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"Dark And Loathsome": The Construction And Persistence Of Racial Theology In The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, Margaret Phillips

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints banned Black men from holding the priesthood until 1978, a policy many mistake for the whole of the faith's engagement with race. This thesis argues that the priesthood ban was only a symptom of a far deeper theology of race, one built into Mormonism's broader theology from its founding. Two intertwined beliefs anchor this theology: the default whiteness of the human body and soul, and twin curse narratives that mark Black and Indigenous peoples alike as bearers of a divine curse— dark skin read as the visible penalty for their ancestors' sin. …

“Every Mother A Missionary”?: The Vlogs Of Mormon Mothers, Celia Golden

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) places high expectations on mothers because their role in the church is to rear children into godly adults. When their lives are made public through social media, Mormon mothers online avoid religious expectations by withholding information about their Mormon faith and scarcely showing their husbands on-camera. Mormon husbands are expected to be the providers for the family, but as demonstrated through mothers’ vlogs on Instagram, husbands’ erasure allows for mothers to market their expertise to others as a paid product to earn their own revenue. Through descriptive coding, this study …

Perspectives On The Soteriological Problem Of Evil: Nuancing The “Universalist” Theologies Of Henri De Lubac And Joseph Smith, Timothy Gervais

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Since the discovery of the new world by Christian European explorers during the age of discovery, the increasingly global community of the modern age has confronted Christian theologians with difficult soteriological questions. These questions have caused many Christian adherents to abandon conceptions of a uniquely Christian salvation in favor of theological positions of religious pluralism. Other Christian theologians have confronted these issues through creative inclusivist theological constructs that expand the offer of salvation to those who may not have professed Christianity in their mortal life. These inclusivist theologies are uniquely suited to address modern concerns about the salvation of non-believers …

Bedeviled Beauty: My Journey Through White American Theater Institutions, J'Aila C. Price

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Game console: Oculus Quest

World: American Theater Institutions

Player: Minority

Place: United States

Level: “Ain’t no way.”

This thesis explores the contrast between the Westernized philosophies ingrained in my education and my identity as a Black female artist. It sheds light on the difficulties of pursuing higher education in the arts and the gaps that arise from limited exposure to culturally diverse Black resources, revealing the systemic issues in Western performance education. The paper also discusses the insights gained from my journey as a Black female artist, focusing on my thesis performance of Blood at the Root, which is …

The Literary Landscape For Twentieth-Century Spanish-Speaking Lds Poets, Gabriel González Núñez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Spanish is the second-most spoken language among Latter-day Saints, but relatively little is known about Mormon literature in this language, either its current status or its history. This absence is evident in the key surveys on Mormon literature that have been carried out. For example, when Eugene England considered the prospects of Mormon literature in his landmark essay on its history and future, he looked ahead at a mostly US-centric and fully English-language literary horizon.¹ This makes sense in the context in which he was writing. In the English language, and in the United States in particular, Mormon literature …

Review: Don Argott, Dir. Keep Sweet. 44 Blue Productions, 2021., Stephanie Griswold

Mormon Studies Review

The recent documentary Keep Sweet, directed by Don Argott and produced by Glenn Meehan (not to be confused with the 2022 Netflix documentary Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey), recounts the producer’s experiences meeting members of the historically Fundamentalist Mormon community in Southern Utah known as Short Creek. The film is advertised as “rare access to current FLDS members” from “a producer embedded for over a decade.” The film follows the producer, Meehan, as he meets ex-members and followers of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) and depicts their experiences with the changes in their …

Reivew: Mark S. Diamond And Andrew C. Reed, Eds. Understanding Covenants And Communities: Jews And Latter-Day Saints In Dialogue. Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, In Cooperation With The Central Conference Of American Rabbis, New York, 2020., Yaakov Ariel

Mormon Studies Review

Scholars, students, and religious leaders who take interest in interfaith dialogues, and especially in the interactions between Latter- day Saints and Jews, will welcome Understanding Covenants and Communities: Jews and Latter-day Saints in Dialogue. The compilation demonstrates both a continuation of and a breakthrough in the long history of the exchanges between the two communities of faith.

Review: Miles Harvey. The King Of Confidence: A Tale Of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, And The Murder Of An American Monarch. New York: Little, Brown And Company, 2020., Amy Derogatis

Mormon Studies Review

A little over a year ago I was in the Clarke Historical Library in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, sifting through documents with librarian John T. Fierst to answer a nagging question regarding the provenance of a remarkable daguerreotype. As we were musing about the limits of what could be known about this material object, he happened to mention that another person who was finishing a book about James Jesse Strang had recently visited and looked at the photograph. Like any other academic hearing about scholarly competition, my heart froze, and out of my dry mouth I managed to croak, “Oh, really, …

Mormon-Ish: Negotiating Religious Ambivalence Online, Kristen Tobey

2022 Faculty Bibliography

Reporting on responses from a survey of disaffected Mormons who utilize internet resources to manage feelings of distance from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this article explores the production of religious ambivalence online, arguing that ambivalence is not a default position for those too passive or afraid to leave, nor is it a failure of decisiveness or commitment. Rather, it is a produced religious mode that depends on robust socialization mechanisms to result in a strong sense of personal and collective identity. The online context enables, and indeed requires, an operationalization of religious ambivalence as both a …

Full Issue

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Review: Etga Ugur. Faith And Politics In The Public Sphere: The Gülen Movement And The Mormon Church. Syracuse, Ny: Syracuse University Press, 2019., Jean-François Mayer

Mormon Studies Review

When I accepted the invitation to review this book, published in a valuable series on Religion and Politics of which I had enjoyed reading several volumes, I assumed that it was a study of interactions between the Gülen movement (also known as Hizmet [service], emphasizing the social service projects for which the movement is well known) and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—something that I found intriguing, since I could not conceive how such a topic might deserve a full volume. I realized my mistake as soon as I started to read it. No sensational revelations about hidden …

Review: Kim Östman. Mormonit: Historia, Oppi Ja Elämä. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2019., Titus Hjelm

Mormon Studies Review

Growing up in Finland in the 1980s, it was practically impossible to hear someone speak Finnish with an accent. In a time when immigrants were more or less nonexistent, it would have been difficult to imagine why anyone would bother learning the language spoken by five million people at the northern periphery of Europe. That is, apart from a handful of immaculately dressed and groomed American men. Although never as ubiquitous as Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on doors, the Mormon missionaries and their perfect, if accented, Finnish left a deep impression on one young person, who later became a sociologist of …

World Enough, Tracy Fessenden

Mormon Studies Review

I value reviews that help me decide whether a book is likely to light up the classroom, so I will say it straightaway: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon will. Classroom friendliness in the humanities feels especially pressing now, as the larger share of our students set foot in our fields to fulfill distribution requirements on their way to degrees in business or STEM. If your class in American literature or history or religious studies is the one experience of your discipline that students who take it are likely to seek, a semester’s offering built around this book will …

Lay Latitude: Latter-Day Saint Women's Agency In Northwest Arkansas, Andrew Tompkins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The question of women’s agency in gender-traditional religions has been the subject of much scholarly attention over the past four decades, but little research has been done focusing specifically on Latter-day Saint women and their identities and roles within the structure and practice of the Church. In popular media representations, Latter-Day Saint women are often depicted as submissive or surviving, either powerless pawns or resistant warriors. However, many Latter-day Saint women find fulfillment and empowerment within and because of, rather than outside or in spite of, the institutional Church. In this thesis, I explore women’s agency in Northwest Arkansas’ Greendale …

Naturalistic Explanations Of The Origin Of The Book Of Mormon, Brian C. Hales

BYU Studies

In early 1830, an unknown farmer in upstate New York burst upon the world’s book-publishing scene. The Book of Mormon rolled off the Grandin Press in Palmyra, New York, with Joseph Smith listed as “author and proprietor” on the title page. That same year, a few other authors produced new titles, including The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck by Mary Shelley, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron by Thomas Moore, and Six Sermons on the Study of the Holy Scriptures by Samuel Lee. If grouped with books classified as “fiction” in 1830, the Book of Mormon may have been the longest, …

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 …

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.

Timing The Translation Of The Book Of Mormon: "Days [And Hours] Never To Be Forgotten", John W. Welch

BYU Studies

This paper aims to stimulate specific thinking about the intense and complex events during which the Book of Mormon was translated in 1829. Encouraged initially by Elder Neal A. Maxwell, and building on my chapter in the second edition of Opening the Heavens, this article strives to be as precise as possible about the timing of the events and progress of the Book of Mormon translation during the months and days it took place. In 1834, Oliver Cowdery wrote, “These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, …

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Review Of Mormons In The Piazza: History Of The Latter-Day Saints In Italy, Richard N. Holzapfel

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

Mormons in the Piazza: History of the Latter-day Saints in Italy is a tour de force and has immediately become a model for future histories written about Latter-day Saints living, working, serving, and struggling to find a place in nations outside the United States.

Mormons In The Piazza: History Of The Latter-Day Saints In Italy, Mauro Properzi

BYU Studies

James A. Toronto, Eric R. Dursteler, and Michael W. Homer. Mormons in the Piazza: History of the Latter-day Saints in Italy.

Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017.

Joseph Smith's First Vision: New Methods For The Analysis Of Experience-Related Texts, Ann Taves, Steven C. Harper

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Miranda Wilcox And John D. Young, Eds., Standing Apart: Mormon Historical Consciousness And The Concept Of Apostasy, Reviewed By Randall J. Stephens

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Book Of Mormon Costume Resource Guide, Rory R. Scanlon

Faculty Publications

This report offers visual costume research support for artists working on Book of Mormon projects, with an historical overview of Mesoamerica and how to understand its historical clothing pieces, an annotated listing of the best research sources, a list of garment and fabric terms for the 2000 BC to 600 AD period, and sample sketches from historical artifacts to suggest how to interpret the original research images the artist will encounter.

Janet Bennion, Polygamy In Primetime: Media, Gender, And Politics In Mormon Fundamentalism, Reviewed By Megan Goodwin

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Reaching The Nations: International Church Growth Almanac, Eric Eliason

BYU Studies

Reaching the Nations: International Church Growth Almanac, 2014 Edition, Volume I: The Americas, Oceana, and Europe and Reaching the Nations: International Church Growth Almanac, 2014 Edition, Volume II: Asia and Africa, by David G. Stewart Jr. and Matthew Martinich (Henderson, Nev.: Cumorah Foundation, 2013).

Making The Unfamiliar Familiar: Mormon Studies For Non-Mormon Students, Jill Peterfeso

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Mormon Studies Review Volume 2, Mormon Studies Review

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Jeremy Grimshaw, Draw A Straight Line And Follow It: The Music And Mysticism Of La Monte Young, Reviewed By Peter Mcmurray

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

The State Of Mormon Folklore Studies, Tom Mould, Eric A. Eliason

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.