Hyrum Conrad Pope: Architect Of God’S Temple On This Pu’Uhonua,
2019
Brigham Young University Hawai’i
Hyrum Conrad Pope: Architect Of God’S Temple On This Pu’Uhonua, Hannah Fullerton
Mormon Pacific Historical Society
At night if one looks over from the Ko’olau mountain range, the sea, or the land a great light can be seen shining from the Laie Hawaii temple. For over three hundred years mankind has congratulated himself on the invention of lighthouses that bring ships in to harbor from a stormy sea. But for eternities has God created lighthouses of His own and the one that stands here has guided millions to safe harbor in a world awash in tumultuous darkness. This temple is unique for many reasons. La’ie Hawai’i temple is the first outside the continental US. This land …
James Lowe,
2019
Brigham Young University
James Lowe
Mormon Pacific Historical Society
Sam Lowe excused. As early as 1970, the church had decided to remodel the temple, and notified newly-called President Lloyd Walsh of their intentions. You local folks are going to laugh, but the project was delayed about 5 years because of the difficulty of obtaining the necessary building permits! Typical Hawaii.
Full Issue,
2019
Brigham Young University
2019 Conference Schedule,
2019
Brigham Young University
The Building Of The Toyko Temple,
2019
Brigham Young University
The Building Of The Toyko Temple, Conan P. Story
Mormon Pacific Historical Society
This is a story of the building of the Tokyo Temple, the first temple built in Asia by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is not a history, although I hope it will shed some historical light on a few aspects of this magnificent temple. It is simply my story—what I saw and did, and what I learned about this House of the Lord as it rose from the ground and was dedicated in 1980. I like to tell this story starting in 1948 because that is when the Lord began to reveal His plan for where …
Indigenizing Mormonisms,
2019
Brigham Young University
Indigenizing Mormonisms, Farina King
Mormon Studies Review
Over generations, scholars have emphasized the binary of “Mormons and Indians” using racialized terms.1 This language and approach often overlooks complex dynamics and locally specific identities of peoples and communities that engaged with Mormonism in North America and Central America.2 Since the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many Mormons have identified Indigenous peoples of the Americas as “Lamanites,” comparable to how white settler colonizers categorized Natives as “Indians.” Although colonizers, including Mormon settlers, used such terms to shape Indigenous identities and populations, individuals and communities appropriated and adapted them.
Evolution Of The Research On Mormonism In Asia,
2019
Brigham Young University
Evolution Of The Research On Mormonism In Asia, Pierre Vendassi
Mormon Studies Review
The first Mormon attempts to put down roots in Asia date back to 1851. Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as other Mormon denominations such as the Community of Christ are officially present in about twenty Asian countries. While many student dissertations and essays as well as testimonial or devotional books have been written on different aspects of Mormonism in Asia, including both the Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ traditions, the allotted space for this paper as well as my own resources prevented me from providing an exhaustive survey. Instead, I chose a few …
Faith Across Cultures: Research On Mormonism In Oceania,
2019
Brigham Young University
Faith Across Cultures: Research On Mormonism In Oceania, Ian Barber
Mormon Studies Review
Oceania describes the largely marine Pacific basin divided (on moot ethnographic grounds) between Polynesia in the east and Melanesia and Micronesia to the southwest and northwest respectively. The continent of Australia lies on Oceania’s southwestern border. T he first Oceanic settlers arrived in the western Pacific tens of thousands of years ago from Asia. Human settlement of the increasingly depauperate and largely noncontinental islands in eastern Melanesia to Polynesia and Micronesia was accomplished within the last five thousand years. The remote Eastern Polynesian islands were colonized largely if not entirely within the last millennium. These vastly different time scales of …
The Forms And The Power: Mapping Mormon Practice,
2019
Brigham Young University
The Forms And The Power: Mapping Mormon Practice, Ryan G. Tobler
Mormon Studies Review
The waters of scholarship on American religion have been troubled over the past few decades, partly by a radical process of diversification, partly because of tremors within the concept of religion itself. More than ever before, scholars in the field have been forced to reflect critically on just what “religion” is. Is it something transcendent, something above and beyond the here and now? Does religion emanate from an internal condition of belief? Is its institutional and social history a story of creeds, writ large? These were, more or less, the assumptions of generations of church historians and scholars who studied …
Review: Joanna Brooks And Gina Colvin, Eds., Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching A Postcolonial Zion. Salt Lake: University Of Utah Press, 2018,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Joanna Brooks And Gina Colvin, Eds., Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching A Postcolonial Zion. Salt Lake: University Of Utah Press, 2018, Jon Bialecki
Mormon Studies Review
It is no secret, even as Christianity appears to be waning as a cultural and demographic force in many of the North Atlantic nations that it is commonly associated with, that religion—or at least, certain forms of that religion—are very much waxing in other parts of the world. In regions such as Africa, South and Central America, Oceania, and even parts of Asia, modes of Christian practice, belief, and organization, some with ties to Euro-American denominations, but also many without, are spreading at such a pace that authors such as Philip Jenkins (2011) can speak about the churches there as …
Review: Carol Cornwall Madsen. Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2017.,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Carol Cornwall Madsen. Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2017., Catherine O'Donnell
Mormon Studies Review
In Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History, Carol Cornwall Madsen reveals the rich and painful inner life of a woman who was for decades the most famous female member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Drawing on an extraordinary “paper trail of thousands of pages from diaries, letters, newspaper articles and editorials, and a volume of poetry” (vii), Madsen offers an astute and sympathetic portrait of a woman who accomplished and suffered much.
Review: Brent M. Rogers. Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons And The Federal Management Of Early Utah Territory. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 2017.,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Brent M. Rogers. Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons And The Federal Management Of Early Utah Territory. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 2017., William Deverell
Mormon Studies Review
Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory accomplishes a number of impressive feats. In the hands of a less-skilled scholar, these objectives might clash and unduly complicate a book and its narrative. Not so in historian Brent M. Rogers’s fine study of antebellum tensions regarding the Mormon political and cultural experiment in the Great Basin.
Review: Richard E. Turley Jr., Janiece J. Johnson, And Lujean Purcell Carruth, Eds. Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. 2 Vols. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2017).,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Richard E. Turley Jr., Janiece J. Johnson, And Lujean Purcell Carruth, Eds. Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. 2 Vols. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2017)., Nathan B. Oman
Mormon Studies Review
The story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is much told, most recently in the comprehensive account produced by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard under the auspices of the Church Historical Department.1 Massacre at Mountain Meadows, however, ends with the mass murder of immigrants by Mormon militiamen in 1857. The authors’ original plan was to produce a second volume that would extend the story to include the subsequent efforts by Mormons to deflect responsibility for the massacre and the pursuit of the perpetrators by federal officials (pp. xi–xii). Much of the research for this effort was …
Review: D. Michael Quinn. The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth And Corporate Power. Salt Lake City, Ut: Signature Books, 2017.,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: D. Michael Quinn. The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth And Corporate Power. Salt Lake City, Ut: Signature Books, 2017., Thomas G. Alexander
Mormon Studies Review
D. Michael Quinn’s The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power is the third book in a series on the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The first volume, published in 1994 and subtitled Origins of Power “emphasizes the development of ecclesiastical and theocratic powers in Mormonism, primarily during the lifetime of its founder Joseph Smith (1805–44), but also including Brigham Young’s transfer of the Mormon hierarchy to Utah in 1847.” (Origins of Power, p. x) Volume 2, published in 1997 and subtitled Extensions of Power, details the development of the spiritual and temporal power of Mormon …
Review: Matthew J. Grow And R. Eric Smith, Eds. The Council Of Fifty: What The Records Reveal About Mormon History. Provo, Ut: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City, Ut: Deseret Book, 2017.,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Matthew J. Grow And R. Eric Smith, Eds. The Council Of Fifty: What The Records Reveal About Mormon History. Provo, Ut: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City, Ut: Deseret Book, 2017., Janiece Johnson
Mormon Studies Review
Since the late 1960s, the minutes of the Mormon Council of Fifty in Nauvoo have been the Mormon documentary “holy grail” (p. viii). What Mario DePillis called “one of the most secret of the Mormons’ sub rosa organizations” and Klaus J. Hansen labelled the “most important key to an understanding of the Mormon past” was a topic for speculation over decades.1 Lack of prior availability did not inhibit prior commentary, but also spurred on attentive archival work. Code words veiling theocratic claims topped with rumors of a self-appointed king could only be met with great suspicion in a democratic republic. …
Neither Fairyland Nor Dystopia: Taking Western Europe Seriously In Mormon Studies,
2019
Brigham Young University
Neither Fairyland Nor Dystopia: Taking Western Europe Seriously In Mormon Studies, Julie K. Allen
Mormon Studies Review
Although Mormonism is intimately associated, externally and internally, with American history and culture, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has older ties to western Europe than to anywhere else outside the United States and Polynesia. Without the influx of approximately eighty thousand convert-immigrants from the UK and continental Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the fledgling church would not have been able to successfully colonize the intermountain West. Although church membership levels in Europe have remained low in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, a robust network of Latter-day Saint congregations across the European continent and the British Isles supports …
Review: Julie K. Allen. Danish But Not Lutheran: The Impact Of Mormonism On Danish Cultural Identity, 1850–1920. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2017.,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Julie K. Allen. Danish But Not Lutheran: The Impact Of Mormonism On Danish Cultural Identity, 1850–1920. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2017., Margit Egdal
Mormon Studies Review
America’s status as a land with a large and diverse immigrant population has long contrasted with the relatively homogenous populations of Europe. However, this situation has changed dramatically throughout Europe in recent decades. In Denmark, migrant workers and refugees from across Europe, Africa, and Asia have made for a more multicultural society.
Review: Terryl L. Givens. Feeding The Flock: The Foundations Of Mormon T Hought: Church And Praxis. New York And Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Terryl L. Givens. Feeding The Flock: The Foundations Of Mormon T Hought: Church And Praxis. New York And Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017., J. B. Haws
Mormon Studies Review
Terryl Givens has been calling, for some time, for a broader and more serious engagement with the theology of the Church of Latter-day Saints—and he has framed that call in memorable language, as only he can. Here’s what he wrote for the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Martin Marty Center in 2012: “In the century since the [1893] Chicago [World’s] fair, Mormons have been lauded for their choirs and their football. They are largely respected as good, decent, family-centered people, who are welcome to sing for presidents and dance with the stars—and everyone agrees to avoid theological questions.”1 Not if …
Faith-Promoting History/ History-Promoting Faith,
2019
Brigham Young University
Faith-Promoting History/ History-Promoting Faith, Martin E. Marty
Mormon Studies Review
An excerpt from a long poem by W. H. Auden comes to mind as a framework for assessing these two publications featuring Mormon historian Leonard J. Arrington. He was poised—we might say surefooted—in his Mormon faith and by commitments to the church. At the same time, Arrington consistently made clear that his calling was to be a scholar who excelled in the writing of history in modes acceptable among university-based researchers and writers of many faiths, or of non-faith. There was never any doubt that he pursued his vocation imaginatively and steadfastly through the decades. While these books give evidence …
Review: Mark Ashurst-Mcgee, Robin Jensen, And Sharalyn D. Howcroft, Eds. Foundational Texts Of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.,
2019
Brigham Young University
Review: Mark Ashurst-Mcgee, Robin Jensen, And Sharalyn D. Howcroft, Eds. Foundational Texts Of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018., Michael Hubbard Mackay
Mormon Studies Review
In 2005, Robert Orsi argued, “The world of the text is really not the world.”1 In remarkably clear prose Orsi promotes a kind of praxis-oriented methodology that has similarly begun to emerge from within the Joseph Smith Papers Project and subsequent volumes produced by its editors. As Orsi explained, he is interested in “what people do with religious practice, what they make with it of themselves and their worlds.”2 This short review essay will briefly examine Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen, and Sharalyn D. Howcroft’s edited volume Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources. As a by-product of the …
