Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Understanding Ritual Hand Gestures Of The Ancient World: Some Basic Tools, David Calabro

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

The ritual use of hand gestures in covenant-making in ancient times is a topic of peculiar interest to Latter-day Saints. In this article, David Calabro summarizes results drawn from his doctoral research, providing readers with some tools to evaluate ancient gestures. The questions he suggests are novel, as is the way they are couched in an organized scheme. The author concludes that Latter -day Saints, who belong to a tradition saturated with ritual gestures, should be among those most educated about them.

Nephite Daykeepers: Ritual Specialists In Mesoamerica And The Book Of Mormon, Mark Alan Wright

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

Mark Alan Wright describes a common type of ritual specialist among the Maya called a “daykeeper.” He discusses similarities and differences with descriptions of ritual specialists in the Book of Mormon, including those who used the Urim and Thummim, performed rituals of healing, experienced near-death episodes at the inauguration of their calling, kept track of calendars, mastered astronomy, and invoked God to bring rain. He finds several intriguing similarities, but also differences — the most important one being that the Nephites understood that the people to do all these things came from the God of Israel rather than the local …

The Potential Of Flipped Learning To Prepare Esl Students For Peer Review, Catherine E. Showalter, Ilka Kostka

Journal of Response to Writing

Peer review is frequently used in both first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) writing courses to help students develop reading and writing skills and foster interaction and collaboration. To maximize these benefits in the L2 classroom, instructors should train their students to provide feedback to their peers (Lam, 2010; Rahimi, 2013; Rollinson, 2005). However, sufficient training and practice can require considerable class time. In this teaching article, we detail how we used a flipped learning approach to prepare undergraduate international students to conduct peer review in a university-level English as a Second Language reading and writing course. First, we discuss how …

Review: E. Marshall Brooks. Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy And Ex-Mormonism Among The Latter-Day Saints. New Brunswick, Nj: Rutgers University Press, 2018., Sara M. Patterson

Mormon Studies Review

In a February 1990 newsletter from the Southern California chapter of Saints Alive in Jesus/Ex-Mormons for Jesus, an anonymous author wrote: I am currently a Mormon who is searching for answers. So far, my studies have led me to have serious doubts about Mormonism, however, I am so fearful and emotionally distraught over leaving the religion that it’s sometimes difficult for me to think rationally. I have been a member for 25 years (I am now 34) and I have 4 children who are very involved in LDS activities. All my friends (most of them anyway) are members and my …

Review: Seth Perry. Bible Culture And Authority In The Early United States. Princeton, Nj: Princeton University Press, 2018., Candy Guther Brown

Mormon Studies Review

The Bible in America and American bibles have generated substantial scholarly interest. In writing about early American bible culture, Seth Perry has stepped onto well-trodden ground. The field has been cleared and ploughed by many important studies, including Paul Gutjahr’s American Bible and Book of Mormon, David Nord’s Faith in Reading, Candy Brown’s Word in the World, John Fea’s Bible Cause, Mark Noll’s In the Beginning Was the Word, and Lincoln Mullen’s America’s Public Bible.1 Perry builds on this scholarship (citing all but Brown in the bibliography) and contributes novel insights, but Bible Culture’s findings are not radically disruptive. Readers …

Review: Richard Neitzel Holzapfel And David M. Whitchurch, Eds. My Dear Sister: Letters Between Joseph F. Smith And His Sister Martha Ann Smith Harris. Salt Lake City And Provo, Ut: Deseret Book And Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2019., Natalie Rose

Mormon Studies Review

decades of letters exchanged between the sixth church president and his sister from the 1850s to the 1910s. A majority of these letters are provided by Carole Call King, the great-granddaughter of Martha Ann Harris, who had the well-preserved letters in her possession. Following her father’s death in 1993, King inherited several items from her father including these letters that remained in a box left “on a closet shelf ” in her home for some time (xiv). In the box were almost one hundred letters written to her great-grandmother Martha Ann Harris by Harris’s brother Joseph F. Smith, the nephew …

Review: Harvard Heath, Ed. Confidence Amid Change: The Presidential Diaries Of David O. Mckay, 1951–1970. Salt Lake City, Ut: Signature Books, 2018., Matthew Bowman

Mormon Studies Review

The complete diaries of David O. McKay, held in the special collections

of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah,

run some forty thousand pages long. Such length seems appropriate

for the man who served as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints for nearly twenty of his ninety-six years, from 1951

to 1970. When he was born many Americans believed his church to be

a strange and threatening polygamous cult; when he died Mormons were widely celebrated as model Americans. These pages help us to

understand that change.

About fifteen thousand of those …

University Of Illinois Press

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Review: Gregory Prince. Gay Rights And The Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Elizabeth Alice Clement

Mormon Studies Review

With an accessible writing style and startlingly short chapters, Gregory Prince analyzes three aspects of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s engagement with homosexuality in the postwar US.1 First, he carefully traces the evolution of the church’s understanding of the causes of homosexuality and the policies the church developed to address same sex attraction among the faithful. Second, he analyzes the church’s participation in both state and national debates around public policy towards homosexuality, with a particular focus on the campaigns against gay marriage. Finally, he explores the harm the church’s analysis, policy, and public involvement have done …

Review: Daniel P. Stone. William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018., Christopher James Blythe

Mormon Studies Review

Daniel Stone’s William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet is a biography of a significant nineteenth-century Latter Day Saint “prophet, seer, and revelator.” It is as much a story about the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ in 1850s Pennsylvania as it is an account of the life of this fascinating man. The Latter Day Saint tradition encompasses hundreds of denominations that have a heritage in the Church of Christ founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. Scholars have spent most of their attention on the largest division of the tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in …

The Latter-Day Saints And Race Issues In South Africa, Khumbulani D. Mdletshe

Mormon Studies Review

When Jesse Haven and his two missionary companions, all white elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, landed on the African continent in 1853 to preach the gospel in the country of South Africa, they had no intention of preaching to the nation’s black inhabitants. Just the year before, Brigham Young, president of the LDS Church, declared to the Utah legislature that “a man who has the African blood in him cannot hold one jot nor tittle of Priesthood.”1 T hese comments fit the governing ideology of South Africa, where the black majority was treated as second-class …

A Scholar In Zion, Anthea Butler

Mormon Studies Review

When I received my copy of Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy, I stared at the cover for a while. Surely Colleen McDannell did not pick this image, I thought, because the cover is reminiscent of what I would consider to be a nineteenth-century version of Mormon womanhood: a young mother playing with her children, looking down upon them lovingly, seemingly free from care. Thankfully, a) the cover was NOT her first choice for the book; and b) the statue is not quite what Sister Saints is all about.

Review: Hokulani K. Aikau. A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism And Race In Hawai’I. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2012., Sujey Vega

Mormon Studies Review

I want to begin by referencing a particularly moving scene depicted in A Chosen People, a Promised Land that speaks to the beauty and hardship of what it means to reclaim faith and culture for one’s own. In her narrative, Hokulani Aikau depicts the 2001 launching of the wa’a kaulua ‘o Iosepa, a voyage canoe made by and for Polynesian Latter-day Saints. Long before it was the “latest attraction” to the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC), this wa’a served an inspiring purpose. Aikau describes in vivid detail the beachside ceremony and the communal effort to set this majestic canoe into the …

Review: F. Lamond Tullis. Martyrs In Mexico: A Mormon Story Of Revolution And Redemption. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2018., Angela Tarango

Mormon Studies Review

F. LaMond Tullis’s book Martyrs in Mexico begins with an evocative quote from one of the Zapatista executioners of Rafael Monroy and Vincente Morales—that the two men died bravely and “with their boots on” (1). The men faced their execution by firing squad resolutely and refused to repudiate their “foreign” faith. Accused of hiding military weapons for the Zapatistas’ enemies, the men stated the only “arms” they harbored were their copies of the Book of Mormon and the Bible. For this they were executed during the height of the Mexican Revolution.

Review: Irén Annus, David Morris, And Kim Östman, Eds. Mormonism In Europe: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives. Szeged, Hungary: Americana Ebooks, 2018., Mees Tielens

Mormon Studies Review

If books about Mormonism “abroad” (that is, Mormonism outside the United States) have a formula, it tends to be along the following lines: focusing heavily on missionary work, they list dates that missionaries arrive, successes and failures in opening up a country to the gospel, perhaps culminating in the triumphant announcement of or, better yet, the actual building of a temple to prove the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ viability and longevity in that place. Rarely are local contexts taken into account or meaningfully explored; rarely are these books written from anything other than the perspective of an …

Review: Megan Sanborn Jones. Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After The Dead. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2018., Jill Hemming Austin

Mormon Studies Review

Outdoor historical pageants hold a long and steady presence in the informal and grassroots culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There are several reasons for the robust health of this tradition: theology that implicates living church members in the salvation of their ancestors; an enthusiastic proselytizing culture that seeks to spread the good word; and a tendency towards large-group events and performance. In her book, Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After the Dead, Brigham Young University theatre professor Megan Sanborn Jones takes on the task of examining four of the largest church pageants in the United States: …

Front Matter

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.

Confronting And Condemning “Hard Doctrine,” 1978–2013, Matthew L. Harris

Mormon Studies Review

Although Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation in the Salt Lake Temple ended the 126-year-old priesthood and temple ban affecting persons of African descent, questions about racial teachings in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lingered. The revelation, canonized as “Official Declaration 2” in Latter-day Saint scripture, failed to repudiate the theology justifying the ban.1 Some members, consequently, continued to assert that black people were cursed, equating their dark skin with misdeeds they allegedly committed in a pre-earth life.2 Anguished over these microaggressions, black Latter-day Saints petitioned church officials to condemn racism within the church as well as remove …

Full Issue

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

No abstract provided.

Ministering Across Fault Lines Of Belief And Community, Daniel Ellsworth

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

David Ostler’s book Bridges: Ministering to Those Who Question addresses the daunting task of ministering to people who have grown disillusioned with the core doctrines and the community of believers they encounter in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is perhaps the most challenging ministering effort a leader or member of the Church can undertake, and Bridges provides valuable insight into the process of disaffection as well as specific things that Church leaders and members can do to create a healthy environment for members to work through challenges to their faith. This review discusses those strengths of …

A Welcome Response, But Flaws Remain, Jeff Lindsay

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

After Interpreter published my lengthy paper that discussed apparent bias and flaws in scholarship in the Joseph Smith Papers volume on the Book of Abraham, two members of the JSP Project team have responded with a defense of their volume. Their reply is welcome and points to some of the strengths in the methodology behind much of the volume. However, the specific evidence for bias and flawed scholarship seems to stand and merits further attention.

Taking Stock, John Gee

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

In a response to my review of their Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts volume, the series editors of the Joseph Smith Papers provided feedback and commentary on two important items. There are other, unaddressed issues this rejoinder examines.

Chapter 3: Mormon’S Use Of The Archive, Brant Gardner

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

Understanding how Mormon used the Nephite archive is an exercise in deduction. One exception is found in Words of Mormon, where Mormon inadvertently describes an important aspect of his work: “And now, I speak somewhat concerning that which I have written; for after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake, I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates, which contained this small account of the prophets, from Jacob down to the reign of this king Benjamin, …

Editorial Introduction, Betsy Gilliland, Katherine Daily O'Meara

Journal of Response to Writing

Welcome to the Spring 2020 issue of the Journal of Response to Writing. This year marks our 6th year of publishing, and this new issue contains five articles illustrating how our journal covers a wide range of topics of interest to scholars and teachers of first- and second-language writing.

Student-Led Assessment: A Small Study On Classroom Rubric Development And Peer Grading Practices, Brice Particelli

Journal of Response to Writing

Peer review is a common practice in writing studies. However, while there is considerable research on peer review, pedagogical studies on other forms of student-led assessment strategies are less prevalent. This study investigates the expansion of assessment practices into student-led rubric development and peer grading, focusing on their effect on student understanding of the writing process. Utilizing surveys and classroom observations in two second-year composition courses at a university in New York City, this study investigates student-led assessment strategies as a potent pedagogical tool, adding to literature that explores assessment as an active part of the writing process.

The Effects Of Informal Training On Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Response Beliefs, Andrew Thomas-James Moos

Journal of Response to Writing

As recent studies have shown (Ferris, 2014; Reid, Estrem, & Belcheir, 2012), formalized types of pedagogical instruction may be less effective for new instructors than previously thought. As new instructors form beliefs about responding to student writing through their first years of teaching and training, they may continue to rely heavily on knowledge from various communities of practice (Wenger, 2000) outside of their current programs while shaping their beliefs about feedback. This study examines these informal influences on the feedback beliefs of first-year writing instructors. Specifically, this study uses both surveys and interviews with teachers in their first 2 years …

Full Issue

Journal of Response to Writing

No abstract provided.

Breaking The Cycle: Using Reflective Activities To Transform Teacher Response, Anthony Edgington

Journal of Response to Writing

This article explores the problems associated with a pedagogy of severity, which influences how teachers read and respond to student papers, and suggests that reflection, especially reflection-in-action, can be useful to writing instructors as they respond to their students’ texts. Reflection-in-action, or the reflection that occurs while one is still in the process of completing a task, offers teachers and students the opportunity to reflect on the value of written comments while still possessing the chance to create effective and informative student texts and teacher comments. After exploring how reflection can benefit response, experiences with two reflective activities are given …

Full Issue

Journal of Response to Writing

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

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

No abstract provided.