Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Andrew Hadfield, John Donne: In The Shadow Of Religion, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Elizabeth Clarke And Robert W. Daniel, Eds., People And Piety: Protestant Devotional Identities In Early Modern England, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Prayer, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’S Religious Past, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Embracing Immigrants Is A Religious Imperative, Christopher R. Fee

English Faculty Publications

I’m an English professor, and in leftist intellectual circles it’s often considered somewhat unsophisticated and definitely uncool to argue in favor of traditional religious beliefs. However, as the clerk of a tiny Quaker Meeting in a farming community in rural Pennsylvania, I feel led to do so in the context of the debate about immigration. I would submit that Scripture is explicit in its requirement that we accept and embrace the immigrants in our midst, and note that Leviticus (19:34) makes no mention of legal status. (excerpt)

The Bible And Creationism, Susan L. Trollinger, William Vance Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) marked a significant challenge to traditional understandings of the Bible and Christian theology. Darwin’s theory of organic evolution stood in sharp contrast with the Genesis account of creation, with its six days, separate creations of life forms, and special creation of human beings. More than this, Darwin’s ideas raised enormous theological questions about God’s role in creation (e.g., is there a role for God in organic evolution?) and about the nature of human beings (e.g., what does it mean to talk about original sin without a historic Adam and Eve?)

Of course, what really …

Response: Are American Christians Persecuted?, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

With an eye toward reuniting the church and the academy, this book focuses on the role that scholarship can play in making good preachers into really great preachers. This is the bridge between scholarly and popular writing that informs the sermon and makes it more powerful and meaningful for the people who regularly listen to sermons. Preachers are challenged to raise the level of their commitment to scholarship as well as overcome any pre-existing prejudices with scholarship. The preacher as scholar is the perfect way for the pulpit to respond to the challenges of a secular, post-modern world that often …

The Apple Among The Trees: To Abraham (Pbodmer 30) And The Apple At The Sacrifice Of Isaac, Kevin J. Kalish

English Faculty Publications

The poem from the Bodmer Papyrus (PBodmer 30) To Abraham contains a number of perplexing phrases and images—one in particular is the ambiguous word μῆλον, which appears in no other known text on the Sacrifice of Isaac. In this poem Abraham, in place of his son Isaac, chooses the μῆλον. I contribute to our understanding of how the poem works by demonstrating what μῆλον signifies in this context. I argue that the poem deliberately uses the ambiguous word μῆλον precisely because it can mean both sheep and apple. Moreover, when the apple is understood in the context of patristic interpretations …

Review Of Sara S. Poor And Nigel Smith, Eds., Mysticism And Reform, 1400–1750, Brooke Conti

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Righting America At The Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger, William Vance Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting zoo with camel rides, the site conjures up images of a religious Disneyland. Inside, visitors are met by dinosaurs at every turn and by a replica of the Garden of Eden that features the Tree of Life, the serpent, and Adam and Eve.

In Righting America at the …

Leading Through Reading In Contemporary Young Adult Fantasy By Philip Pullman And Terry Pratchett, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

There’s a popular bumper sticker in some areas that reads: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” It is sometimes paired with another one: “Bibles that are falling apart usually belong to people that aren’t.” The two combine to suggest an approach to reading and religion that are at the core of my argument in this chapter: they suggest that religious reading is fundamentally anti-interpretive; that reading the Bible or other religious texts provides direct access to truth. In the young adult texts I discuss in this essay, however, the opposite is the case: while texts (of many …

Jesus Lives, But Should He Live In My Front Yard?, Christin N. Taylor

English Faculty Publications

As I drove home from church, I eyed the bright foam sign my 6-year-old daughter held. “Jesus is Alive” it read in kid scrawl. “We’re supposed to put them in our yards!” Noelle beamed, eyeing her creation proudly through pink-rimmed glasses.

I imagined our wide, open yard in Pennsylvania, the green grass stretching without fences from one neighbor to the next. Our best friends in the neighborhood, secular humanists, would easily see it. I cringed. What would they think? [excerpt]

Conversion Calls For Confrontation: Facing The Old To Become New In The Work Of James Baldwin, Mckinley E. Melton

English Faculty Publications

Book Summary: The recognition and study of African American (AA) artists and public intellectuals often include Martin Luther King, Jr., and occasionally Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.DuBois, and Malcolm X. The literary canon also adds Ralph Ellison, Richard White, Langston Hughes, and others such as female writers Zora Neale Hurston, MayaAngelou, and Alice Walker.

Yet, the acknowledgement of AA artists and public intellectuals tends to skew the voices and works of those included toward normalized portrayals that fit well within foundational aspects of the American myths reflected in and perpetuated by traditional schooling. Further, while many AA artists and public intellectuals …

Foreword: Dead Wood And Rushing Water: Essays On Mormon Faith, Family And Culture, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

The essay is a form particularly well suited for Mormon writers, for it blends a number of their cultural and religious imperatives. We are a confessional people, in both senses of the word. In keeping with Augustine’s principal employment of the term, we are committed to the public profession of our faith. Not merely as an act of evangelizing, but among the more reflective Saints, as an articulated meditation on our yearning for the divine, and a psalmic celebration of God’s gifts. We are also confessional in the more conventional sense: journal keeping, the informality of Mormon worship, public testimony …

Mormonism And The Family (Forum), Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

When we speak of the family in Mormonism, the term can mean many things. There is an idealized Mormon family, the one described in church magazines, General Conference talks, and Mormon public service commercials. There is the family of the Mormon theological tradition, stretching endlessly off into the eternities, bound together with temple ordinances, the forever family of Mormon bumper stickers. There is another family, product of a more speculative bent in Mormon theology, which comes of an eschatological reading of the Abrahamic covenant, and which imputes to a temple-sealed Mormon couple the right to an endless seed, a posterity …

Selling The Amish: The Tourism Of Nostalgia, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

In this book, I address these and related question. Although I talk about the Amish, my primary goal is not to describe them. Many others have offered excellent accounts of the Amish, and references to their books and articles can be found in this book's bibliography. Instead, my purpose is to understand Amish Country tourism and, specifically, how it attracts and sustains the interest of millions of visitors each year. The purveyors of Amish Country tourism use a variety of strategies to draw tourists in and give them pleasure during their stay, and I explore those techniques. I focus especially …

Book Review: A Brief History Of The Soul, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A Brief History of a Soul is the story of a lively debate whose arguments, vocabulary, and even subject have evolved over millennia. In this historical narrative cum apologia, Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro champion “substance dualism,” a philosophical position that asserts the ontologically distinct reality of matter and soul (or body and mind in post-Cartesian terms). They largely succeed in their efforts to be “fair and balanced” (4) and succeed in presenting a sophisticated and nuanced yet readable account of the controversy in its philosophical and, to some extent, theological and scientific dimensions. As entailed by the “Brief …

Joseph Smith, Romanticism, And Tragic Creation, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Joseph Smith, as I think historians readily recognize, has much to commend him as a Romantic thinker. Personal freedom was as sacred to him as to the young Schiller, his emphasis on individualism invites comparison with Byron and Emerson, his view of restoration as inspired syncretism is the religious equivalent of Friedrich Schlegel's "progressive universal poetry," his hostility to dogma and creeds evokes Blake's cry, "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's," and his celebration of human innocence and human potential transform into theology what Rousseau and Goethe had merely plumbed through the novel and …

The Heavenly Logic Of Proxy Baptism, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

By mid-eighteenth century, two religious titans of the Anglo-Saxon world, erstwhile allies, were at loggerheads over the question of just how many people were destined for an eternity in hell. George Whitefield attacked John Wesley in 1740 for asserting “God’s grace is free to all.” Wesley had agonized over “How uncomfortable a thought is this, that thousands and millions of men, without any preceding offence or fault of theirs were unchangeably doomed to everlasting burnings!” Some, like Francis Okely, simply abandoned the restrictive hell: “Neither doeth it damn any Man, that he hath not the Word of God, if it …

How Mormons Became American, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

A century ago, it was once a simple matter to assume a norm for American culture and situate the Mormon well outside it. Polygamy was likened to slavery in the nineteenth century (as the first Republican Party platform did in 1856). Brigham Young was compared to an Asian despot. Mormon women were victims in need of mythic frontier heroes like Captain Plum and Buffalo Bill to save them. Even Joseph Smith’s martyrdom could be seen as the penalty for his violation of the right to a free press. Mormonism made available to the playwrights of the Great American Saga the …

From Reading To Revering The Good Book, Or How The Word Became Fossil At The Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger

English Faculty Publications

Given the complexity of this sacred text and the intensity with which Protestants have sought to glean its truths from it, it is not surprising that Luther’s “dangerous idea” yielded countless splits, schisms, and sects. Whereas once there was the Church, Protestants dedication to reading the Scripture for themselves has brought an endless variety of theologies, practices, and fellowships with no end in sight. While every one of these groups claims (whether explicitly or implicitly) that they alone have the true word of God, none has been able to arrest the flow of interpretations. With everyone free to read the …

Book Review: The Mormon Menace: Violence And Anti-Mormonism In The Postbellum South, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

“Whereas anti-Mormon violence had been characteristic of virtually every northern locale of Mormon settlement during the antebellum period,” Patrick Mason writes in his history of the subject, “violent assaults on Mormon missionaries became an increasingly southern practice in the years after the Civil War” (93). What distinguishes Mason’s book from other chapters in the sad saga of religious persecution is his excellent analysis of the complexities that result when political agendas, regional norms and interests, and theories on the proper role and limits of government all collide in the face of religious heterodoxy. Virtually all late nineteenth-century citizens and politicians …

Preface: Monsters And Mormons, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

In the nineteenth century, Mormonism seemed grist for everybody's mill. Humorists like Artemus Ward and Mark Twain made hay out of polygamy; conspiracy theorists like Thomas deWitt Talmage imputed President Garfield's assassination to the Mormons; pseudo-memoirists like "Maria Ward" recounted their seduction, imprisonment, and torture at the hands of Mormon mesmerists; the Republican jump-started their political party with a promise to expunge the Mormon "relic of barbarism"; and pulp fiction writers and serious novelists alike fueled sales with stories of bloodthirsty Danites, lecherous elders, and grief maddened Mormon wives who murdered competitors.

Book Review Panel: When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence In Western Thought, Terryl Givens, James L. Siebach, Dana M. Pike, Jesse D. Hurlbut, David B. Paxman

English Faculty Publications

On October 13, 2011, BYU Studies sponsored a program reviewing Terryl Givens’s important Oxford book on the idea of the premortal existence of souls in various lines of Western philosophy and religion. Because this first volume of its kind covers literature from so many different civilizations, the editors of BYU Studies saw no way to do this book justice without involving a panel of reviewers from several disciplines. After portions of Robert Fuller’s forthcoming review in Church History were read, the program proceeded with reviews, responses, and open discussion.

Book Review: Understanding The Book Of Mormon, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

With over 150 million copies in circulation, the Book of Mormon has yet to find its niche in historical, religious or literary studies. Largely ignored by scholars and berated by Evangelicals, the text may find a more successful path to a larger audience, hopes historian Grant Hardy, if historical and religious questions are bracketed in deference to the work’s surprisingly complex and interesting literary dimensions

Mormon Worship, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints*, (LDS), worship God, the eternal Father, and Jesus Christ.

LDS doctrine designates temples as the most sacred sites of worship, the believers' homes as the second most privileged spaces for devotional acts, and the chapels, or meetinghouses, as the third most important. A temple (more than 100 worldwide in 2000) is a holy place, a "house of the Lord."

Young, Brigham, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Upon Joseph Smith's murder in 1844, Young, as president of the Quoram of the Twelve Apostles, was recognized as the new leader by most members of the Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Smith, Joseph, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

An influential 19th-c. US religious figure, Joseph Smith was a 14-year-old boy living in New York, when, by his own account, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him.

Mormon, Book Of, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

In 1830 Joseph Smith* published a book he claimed to have translated "by the gift and power of God" from ancient gold plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York. The book records the details of three ancient peoples who had inhabited the North American continent.

Latter-Day Saints, Church Of Jesus Christ Of, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged in the 19th c. out of a Restoration* rather than a Reformation* ideology. Joseph Smith* organized the Latter-day Saints in Fayette, New York, in 1830, shortly after he produced the Book of Mormon* which, he claimed, he received from the angel Moroni and translated from an ancient record.