Mormon Studies Commons^™

Teaching The Scriptural Emphasis On The Crucifixion Of Jesus Christ, John Hilton Iii

Faculty Publications

A colleague recently shared with me how, when teaching missionary preparation classes, he would role-play with students. When students pretending to be missionaries would ask him (acting as an investigator) if he knew about Christ’s Atonement, he would say, “Yes, I saw that Mel Gibson movie about Christ dying for our sins on the cross.” At least half of his students would correct him, stating that Christ atoned for our sins in Gethsemane, but not on the cross. This not only indicates a lack of the interpersonal skill of building on common beliefs but is also doctrinally incomplete. It also …

Review: Mette Ramstad. Conversion In The Pacific: Eastern Polynesian Latter-Day Saints’ Conversion Accounts And Their Development Of A Lds Identity. Kristiansand, Norway: Høyskoleforlaget, 2003., Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Mormon Studies Review

Mette Ramstad’s Conversion in the Pacific: Eastern Polynesian Latter-day Saints’ Conversion Accounts and Their Development of a LDS Identity was published in 2003. Although it is over a decade old, it remains a refreshing, smart contribution to the field. Unlike many scholars of Mormonism, Ramstad is not a historian. Instead, she writes as an anthropologist of religion. The result can be a bit disconcerting for individuals used to narrative histories. Like many social scientists, she categorizes the experiences of her subjects and uses them as case studies for understanding concepts that have been important to the academic study of religion. …

Review: Mark Ashurst-Mcgee, David W. Grua, Elizabeth A. Kuehn, Brenden W. Rensink, And Alexander L. Baugh, Eds. The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 6: February 1838-August 1839. Salt Lake City, Ut: T He Church Historian’S Press, 2017)., Angela Bell

Mormon Studies Review

The most recent volume of The Joseph Smith Papers, Volume 6 is a contribution long-awaited by students of Mormon history, members of faith traditions, and scholars of American religion. The collection chronicles the tumultuous time in Mormon history from Joseph Smith Jr., and Sidney Rigdon’s removal from Kirtland, Ohio, in early 1838 through the establishment and early settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois, during the spring and summer of 1839. In the tradition of the first f ive volumes of documents, this work compiles all known documents written, dictated, and received by the prophet from February 1838 to August 1839 and provides …

Review: Marjorie J. Spruill. Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’S Rights And Family Values That Polarized American Politics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017., Colleen Mcdannell

Mormon Studies Review

With polarization in American politics possibly at an all-time high, historians frantically search the past for the origins of our current malady. When did we become so alienated as a people, and why is it that we seemingly cannot understand each other’s behaviors? Marjorie J. Spruill provides another reflection on how we came to be what we are in Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics. Spruill sees gender as the theoretical place where we need to begin our exploration and the 1970s as the defining years. Passing up the easy targets …

Faithful And Fearless: Major Howard Egan, Early Mormonism And The Pioneering Of The American West, Brett D. Dowdle

BYU Studies

As he did with his earlier biographies—My Best for the Kingdom: His- tory and Autobiography of John Lowe Butler, a Mormon Frontiersman and Stand by My Servant Joseph: The Story of the Joseph Knight Family and the Restoration—the late William G. Hartley reminds us of the value and importance of studying the lives of ordinary Latter-day Saints without ecclesiastical position in Faithful and Fearless: Major Howard Egan, Early Mormonism and the Pioneering of the American West. Similar to the stories of both Butler and the Knight family, Hartley shows that, when examined closely, Egan’s life was far …

The Book Of Mormon: Another Testament Of Jesus Christ, Maxwell Institute Study Edition, Roger Terry

BYU Studies

The Maxwell Institute’s study edition of the Book of Mormon is both an update and an expansion of Grant Hardy’s The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition, published in 2003 by the University of Illinois Press. Among the many differences between the two volumes, I find two most significant. First, the base text for the Maxwell Institute edition is the 2013 version of the Book of Mormon, used currently by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A Reader’s Edition used the 1920 version because it was the most recent edition available in the public domain. The Church …

Kalaupapa: The Mormon Experience In An Exiled Community By Fred E. Woods (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center,, Emily Cook

BYU Studies

As Hansen’s Disease (also known as leprosy) spread rapidly throughout Hawaii in the nineteenth century, the Kalaupapa peninsula was selected as an “isolation settlement for confirmed cases” of leprosy and the location of “a receiving hospital where suspected cases could be treated” (20–21). These individuals were essentially exiled, and one might think that such an isolated community would be a place of loneliness, but Kalaupapa: The Mormon Experience in an Exiled Community explores how, instead, the community was built on love and inclusion and began to thrive and became a sacred space. According to author Fred E. Woods, professor of …

Remembrance And Return, Ted Vaggalis, Daniel C. Peterson

Interpreter Foundation Books

The essays collected here honor and celebrate our friend, colleague, and teacher, Louis Midgley. Many of us know him from his time at BYU, where he taught political philosophy in the Political Science Department. But he was a great friend and mentor, and his influence extended well beyond the campus. In my own case, after I left BYU to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, Lou made sure to keep in touch with me, helping me to negotiate the obstacles one encounters in graduate school, asking about my family, as well as sharing lessons and spiritual experiences in order to keep …

The Impact Of Sharing Temple Stories And Images In The Pacific Through Social Media, Dr. Jared Hansen, Paul Wilson

Mormon Pacific Historical Society

No abstract provided.

One Hundred Years Of The Art And Architecture Of The Laie Temple

Mormon Pacific Historical Society

PowerPoint slide notes from a presentation by Sharon R. Gray, November 16, 2019, for the Mormon Pacific Historical Society (MPHS) Conference celebrating the Centennial of the Dedication of the Laie Hawai’i Temple.

Slide 1. Title Page 100 Years of the Art and Architecture of the Laie Hawai’i Temple. Image of the Laie Temple watercolor drawing by Paul L. Anderson.

Review: David T. Smith. Religious Persecution And Political Order In The United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)., Charles Mccrary

Mormon Studies Review

In this careful comparative study, David T. Smith develops a useful framework for analyzing US state actors’ reactions to and participation in religious persecution. To set up the problem, Smith identifies three interlocking puzzles: (1) the United States has always valued religious tolerance and has had legal frameworks preventing persecution; and (2) these protections have worked, in large part; but (3) when state agents have persecuted religious groups or encouraged or at least allowed for their persecution, it has been against those we might not expect, namely Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Derived from these puzzles are two basic questions that …

Review: T Homas W. Simpson. American Universities And The Birth Of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940. Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2016., Ronit Y. Stahl

Mormon Studies Review

“Good for what? Good for whom?” It’s been a long time since I took historian of education Larry Cuban’s “Good Schools” class, but I will never forget the pair of questions he asked every meeting, about every reading. And it’s these two questions, “Good for what? Good for whom,” that I kept returning to as I read Thomas W. Simpson’s American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940. For whom were American universities good? For what purposes? Or, more specifically, “For which Mormons did American universities serve what purposes to what ends?”

We’Ll Sing And We’Ll Shout: The Life And Times Of W. W. Phelps By Bruce A. Van Orden, Donald Q. Cannon

BYU Studies

Latter-day Saints who know of William W. Phelps tend to associate him with the hymns that he wrote. In fact, the words in the title of Bruce A. Van Orden’s biography, “We’ll Sing and We’ll Shout,” are taken from one of his most famous hymns, “The Spirit of God.” As influential as his hymns have been to Latter-day Saints then and now, Phelps contributed much more than that in his efforts to build the Church. Van Orden’s book is a detailed biography of this interesting and influential writer and Church leader. The book provides insight into both his ecclesiastical contributions …

Trajectories In The Evolution Of Mormon Studies On Faith And Science, Steven L. Peck

Mormon Studies Review

The relationship between science and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been and continues to be a complicated story. Concerns and differing perspectives about science provided the underlying context for a number of formal and informal institutional directions taken by the church in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Often, these were influenced by differences in opinion about science among various leaders of the church. Areas in which science played a role include: the relationship between secular and church education, a battleground in framing doctrinal questions about creation—including syncretic influence from the rise of Christian fundamentalism and …

Review: Rachel Cope, Amy Easton-Flake, Keith Erekson, And Lisa Olsen Tait, Eds. Mormon Women’S History: Beyond Biography. Madison, Nj: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017., Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Mormon Studies Review

“Women shaped Mormonism from its outset.” Simple, isn’t it? With all that scholars now know about the distinctive emphasis on family and childbearing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint tradition, it seems obvious that women have played a crucial role in the development of Mormon history and community life. Yet, as the framing essays in Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography so amply demonstrate, the broader narrative histories of the tradition remain willfully fixed on its patriarchal organizational structure and male leadership. Despite an abundance of work in social and cultural history beginning in the 1970s, women’s roles …

Review: Max Perry Mueller. Race And The Making Of The Mormon People. Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2017., Brandi Denison

Mormon Studies Review

Max Perry Mueller’s Race and the Making of the Mormon People argues that “for early Mormons, the construction and deconstruction of what it meant to be, to act, and to look black, white, and red were as much literary projects and they were literal ones” (p. 8). Mueller positions his book as both a case study of how nineteenth-century Americans wrote about and constructed race through text as well as a “particular case unto itself” (p. 9). Through the book, Mueller aimed to capture the voices of nonwhite Mormons in the nineteenth century and how they “resisted, acquiesced, and sometimes …

Review: Kerry William Bate. The Women: A Family Story. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2016., Francesca Morgan

Mormon Studies Review

Bate brings the stringent methods of trained historians and scholarly genealogists to bear on the sometimes-fanciful genre of the family genealogy: a publication focusing on only one set of interconnected lineages. His result is a warts-and-all portrayal of everyday life in isolated desert and mountain towns in southern Utah, throughout Mormonism’s f irst century up until the Second World War. His scrutiny of forebears extends to levels of schooling, disease, infant mortality, old age and the end of life, poor financial decision-making, sex before wedlock, and marital tensions. He describes uncongenial personalities when he finds them among his kin. The …

Who Is Leaving The Church?, Stephen Cranney

BYU Studies

Who is leaving the Church? The blogosphere and informal ward council discussions have no shortage of speculation on this point, but there is surprisingly very little representative research to help shed light on this issue in a clear, systematic way. Because members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints make up a small fraction of the total population, most random surveys that ask about religion and former religion pick up only a handful of people with a Latter-day Saint background or affiliation in any wave. (For example, the 2016 General Social Survey reported only twenty-three members.) Numbers like …

Name As Key-Word: Collected Essays On Onomastic Wordplay And The Temple In Mormon Scripture By Matthew L. Bowen, Jennifer Hurlbut

BYU Studies

The ancient world’s use of names to represent meanings, symbols, prophecies, and memorials is foreign to us today, and Matthew Bowen’s book bridges that gap to tell us what we can learn from understanding the use of names in ancient scriptural narratives. The volume’s sixteen essays delve into the names of persons and places in the Book of Mormon and Bible. Bowen’s thorough and careful research into these names provides helpful background for these scriptural texts: for example, the essay on the place names Zarahemla and Jershon draws parallels between these names and a naming practice in the Bible seen …

Doing Business In The World Without Becoming Worldly, Lindon J. Robison, David R. Just, Jeffery R. Oliver

BYU Studies

Doing business in the world consists of, among other things, exchanging goods and services. One way people reflect who they are and what they love most is by what they exchange and by the quantities and terms with which they exchange goods and services.