Mormon Studies Commons^™

Aguas Vivas, Thea Jo Buell

BYU Studies

"So, was there anything you just couldn’t find there?” I asked the newly returned missionary. He had been home from Guatemala for a few months, and I would be leaving for the same country soon.

He looked puzzled at my question and thought for several seconds before answering. “Balloons,” he said.

His Body Breaks, James Goldberg

BYU Studies

His body breaks long before he hangs on the cross.

All Things Sing Praise, Susan Elizabeth Howe

BYU Studies

The anteater’s tongue licking praise in the tunnels of the termite mound.

The alpaca spitting praise, olé!

Serrano peppers’ praise in perspiration.

Plastic praise: the Taj Mahal, a million interlocking Lego blocks.

Bayou, Pamela J. Hamblin

BYU Studies

Slowly the rain plays thin strings, plucking.

Life And Times Of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses Of The American West, Adam Oliver Stokes

BYU Studies

In recent years there has been a growing effort to expand the definition of “Mormonism” within Mormon studies. “Mormonism,” in twenty-first-century scholarship, refers not only to the largest organization in the restoration tradition—namely, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, headquartered in Utah—but also to other branches and movements within the restoration tradition. Joseph Smith’s movement includes the Reorganized Church (RLDS, now known as the Com- munity of Christ), the Bickertonite church (Church of Jesus Christ), the Strangite church, and the Elijah Message church, among others. In large part, this expanded understanding of what qualifies as “Mormon” has come …

End Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

“In Their Promised Canaan Stand”: Outlawry, Landscape, And Memory In C. C. A. Christensen’S Mormon Panorama, Jennifer Champoux

BYU Studies

What do Robin Hood and Joseph Smith have in common? This article examines C. C. A. Christensen’s Mormon Panorama according to themes of outlawry in Anglo-Saxon literature, revealing insights into the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint understanding of exile and sacred space in relation to both the landscape and to America. In Christensen’s paintings, the moral rightness of Latter-day Saints is contrasted with injustice by both government officials and local vigilantes, thereby equating outcast status with righteousness and true justice. In collating early stories of persecution and miracles, and presenting them with an aura of objective truth, the Mormon Panorama helped shape …

Latter-Day Saints And Images Of Christ’S Crucifixion, John Hilton Iii, Anthony Sweat, Josh Stratford

BYU Studies

In his classic 1897 work The Ministry of Art, Frank Bristol proclaimed, “Art has glorified Christianity. It has set forth her doctrines, portrayed her saints, and even her very God and Savior. Limited only by the necessary restrictions of her powers, art has been a teacher of things divine.”¹ The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (herein referred to as “the Church”) also employs the power of visual art to portray its central doctrines and perpetuate its sacred history. Religious paintings adorn hallways and classrooms of Latter-day Saint meetinghouses, fill the walls of sacred temples, and accompany …

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Contents

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Lost Sheep, Lost Coins, And Lost Meanings, Jenny Rebecca Rytting

BYU Studies

Three of the best known and most loved of Jesus’s parables occur together in the fifteenth chapter of Luke as a response to the Pharisees’ disapproval of Jesus’s association with sinners: the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin (also known as the lost drachma or lost groat), and the lost (or prodigal) son. In the teaching and preaching traditions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, these parables (especially the first two) have primarily been interpreted as a call for missionary work, particularly reactivation. For example, President David O. McKay suggested that the three parables represent …

Visualizing Temples Through Time, Litian Zhang, Geoffrey M. Draper

BYU Studies

The large number of temples dedicated in recent decades has rendered it impossible to draw a linear timeline of all temples on a standard printed page. We propose an interactive timeline that can run on mobile devices. Rather than display the entire timeline at once, our visualization renders a subset of the temples on an interactive spiral and provides controls for the user to navigate forward and backward through time. Below we will present a mobile app prototype of this visualization, called Temples Timeline, and discuss its implementation and reception.

The Early Development Of Latter-Day Saint Women’S History An Interview With Jill Mulvay Derr, Cherry Bushman Silver

BYU Studies

This piece is half of an interview conducted by Cherry B. Silver on August 8, 2019, in the BYU Studies offices. The second half of the interview was published in BYU Studies Quarterly 59, no. 3. Many thanks to Laurel Barlow for transcribing the recording.

Joseph Smith’S Translation: The Words And Worlds Of Early Mormonism, Samuel Morris Brown, Kent P. Jackson, Reviewer

BYU Studies

Samuel Morris Brown’s Joseph Smith’s Translation: The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism announces a sweeping objective: to place all of Joseph Smith’s prophetic projects under a single heading: translation. The thesis of the book is that “translation as a source of scriptural texts” is mirrored in “translation as a process by which humans became assimilable to the divine presence” (ix). “Translation was about more than words and sentences. Translation was also concerned with the transformation of human beings and the worlds they were capable of inhabiting. These twin senses of translation run together in early Latter-day Saint thought” (4).

Prophetic Authority: Democratic Hierarchy And The Mormon Priesthood, Michael Hubbard Mackay, Roger Terry, Reviewer

BYU Studies

Considering how central the concept of authority is in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is somewhat surprising that so few scholarly examinations of this topic have been attempted, which makes this book by Michael Hubbard MacKay a welcome and overdue contribution to the short list of publications on authority in the Church. And for the most part, MacKay does not disappoint. Although much of what he presents is not new and the writing can at times be challenging to digest, his exploration of the topic is both surprisingly thorough and notably insightful.

Review: Brenda R. Weber. Latter-Day Screens: Genre, Sexuality, And Mediated Mormonism. Durham, Nc: Duke University Press, 2019., Andrew Patrick Nelson

Mormon Studies Review

For a religion whose adherents make up only 2 percent of the nation’s population, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has occupied an outsized place in the American media landscape of the new millennium. Highly publicized events like the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the kidnapping of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the arrest and trial of fugitive polygamist child rapist Warren Jeffs, and the presidential campaigns of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney have repeatedly thrust the Latter-day Saint faith into the national media spotlight. So have a variety of popular entertainments with Mormons as their subject, including the hit …

Review: Will Bagley, Ed., “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877. Vol. 16 Of Kingdom In The West: The Mormons And The American Frontier. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Katrina Phillips

Mormon Studies Review

In the foreword to Will Bagley’s “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877, Floyd O’Neil highlights how integral American Indians have been in Latter-day Saint doctrine—and history. Additionally, he contends that a dearth of available Mormon-created sources has left a gap in the scholarship on the long history of the relationships between Latter-day Saints and Indians in the American West. While some encounters were “routine” or “lacking in conflict,” to quote O’Neil, contestations over resources in places such as the Utah Valley led to more violent and protracted battles that would stretch into the twenty-first century (17). “The Whites …

Review: Craig L. Foster And Marianne T. Watson. American Polygamy: A History Of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith. Charleston, Sc: The History Press, 2019., Cristina Rosetti

Mormon Studies Review

For most of the time that Mormon studies has been a field, the study of Mormonism was synonymous with the study of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With its rich archival resources, the LDS Church is a goldmine for scholars interested in American religion. However, the great interest in the LDS Church often came to the detriment of other religions that trace their history to Joseph Smith’s restoration. As Mormon history became synonymous with Latter-day Saint history, other Mormon groups went unknown or were derided as less authentic expressions of Mormonism.

Front Matter

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Teaching, Paul V. Johnson, Scott C. Esplin

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

Esplin: Thank you for allowing us to share your experiences as a religious educator, administrator, and commissioner of the Church Educational System with our readers. For those who may be unaware of your background, will you share your experience with Church education?