elder Packer sounded many of the same themes, albeit without coining any new metaphors. Deseret News summarized Packer's remarks, including this quote:
"You live in an interesting generation where trials will be constant in your life," he said. "Learn to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost. It is to be a shield, a protection and a teacher for you. Never be ashamed or embarrassed about the doctrines of the gospel or about the standards we teach in the church."
I suppose I could come up with a mellower title, but hey, this is blogging. Go read an online essay from a couple of weeks ago at PowerBlog entitled "Hugh Hewitt and the Mormon Question." Hewitt is telling everyone who will listen that Evangelicals who go after Romney on religious grounds are setting themselves up for other politicians — a fairly opportunistic bunch, these politicians — to go after them , the Evangelical Christians, on religious grounds. I'll bet half the country would agree with the following statement: "If you can't trust a Mormon in the White House, what makes you think you can trust an Evangelical Christian?" Would you? Evangelicals ought to just shut up and vote. Or at least just shut up.
Since no one commented on my prior post on real astronomy, maybe y'all are more interested in speculative religious astronomy. To wit, a Meridian Magazine post entitled Synchronicity as a Sign. It includes the provocative question, "Can a meteor be an answer to prayer?" Sorry, rocks are just whirling around the Sun following their prescribed gravitational paths, and every so often (quite often, actually) one plummets through Earth's atmosphere and is momentarily visible. It's not an answer to prayer, it's just physics. Even if you are looking at the sky with a query in your mind when it happens, it's still just physics.
For this week's online essay, go read Part 2 of Kieth Merrill's "Write the Truth" series, giving some of his views on what's right and wrong (mostly wrong) with Hollywood and the movie business. Here's a quick summary of his view:
The search for God in the movies accentuates the division between the mainstream motion picture industry and main street USA. Many movies from the heart of Hollywood not only tend to favor stories that are often antagonistic toward faith and/or hostile to religion but leave God out all together.
As my online essay of the week, I'm posting a link to Grant Underwood's essay "Millenarianism and Popular Methodism in Early Nineteenth Century England and Canada". It's a nice complement to his book The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, a new entry to my Featured Books queue (at the bottom of the list — I flipped it). Underwood is a history prof at BYU.
The United Brethren, an offshoot of the Primitive Methodists and a source of many of the English converts to Mormonism in the 1840s, make an appearance in the essay. For collected links to several posts I've put up on Methodism, see here.
Still ... processing ... Tuesday. At First Things, there's a short note (which I'll designate my online essay of the week) on the nature of the Left's opposition to the conflict in Iraq: "The left, however, has seen Iraq almost entirely as a culture-wars issue. From the moment the invasion looked imminent, the left responded with petitions, denunciations, marches, placards, screeds—the whole leftist arsenal since the 1960s for fighting the culture wars." So to the Left, it's not really a military conflict; it's a culture war. Politics. Isn't it a little disconcerting to think that those now apparently in a position to determine (or at least influence) foreign policy and military strategy might not have their head in the game? At least the right game. Conservatives are fighting insurgents and terrorists. Liberals are fighting conservatives.
Nobody really picked up on my brief discussion of Christian and Mormon symbols in yesterday's post, so I'll prod y'all a little with this week's online essay, "Symbolism." There are actually two articles at that link, one an essay by Todd Compton from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism and one an entry from Mormon Doctrine by Bruce R. McConkie.
That's the title of a famous talk given by Bertrand Russell, which I hereby designate my online essay of the week. You don't have to agree with him to enjoy his remarks, but if you read it, you might find yourself agreeing with more than you would expect. Russell is unhappy with Christian theology and orthodoxy, and more generally with Christendom and its early-20th-century politics. But Mormons aren't always happy with Christian orthodoxy or institutions either. Take for example the definition of a Christian.
For this week's online essay, go read Islam and Us by no less than the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, at First Things (hat tip: Right Coast). He sounds several notes of caution, such as: "[C]oncern begins with the Koran itself. I started, in a recent reading of the Koran, to note invocations to violence—and abandoned the exercise after fifty or sixty pages, as there are so many of them." And: "The claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities are largely mythical, as the history of Islamic conquest and domination in the Middle East, the Iberian peninsula, and the Balkans makes abundantly clear." He goes into some detail on these and other themes.
For this week's online essay, go read "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," a widely-cited 1997 essay by Stephen Jay Gould. Here is its central thesis:
The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains ...
Sticking with my topic for the week, I have a couple of essays to offer as my online essays of the week. The first essay is a 1911 Improvement Era article by B. H. Roberts entitled Higher Criticism and the Book of Mormon. Elder Roberts took Book of Mormon apologetics seriously and is still regarded as one of the Church's finest intellectuals, a truly remarkable accomplishment given that he grew up poor and was largely self-taught. He was not one to shrink from an intellectual challenge. Here's a quote supporting in principle, if not in all its generally held conclusions, the application of "higher criticism" to the scriptures:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For a particularly interesting online essay, go read The Spell of the Meme (click here for a nicer pdf version). The essay is by lapsed atheist and professor of historical theology Alister McGrath, offering a pointed critique of Daniel Dennett's latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006). He takes Dennett to task for his rather liberal use of the problematic concept of the meme in his "natural" explanation of religion. For several interesting posts on Dennett's book, see entries at Issues in Mormon Doctrine (first entry here).
Note: I've been getting increased spam and troll comments lately, so I turned the comment queue ON for a few days. Expect short delays before your comments post publicly. On the bright side, some comment typos will now magically disappear before posting.
Before there was Big Love, there was Solemn Covenant (U. of Illinois Press, 1992). I think it's time to pull it off my bookshelf (where it has been sitting for a year) and actually read it. As a warm up (and for this week's online essay) go read Truth and Mistruth in Mormon History, an essay by Carmon Hardy, the author of Solemn Covenant. This one is well worth your time. Here's the first paragraph:
It was while doing research in preparation for a book on polygamy, especially post-Manifesto polygamy, that I encountered extensive resorts to purposeful mistruth by Mormon leaders and others. I will suggest that such practices have serious implications beyond the particular instances involving their employment. This was certainly the case, I believe, when dishonesty was used to defend polygamy.
For this week's online essay, go read Winter Light, a short personal essay in the November 2005 Sunstone. The author is Stephen Carter, who also had a longer personal essay published in Dialogue last year and did a 12Q on it over at BCC. I stumbled upon the featured essay following a visitor link back to the Sunstone site — it's always interesting to see what brings people to the blog. I'm sure you'll enjoy the essay. Writers love Alaska. Things just seem different Up North.
For this week's online essay, go read The Lure of the Web at Meridian Magazine. It's good to know what connotations the word "blog" has for some people in the Church. I think the odds just went up that the word "blog" will enter the Conference lexicon this April.
For this week's online essay, go read Creation and Evolution in the Schools, by Orson Scott Card at Meridian Magazine. It's got something for everyone, and OSC himself tries to come down somewhere in the middle. Against "Designists," he notes: "But when you purport to teach science in school, the subject you teach had better be science, and not somebody's religion in disguise." Against "Darwinists," he says: "That's the problem with both sides in this squabble. They are both functioning as religions, and they should stop it at once." I'm not sure the article really makes clear what OSC's own position is on evolution or ID.
Edwin Gaustad posted a short essay entitled Roger Williams & Church-State Separation over at the Oxford University Press Blog (which any discriminating blogger will immediately add to their blogroll — where else will you find posts like The Year in Geography?). Roger Williams often gets overlooked in the bubbling pageant of American religious history, especially by Mormon readers who often have a hard time seeing anything of consequence in the historical record before 1830. Gaustad's essay (he also authored a recent biography of Williams) reminds us what a courageous figure was Williams, truly a man before his time. I'm also going to use this to resurrect my dormant online essay of the week feature.
I promised a weekly FARMS piece, so this week's online essay is Reflections on Secular Anti-Mormonism, by Daniel C. Peterson. It was his presentation at the recent FAIR Conference (hat-tip to M* for the link). Despite the title, Peterson spent most of the essay debunking the nihilistic bent of modern secularism rather than focusing on anti-Mormons, and I agree with most of his commentary. Our few Eurobloggers should find Peterson's remarks particularly interesting. He did, of course, throw in a few jabs up front, poking fun at Signature Books, one of its authors, and "Sunstone atheists" in the first few paragraphs before moving on to his main thoughts. What surprised me is that I actually enjoyed the piece. Perhaps he should write fewer book reviews and more essays.
He's not just a prophet, now he's a website: JosephSmith.net. I haven't had much time to explore the site, but I've been pleasantly surprised by what I've seen so far. For example, click "First Vision" (on the "Mission of the Prophet" pop-up menu), and you get a screen that includes additional tabs. The "Questions" tab notes the four versions of the First Vision penned, at various times, by Joseph Smith, from the 1832 sketch (in the Kirtland Letter Book) to the 1842 Wentworth Letter account (the canonized version is from the 1838 account, part of the History of the Church narrative). The "Readings" tab provides straight links to several LDS publications on the subject (from the Ensign and CES manuals), but also a link to Dean C. Jessee's classic 1969 BYU Studies article entitled The Early Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision. I'll designate that article my online essay of the week and invite you all to read it. Bottom line: the JS.net site seems to offer some nice material with pretty good navigation around the site (much better than the LDS.org site!).
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."
For this week's short online essay of the week, go read the Daily Herald's interesting editorial on tax reform proposals being discussed in the Utah legislature. The editorial notes: "The Legislature's Tax Reform Task Force is considering the idea of creating a flat income tax in Utah with a single standard deduction. The plan ... would eliminate deductions for children and for charitable contributions." One might expect the Church to be opposed to such a move, but here is the editorial's summary of the actual LDS position: "But the church said it's not worried about reducing the amount of tithing from Utah members. It is other charitable groups the church is worried about" (grammar corrected). Right. I'm not sure what bothers me more: That some LDS spokesperson could make that statement with a straight face, or that there are a good many Utah LDS who will accept it as a sincere statement.
And professors. Those are two safe career choices offered in Nibley's famous Leaders and Managers essay (hat tip: Mormanity). Okay, his full list also included "artists, astronomers, naturalists, poets, athletes, musicians, scholars, or even politicians." To me, that still seems like a fairly selective, even elitist, list.
For this week's online essay, let's extend our range a bit: Politics and the English Language, a classic essay by George Orwell. He was an enemy of bad politics and bad language, and felt they ran together. In terms of its relation to language, we can consider religion a subset of politics, I think. You can see where I'm heading, but I'll let Orwell do the talking.
Can religious conversion piggyback on top of 12-step addiction recovery? Meridian posts an article and a link to Understaning Alcohol and Drug Addiction: An LDS Perspective, by Merlin O. Baker. The Introduction notes that "the average Utah addict is 31 years old, white and LDS." The book seems like a great resource for any Mormon who is dealing with their own or a family member's addicition problems, as most Mormons have little personal familiarity with regular, socially acceptable alcohol and drug use, much less addictions. But despite claims to the contrary, the excerpts in the "LDS 12-step program" section sure make it sound like LDS recovery (back into activity) and substance recovery (back to sobriety) are tightly linked in this approach. Or maybe it is simply a clinical fact that in Utah you can't succesfully treat LDS substance abuse recovery without also confronting religious issues? "Hi, my name is Nephi, and I'm an alcoholic." Yeah, maybe.
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.
For this week's online essay, I recommend Christianity's Debt to the Vatican, by Peterson and Hamblin. They reflect on John Paul II, "a talented writer, a linguist, and a trained philosopher, as well as an attractively athletic, approachable, guitar-playing pastor," and ask what we as LDS should make of him and the Catholic church. They give a generous summary of historical contributions for which all Christians should be grateful, and conclude that we are all "indebted to the Church of Rome and to its popes. And, among these, John Paul II was clearly one of the greatest."
For this week's online essay (courtesy of Nauvoo Neighbor) I offer The Place of Mormon Women: Perceptions, Prozac, Polygamy, Priesthood, Patriarchy, and Peace, by Andrea Radke, PhD. Yes, that is really the name of the paper. Well, at least she didn't throw in Pregnant. I perused this perceptive paper, and proudly proclaim it professional, if perhaps not profound. Pointedly proper, it is a pensive paean promoting present policy. Publicly!
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?
Meridian has a nice retrospective on Hugh Nibley by Orson Scott Card. It turns out that Card knew several of the Nibley kids as friends while he was a high school student, and he often visited the Nibley home, which he describes as follows:
Families are either open or closed -- and the Nibley home was as open as any family I have ever known. There was no pretense, though of course there was privacy. No one was trying to impress anybody.
For this week's online essay, go read Zeal Without Knowledge, the classic Nibley essay. This is also my weekend schmooze post, specially designed for people who have nothing better to do over the weekend than cruise a near-empty Bloggernacle, leaving long, aimless comments. Short and insightful comments are welcome too, but I know it's tough to think that hard on the weekend. My favorite line from the essay: "We [Mormons] think it more commendable to get up at 5 AM to write a bad book than to get up at nine o'clock to write a good one--that is pure zeal that tends to breed a race of insufferable, self-righteous prigs and barren minds." Wow. Imagine the flak I'd get if I tried to say that!
For this week's online essay, go read Keeping Faith and Reading Kafka online at Sunstone. This short but thoughtful essay by a Mormon writer and scholar who has spent several years in Germany reflects on the difficulties of preaching religion, or even simply being religious, in Germany. The people are depicted not so much irreligious as post-religious, and that sentiment is likely familiar to anyone who served an LDS mission in Europe. Fine writing, by the way -- reflective and challenging prose, the kind of stuff that would never get through Correlation.
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.
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.
As the online essay of the week, I offer Church History, 1820-1831, by Richard L. Bushman and Larry C. Porter. This is a good refresher for the material covered in the first few Sunday School lessons of this year. This essay is actually an Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry, available online (as are many EOM entries) at All About Mormons. This is one of the few Bushman essays available online that I am aware of. However, a collection of Bushman essays on LDS historical themes was recently published, Believing History (Columbia Univ. Press, 2004). The first essay in that collection, entitled Faithful History, is also found as the first essay in an earlier collection by various authors, Faithful History (Signature Books, 1992).
My choice for online essay of the week is from the most recent issue of Dialogue, Ecclesiastical Polity and the Challenge of Homosexuality: Two Cases of Divergence within the Mormon Tradition, by O Kendall White Jr. and Daryl White. The authors are visibly sympathetic to the RLDS move to the left and unhappy with the LDS move to the right over the last century, but that perspective is nothing new. The divergence they are writing about is actually in the eccesiastical polities or governance paradigms of the two denominations, not simply the SSA policies. The article is much more interesting than I expected from the title!
Light reading for this week's online essay of the week: The Introduction to Simon Southerton's Losing a Lost Tribe, recently posted at the publisher's website. My earlier post on this book got 83 comments, so I'm guessing a lot of you are interested! Here's his paragraph summarizing present LDS views of the origins of Native Americans/Nephites/Lamanites:
The absence of physical evidence supporting the Book of Mormon has had little impact on the millions of Mormons who consider the book to be a true record of the ancestors of Native Americans and Polynesians. Many LDS scholars have been eager to leap to the defense of the book and to criticize mainstream scientific views. The church employs academics at its own university who defend the Book of Mormon on a professional basis. Mormons are liberally provided with uplifting accounts of evidence that seems to support the book. Frequently this proof—and criticism of Gentile (non-Mormon) science—is delivered to church members by General Authorities speaking during world conferences. Consequently, Mormons remain deeply suspicious of Gentile theories, particularly any that conflict with widely accepted beliefs of the church.
I stumbled across an excellent blog post series on Bible translation at Challies.com. In Part 1, the author talks about three styles of rendering the translated English text (paraphrase or free translation, dynamic equivalence or thought-for-thought, and formal equivalence or word-for-word) and such general questions as the difference between thematic interpretation (bad) and linguistic interpretation (necessary). In Part 2, he discusses the different text lines which came together in the Textus Receptus pioneered by Erasmus, later displaced by the Westcott and Hort text toward the end of the 19th century. The more I read about translation, the less I like the KJV. What thinkest thou?
My online essay of the week is the Preface to An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, posted at the publisher's website. It's only a few pages in print, and it seems fair to give Palmer a chance to speak for himself. This seems particularly useful for those of you who haven't read Insider's View and wonder what all the fuss is about. He begins: For thirty-four years I was primarily an Institute director for the Church Educational System (CES) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He continues, explaining:
Of course, candor is no guarantee of accuracy and relevance, but it's worth something.
For this week's online essay, go read the three-part essay from the FARMS Insight magazine entitled FARMS Through the Years. Each part gives a brief Q&A with two FARMS scholars about the origin, growth, and development of your favorite apologetic think tank. Part One interviews John Sorenson and John Welch (aka Jack Welch, the original moving force behind FARMS). Welch described Sorenson's 1984 book An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon as FARMS' first major publication. Also interesting is his comment that he set up The FARMS Review to follow the same editing procedures as a law review. Part Two talks to Stephen D. Ricks and Noel B. Reynolds (who became president of FARMS shortly after the 1997 decision to officially attach FARMS to BYU). Part 3 talks to Daniel Peterson and Daniel Oswald (the FARMS CEO from 1998 to 2003). Their comments suggest the CPART project is broadening the FARMS mission in a positive way. CPART certainly appears to me to be the most promising scholarly project FARMS has undertaken. Does anyone have any firsthand experience with any of the CPART publications or resources? [minor edits, 12/7]
In honor of Prof. Midgley's brief appearance at T&S last week (in that forgettable thread that went into meltdown), my online essay of the week is Midgley's review of Palmer's An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, which he entitled Prying Into Palmer (read the review to get the reference). I also added Palmer's book to my Mormon Studies blogroll on the right sidebar along with my own 45-word review. If that's not long enough, go see my slightly longer review back at the old blog (which for some reason refuses to die, despite my not paying the renewal). Here's a paragraph from Midgley's review, on the minor but telling point that those denominations that endorse revisionist history in the Palmer mold do not seem to fare well:
But if worldly success is the measure, then the fact is, as I and others have shown in considerable detail, that the Community of Christ -- the controlling faction of what was once known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- has not prospered. Instead, those in charge of the Community of Christ have managed, since the late 1960s, to turn the nearly 250,000 on their membership rolls into something like 70,000 members. This dramatic decline has been the result of adopting radically revisionist guesswork about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. Palmer thinks that this is the direction that the Church of Jesus Christ should now take. This is simply amazing.
Here's an early stab at an online essay of the week: a series of short essays entitled The Poetic Genius of Alma the Younger, over at Meridian Magazine. The link is to Part 1 on Lyricism; there are later installments talking about Virtuosity and about Symbolism. Since my earlier post on depth in Book of Mormon elicited some interest, I though this might be a nice follow-up. The author doesn't try to make an apologetic argument out of his analysis, he just looks at some of the material in Alma as poetry and sees how far he can go with it. I find the author's approach rather refreshing, the kind I would expect from a backpacker turned missionary turned lawyer-poet (from the author bio paragraph accompanying the article).
For the online essay of the week, go read The Evangelical Mind Today, a short piece by noted religious historian Mark Noll over at First Things. Noll authored the controversial book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind ten years ago--the article at First Things gives his comments on how things look ten years later, which is pretty much the same. His opening sentence: "Ten years after the publication of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, I remain largely unrepentant about the book’s historical arguments, its assessment of evangelical strengths and weaknesses, and its indictment of evangelical intellectual efforts, though I have changed my mind on a few matters." The following paragraph from the article sums up his critique:
Yet on the whole, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind still seems to me correct in its descriptions and evaluations. What is true throughout the Christian world is true for American Christians: we who are in pietistic, generically evangelical, Baptist, fundamentalist, Restorationist, holiness, "Bible church," megachurch, or Pentecostal traditions face special difficulties when putting the mind to use. Taken together, American evangelicals display many virtues and do many things well, but built-in barriers to careful and constructive thinking remain substantial.
The LDS Church is Restorationist and shares many features of the Evangelical approach to religion. Does Noll's critique extend to Mormonism as well?
For the online essay of the week, go read On Wagging the Dog by Kevin Christensen, from the May 2004 Sunstone. It's short, only four pages! Christensen is responding to several articles in the March 2004 Sunstone grouped around the theme "Reframing the Book of Mormon." Christensen refers sympathetically to other instances of bottom-to-top inspiration in the Church as the tail wagging the dog, but argues that buying into this more radical reframing effort "would amount to their not only wagging the dog, but also stuffing and mounting it as well." Hats off to Sunstone for publishing a "rebuttal" view--not a practice followed by all Mormon Studies publications.
For the online essay of the week, go read 12 Answers From Royal Skousen, the latest and one of the best from the T&S 12 Questions series. In his comments, Prof. Skousen provides details and some preliminary results from the critical text project, which is designed "(1) to recover the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon, and (2) to determine the history of the text (namely, how it has changed over time)" (Q1). Skousen notes that the project began as an "independent scholarly project," and he has protected that independence despite a significant degree of cooperation from the LDS and RLDS (now Community of Christ) churches, which together control many of the manuscripts that are the focus of much of the research (Q6). Here are a couple of the more interesting points from the fascinating discussion.
The Worldwide Attack on Marriage is the online essay of the week. It is written by a BYU law prof but is written for a popular audience and is posted at Meridian Magazine. What's interesting about this short essay is that it highlights the more significant role international law is playing in discussions of domestic US law, even something as basic as marriage. You might find his account of experiences with international meetings on the topic to be interesting. However, his comment that the US Supreme Court was "relying on" international law in deciding last year's Lawrence v. Texas case striking down a Texas criminal law against homosexual sodomy might be misleading. Justice Kennedy's decision in that case noted similar cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights, but did so while countering claims that prohibitions against homosexual activities are rooted in "values we share with a wider civilization." They didn't really rely on international law or foreign cases to decide the case. There is no "global test" for US constitutional law. Yet.
The backdrop for this article is the present campaign for a Utah marriage amendment. Amazing how much life in Utah sets the agenda for the global Mormon Church. Surprisingly, this issue has not become a prominent campaign issue, although it did make an appearance at last night's debate. Nevertheless, after the election, plus two months of legal challenges about balloting, vote counting, voter registration fraud, etc., I think the marriage amendment issue will heat up again next year. The author of the essay goes so far as to call marriage a world issue.
New feature: a weekly review of an online essay, starting off with Recent Trends in Book of Mormon Apologetics: A Critical Assessment of Methodological Diversity and Academic Viability, in the latest edition of the Farms Review, by Benjamin Judkins. The trend? He thinks it's getting better, noting "the increasing methodological sophistication and professionalization of the field." I'd agree, although I have yet to see anyone self-identify as a professional Mormon apologist.
External Approaches. Judkins holds out Terryl Givens' By the Hand of Mormon as an exemplar of the new apologetics, which he splits into external and internal approaches. "External" means archaeological, although he notes Nibley was "persistently hostile toward the role of archaeology in Book of Mormon studies." He continues:
How the Jaredites actually fit into the Nephite myth complex and what evidence of them one can rationally expect to see are examples of issues that have yet to be addressed by the Latter-day Saint scholarly community. Finding answers to these questions is difficult . . .
While these difficulties haven't stopped the external approach from moving forward with new energy in recent years, Judkins sounds a methodological note of caution by reviewing the controversy that bedevils biblical archaeological claims resting on considerably better artifacts than the Nephite quest is likely to produce in the near future. Nevertheless, he gives a brief but friendly review of the more promising Mormon developments.
Internal Approaches. He discusses the textual school (think chiasmus) and the ethnographic school (think Nibley). Methodologically, he highlights the need for a theory of translation, noting that the textual school almost necessarily forces one to "adopt a direct, word-for-word theory of translation," but pointing out the problems this raises. He is rather blunt in describing these "overly literal theories," which "while respectable by the standards of seventeenth-century biblical scholarship, must be considered very marginal today." Wow. But self-criticism is always a good sign. Judkins is friendlier toward the ethnographic approach, noting that it "does not pressure scholars to adopt any particular theory of translation and transmission."
Overall, I found Judkins' essay to be a refreshingly candid assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Mormon apologetics. It's well worth your ten minutes to give it a quick read.