Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Catholic Experience In Utah, Thomas G. Evans

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

The Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University has in its collection an infamous book that is talked about by both Mormons and non-Mormons alike: the first edition of Bruce R. McCon.1de'sMormonDoctrine.l Shocking and controversial when it first appeared in print for its characterization of the Catholic Church, among other controversial assessments, I had heard about it myself growing up as a member of the L.D.S. Church in various tales of Mormon folklore. McConkie's penchant for brusque, un-apologetic apologetics and bold declarations of the truth of the Mormon faith was legendary. One day, as I perused the book in the Library, …

Joseph Smith And The Bible: "Extending The Text And Filling The Silences", Sylvan Eugene Needham Iii

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the first chapter, the underlying argument of the thesis indicates that Smith was very familiar with the Bible. His written work that reflects the scriptural nature of the Bible and is today canonized by Mormons is argued that it "extends the Bible's text and fills [many of] its [doctrinal] silences." A complete reading of this thesis could make some readers think that the doctrine of a plurality of Gods is integral to the sense of the Bible and a novel explanation for the existence of the universe.

The second chapter indicates that many have grappled with the summary doctrine …

Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence Of Helen, Owen, And Avery Woodruff, Lu Ann Faylor Snyder, Phillip A. Snyder

All USU Press Publications

These letters among two women and their husband offer a rare look into the personal dynamics of an LDS polygamous relationship. Abraham "Owen" Woodruff was a young polygamous Mormon apostle, and the son of LDS President Wilford Woodruff, who is remembered for the Woodruff Manifesto, a divinely-inspired call for the termination of plural marriage. The Woodruff Manifesto eased a systematic federal judicial assault on Mormons and made Utah statehood possible. It did not end polygamy in the church. Some leaders continued to encourage and perform such marriages. Owen Woodruff, himself married to Helen May Winters, contracted a secretive second marriage …

The Mormon Passage Of George D. Watt: First British Convert, Scribe For Zion, Ronald G. Watt

All USU Press Publications

Nineteenth century Mormonism was a frontier religion with roots so entangled with the American experience as to be seen by some scholars as the most American of religions and by others as a direct critique of that experience. Yet it was also a missionary religion that through proselytizing quickly gained an international, if initially mostly Northern European, makeup. This mix brought it a roster of interesting characters: frontiersmen and hardscrabble farmers; preachers and theologians; dreamers and idealists; craftsmen and social engineers. Although the Mormon elite soon took on, as elites do, a rather fixed, dynastic character, the social origins of …

Jesus In America, Claudia Gould

All USU Press Publications

Claudia Gould draws on fieldwork she conducted, as an anthropologist, in North Carolina, where she earlier spent large parts of her childhood, among a net of paternal relations. From that ethnography and from lifelong observation, she crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist Christian belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them pull us into the complicated, variable core of religious experience among southern American Christians. Jesus in America, a perceptive work rich with cultural insight, is a singular addition to the growing genre of ethnographic fiction.

Happiness In Plural Marriage: An Exploration Of Logic, Audrey Mcconkie Merket

Arrington Student Writing Award Winners

It is difficult for any monogamous person, but especially a monogamous woman to understand how living a life of polygamy could be considered joyful and fulfilling. Being a young woman, happily married to my “true love,” the idea that the same kind of happiness I feel could exist in a plural relationship at first seemed completely illogical to me. However, as Kathleen Flake pointed out in the 2009 Arrington Memorial Lecture, “logic is not an absolute set of assertions about something. People that share your premises will think you’re logical, whereas people that don’t believe the same things as you …

The Logic Of Religious Studies And Kathleen Flake, Blair Dee Hodges

Arrington Student Writing Award Winners

Kathleen Flake’s 2009 Arrington lecture gave a sneak preview of research she has been conducting on the topic of plural marriage and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. Flake, associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University, brings a unique list of qualifications to her study by combining elements of law, religious studies, ritual, and the skills of an historian. Using these tools Flake explores what she calls the “priestly logic” of plural marriage, seeking to understand not only how 19th century outsiders viewed the peculiar institution, but how practicing Mormons themselves made sense of it. Flake …

“They Do Things Differently There”: Understanding A Polygamous, "Foreign Country", Barbara Jones Brown

Arrington Student Writing Award Winners

My perception of the Mormon practice of polygamy has been evolutionary. My desire to comprehend it comes from a need to understand not only the faith I espouse, but also my very being. Polygamy is in my DNA. My maternal, third-great grandfather, Willard Richards, was one of Mormonism’s earliest polygamists, and my fraternal, third-great grandfather one of its most prolific—Christopher Layton had ten wives and sixty-five children. When I was a child my dad sometimes told me about our polygamous ancestors. Somehow polygamy did not seem that surprising or strange to me then. “Just a different, old-fashioned way of marriage,” …