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Happiness In Plural Marriage: An Exploration Of Logic, Audrey Mcconkie Merket
Happiness In Plural Marriage: An Exploration Of Logic, Audrey Mcconkie Merket
Arrington Student Writing Award Winners
It is difficult for any monogamous person, but especially a monogamous woman to understand how living a life of polygamy could be considered joyful and fulfilling. Being a young woman, happily married to my “true love,” the idea that the same kind of happiness I feel could exist in a plural relationship at first seemed completely illogical to me. However, as Kathleen Flake pointed out in the 2009 Arrington Memorial Lecture, “logic is not an absolute set of assertions about something. People that share your premises will think you’re logical, whereas people that don’t believe the same things as you …
The Logic Of Religious Studies And Kathleen Flake, Blair Dee Hodges
The Logic Of Religious Studies And Kathleen Flake, Blair Dee Hodges
Arrington Student Writing Award Winners
Kathleen Flake’s 2009 Arrington lecture gave a sneak preview of research she has been conducting on the topic of plural marriage and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. Flake, associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University, brings a unique list of qualifications to her study by combining elements of law, religious studies, ritual, and the skills of an historian. Using these tools Flake explores what she calls the “priestly logic” of plural marriage, seeking to understand not only how 19th century outsiders viewed the peculiar institution, but how practicing Mormons themselves made sense of it. Flake …
“They Do Things Differently There”: Understanding A Polygamous, "Foreign Country", Barbara Jones Brown
“They Do Things Differently There”: Understanding A Polygamous, "Foreign Country", Barbara Jones Brown
Arrington Student Writing Award Winners
My perception of the Mormon practice of polygamy has been evolutionary. My desire to comprehend it comes from a need to understand not only the faith I espouse, but also my very being. Polygamy is in my DNA. My maternal, third-great grandfather, Willard Richards, was one of Mormonism’s earliest polygamists, and my fraternal, third-great grandfather one of its most prolific—Christopher Layton had ten wives and sixty-five children. When I was a child my dad sometimes told me about our polygamous ancestors. Somehow polygamy did not seem that surprising or strange to me then. “Just a different, old-fashioned way of marriage,” …