Digital Commons Network^™

What Is Islamic Studies?: European And North American Approaches To A Contested Field, Leif Stenberg, Philip Wood

Books

Explores the vibrant, divided and evolving field of Islamic studies in Europe and North America
Covers topics ranging from gender and secularism to pop music and modern science

Discusses contemporary and historical approaches in Islamic Studies

Features contributions from leading scholars studying Islam and Muslims, including Shahzad Bashir, Hadi Enayat, Juliane Hammer, Aaron Hughes, Carool Kersten, Susanne Olsson and Jonas Otterbeck

Addresses the role of both Muslims and non-Muslims in the ongoing construction of Islam
The study of Islam and Muslims in Europe and North America has expanded greatly in recent decades, becoming a passionately debated and divided field. This …

Volume 9: What Is Islamic Studies?: European And North American Approaches To A Contested Field, Leif Stenberg, Philip Wood

Exploring Muslim Contexts

The study of Islam and Muslims in Europe and North America has expanded greatly in recent decades, becoming a passionately debated and divided field. This collection critically assesses the development of the field of Islamic Studies and its place in society. Featuring contributions from anthropologists, historians and scholars of religion, each chapter contains new empirical material and discusses approaches to the study of Islam, past and present.

Key Features

• Covers topics ranging from gender and secularism to pop music and modern science
• Discusses contemporary and historical approaches in Islamic Studies
• Features contributions from leading scholars studying Islam and Muslims, including …

Emory-Tibet Science Initiative: Changes In Monastic Science Learning Motivation And Engagement During A Six-Year Curriculum, Kelsey M. Gray, Cindy Achat-Mendes, Ann Cale Kruger, Tashi Lhamo, Rinchen Wangyal, Gelek Gyatso, Carol M. Worthman

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the initiative taken by the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community to connect with western science and scientists presents a unique opportunity to understand the motivations and engagement behaviors that contribute to monastic science learning. In this study, we draw on quantitative data from two distinct surveys that track motivations and engagement behaviors related to science education among monastic students. The first survey was administered at one monastic university in 2018, and the second follow-up survey was completed by students at two monastic universities in 2019. These surveys assessed the reception of science education related …

A Reader In Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis, Lydia Schumacher, Oleg Bychkov

Philosophy & Theory

A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology presents for the first time in English key passages from the Summa Halensis, one of the first major installments in the summa genre for which scholasticism became famous. This systematic work of philosophy and theology was collaboratively written mostly between 1236 and 1245 by the founding members of the Franciscan school, such as Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, who worked at the recently founded University of Paris.

Modern scholarship has often dismissed this early Franciscan intellectual tradition as unoriginal, merely systematizing the Augustinian tradition in light of the rediscovery of …

Mormon Women And Polygamy: Creating A Better Future With The Past, Mia Seegmiller

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Identity And Resistance: Queer Puerto Rican Subjects, Pentecostalism, And The Shadow Of U.S. Imperialism, Jared Vázquez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

James K.A. Smith argues that the first principle of Pentecostalism is that the same Holy Spirit described in the New Testament is !actively, dynamically, and miraculously present both in the ecclesial community and in creation” today. This ontological experience of the Holy Spirit transforms Pentecostalism into a hermeneutic thorough which Pentecostals interpret their social world. In his attempt to articulate a Pentecostal epistemology Smith leaves implied what this project seeks to make explicit: the emergence of subjectivity is mediated through the experiences of the body and is therefore affective and phenomenological in nature. I argue that pentecostal spiritual practices are …

Economic Theology And The Death Of God In The Context Of The Crisis Of Neoliberalism, Jared A. Lacy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In light of the ongoing political and economic crises in the twenty-first century, this study aims to apply the discourse of political theology, alongside Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God to an understanding of neoliberalism and the problems it faces on a global level. However, because of the centrality of sovereignty in political theological discourse and the view of neoliberalism as diffusing sovereignty in favor of an ordered system, I attempt to further develop an offshoot discourse of political theology referred to as economic theology. This discourse allows a theological signature of power to be traced through the history …

“The Lord God Will Proceed”: Nephi’S Wordplay In 1 Nephi 22:8–12 And The Abrahamic Covenant, Matthew L. Bowen

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

Nephi quotes or alludes to four distinct Old Testament passages — Genesis 22:18; Isaiah 29:14; Isaiah 49:22–23; and Isaiah 52:10 — twice each in 1 Nephi 22:6, 8–12. These four texts form the basis of his description of how the Lord would bring to pass the complete fulfillment of the promises in the Abrahamic covenant for the salvation of the human family. These texts’ shared use of the Hebrew word gôyim (“nations” [> kindreds], “Gentiles”) provides the lexical basis for Nephi’s quotation and interpretation of these texts in light of each other. Nephi uses these texts to prophesy that the …

Honoring Joseph’S Theophany Two Centuries Later, Spencer Kraus

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

In the year 2020, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints celebrated the 200th anniversary of the First Vision of the Prophet Joseph Smith. As a part of honoring that seminal moment in the Church’s history, the Church History Symposium focused on the context, place, and meaning of the First Vision. Selected papers from the conference have been published in Joseph Smith and his First Vision: Context, Place, and Meaning, edited by Alexander L. Baugh, Steven C. Harper, Brent M. Rogers, and Benjamin C. Pykles, offering new insights and research into Joseph Smith’s theophany in the Sacred …

“We Might Have Enjoyed Our Possessions And The Land Of Our Inheritance”: Hebrew Yrš And 1 Nephi 17:21, Matthew L. Bowen

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

The verbal expression “we might have enjoyed,” as used in a complaint that Nephi attributes to his brothers, “we might have enjoyed our possessions and the land of our inheritance” (1 Nephi 17:21), reflects a use of the Hebrew verb yrš in its progressive aspect, “to enjoy possession of.” This meaning is evident in several passages in the Hebrew Bible, and perhaps most visibly in the KJV translation of Numbers 36:8 (“And every daughter, that possesseth [Hebrew yōrešet] an inheritance [naḥălâ] in any tribe of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto one of the family of the tribe …

“For Their Good Have I Written Them”: The Onomastic Allusivity And Literary Function Of 2 Nephi 25:8, Matthew L. Bowen

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

Nephi’s writings exhibit a distinctive focus on “good” and divine “goodness,” reflecting the meaning of Nephi’s Egyptian name (derived from nfr) meaning “good,” “goodly,” “fine,” or “fair.” Beyond the inclusio playing on his own name in terms of “good” and “goodness” (1 Nephi 1:1; 2 Nephi 33:3–4, 10, 12), he uses a similar inclusio (2 Nephi 5:30–31; 25:7–8) to frame and demarcate a smaller portion of his personal record in which he incorporated a substantial portion of the prophecies of Isaiah (2 Nephi 6–24). This smaller inclusio frames the Isaianic material as having been incorporated into Nephi’s “good” writings on …

Review: Michael Hubbard Mackay, Mark Ashurst-Mcgee, And Brian M. Hauglid, Eds. Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’S Translation Projects In The Development Of Mormon Christianity. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2020., Sonia Hazard

Mormon Studies Review

Joseph Smith was, among much else, a translator. One of the most distinctive qualities of early Mormonism is that saving knowledge came not only from revelations—though Smith received plenty of those— but also through texts from the ancient past. In order to be useable as scripture, those texts required translation, and Smith tackled the office of translator with relish. What did translation mean for Smith and early Saints?

The editors of Producing Ancient Scripture—Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid—set out to answer that question with a comprehensive treatment of Smith’s translations, and they delivered. Among the seventeen …

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, …

Review: Matthew L. Harris. Watchman On The Tower: Ezra Taft Benson And The Making Of The Mormon Right. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2020., Carmen Celestini

Mormon Studies Review

Ezra Taft Benson, to those of us who study the joint impact of overlapping belief systems of religion and conspiracy theories on politics, personifies the implications of these beliefs not only within his lifetime but within contemporary times as well. In Watchman on the Tower, Matthew L. Harris provides insight into Benson and his thinking. Using Benson’s personal correspondence, speeches, and public writings, Harris creates an image of a man significantly influenced by his faith and his life experiences.

Full Issue

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Review: Terryl Givens. Mormonism (Or The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints): What Everyone Needs To Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020., Jill Peterfeso

Mormon Studies Review

Terryl Givens’s new book Mormonism (Or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): What Everyone Needs to Know is a resource guide that seeks to explain the LDS Church’s history, beliefs, and practices, and in so doing clarifies items of confusion and controversy. The book is organized into topic-driven chapters (such as “History,” “Polygamy,” “Organization,” and “Conflicts and Challenges”), which unfold in a question-and-answer format. The questions Givens tackles range from predictable (“Why did the Latter-day Saints practice polygamy?” “What is the church’s relationship to Christianity?”) to unexpected (“What do Latter-day Saint scriptures teach about peace and war?” “Does …

Review: David Walker. Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, And The Corporate Spirit Of The West. Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2019., Emily Ogden

Mormon Studies Review

David Walker’s Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West tells the riveting story of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints won the battle not only to define what the railroad would mean in Utah but also to locate the junction and stations that would have a definitive impact on development near the Great Salt Lake. Through well-executed bureaucratic maneuvers, Brigham Young and other church leaders secured the construction of a railroad infrastructure that they calculated would best serve church interests.

Lehi And Nephi As Trained Manassite Scribes, Noel B. Reynolds

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

This paper brings together contemporary Ancient Near East scholarship in several fields to construct an updated starting point for interpretation of the teachings of the Book of Mormon. It assembles findings from studies of ancient scribal culture, historical linguistics and epigraphy, Hebrew rhetoric, and the history and archaeology of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, together with the traditions of ancient Israel to construct a contextualized perspective for understanding Lehi, Nephi, and their scribal training as they would have been understood by their contemporaries. Lehi and Nephi are shown to be the beneficiaries of the most advanced scribal training available in …

“Unto The Taking Away Of Their Stumbling Blocks”: The Taking Away And Keeping Back Of Plain And Precious Things And Their Restoration In 1 Nephi 13–15, Matthew L. Bowen

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

In the latter part (1 Nephi 13–14) of his vision of the tree of life (1 Nephi 11–14), Nephi is shown the unauthorized human diminution of scripture and the gospel by the Gentile “great and abominable church” — that plain and precious things/words, teachings, and covenants were “taken away” or otherwise “kept back” from the texts that became the Bible and how people lived out its teachings. He also saw how the Lord would act to restore those lost words, teachings, and covenants among the Gentiles “unto the taking away of their stumbling blocks” (1 Nephi 14:1). The iterative language …

A Deeper Understanding Of The Temple In 175 Entries, David Calabro

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

In a must-have book written for a Latter-day Saint audience, Donald Parry offers profound insights into 175 features of ancient and modern temples, including architectural features, aspects of ritual, and temple-related doctrine.

“But That Thou Wouldst Clear My Way Before Me”: A Note On The Personal And Emotional Rendering Of An Ancient Idiom In 2 Nephi 4:33, Matthew L. Bowen

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

The biblical Hebrew collocation pinnâ derek or pannû derek (cf. Egyptian Ἰr wꜣ.t [n]), often rendered “prepare the way” or “prepare a way” in English, is an evident stylistic feature of Nephi’s writings. The most basic meaning of this idiom is “clear my way,” which is how it is rendered in 2 Nephi 4:33. Zenos’s use of “prepare the way” (Jacob 5:61, 64) in the context of “clear[ing] away” bad branches also reflects this most basic meaning.

Verbal Punctuation In The Book Of Mormon I: (And) Now, John Gee

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

The Book of Mormon, being an ancient book, was originally written without typographic punctuation and employs verbal punctuation instead. This article looks at the use of “and now” as verbal punctuation in the Book of Mormon. The phrase is used to mark major breaks in the text, not only for chapters but also within chapters of the text. The Book of Mormon usage is borrowed from Classical Biblical Hebrew (the Hebrew used before the exile) and follows the pattern set by pre-exilic Hebrew scribes. While this usage dropped in the Old World after the Babylonian exile as Aramaic replaced Hebrew …

Full Issue

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

No abstract provided.

Nephi’S Small Plates: A Rhetorical Analysis, Noel B. Reynolds

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

In previous and pending publications I have proposed interpretations of various features of Nephi’s writings. In this paper I undertake a comprehensive discussion of the seven passages in which Nephi and his successor Jacob explain the difference between the large and the small plates and describe the divinely mandated profile for each. While most readers of the Book of Mormon have been satisfied with the simple distinction between the large plates in which the large plates are a comprehensive historical record of the Nephite experience and the small plates are a record of selected spiritual experiences, including revelations and prophecies, …

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 …

A Relational Account Of Structure And Agency Via ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ And The ‘Processing Approach’, With A Case Study Of Circumcision In Ancient Judaism*, Thomas R. Blanton Iv

2022 Faculty Bibliography

Addressing studies of the concepts of structure and agency, in 2008 sociologist François Dépelteau called for a ‘relational approach’ that compared the ‘trans-actions’ of actors, but notably left open the question of how such a study should be conducted. The present article attempts to operationalise Dépelteau’s call, albeit in a manner tailored specifically to meet the needs of researchers in the area of ‘lived ancient religion’. The study of ‘trans-action’ is operationalised here by employing key terms drawn from Staf Hellemans’s ‘processing approach’ to the study of religion, in which agents ‘process’ their environments through selection, modification, assembly, performance, integration, …

What Is Transpersonal Psychology? A Concise Definition Based On 20 Years Of Research, Glenn Hartelius

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Research on definitions of the field of psychology and themes in the literature of the field over a period of 20 years inform this description: Transpersonal psychology is a transformative psychology of the whole person embedded within a diverse, interconnected, and evolving world that pays particular attention to states of consciousness and developmental models reflecting expansion beyond conventional notions of self. Each element of this definition is examined, as well as the four phases of definitional development within the field from its founding in 1968 up to the present.

Islamic Meditation: Mindfulness Apps For Muslims In The Digital Spiritual Marketplace, Megan Adamson Sijapati

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter describes and analyzes three digital sites that offer guided meditations curated by and for Muslims: Sakeenah, Sabr, and Halaqah. My analysis offers thick descriptions of these mobile apps, which first appeared in the online “meditation marketplace” in 2020 and 2021, and identifies resonant themes and questions that I believe are fruitful for the study of religion in digital landscapes and for mapping the shifting contours of lived Islam. Today’s industry of online meditation and mindfulness products is highly profitable, as meditation—and, more broadly, “mindfulness”—has in recent decades been embraced and normalized in contemporary, cosmopolitan life as a key …

Surzhyk, Andás Máté-Tóth

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.