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[Introduction To] By The Hand Of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched A New World Religion, Terryl Givens

Bookshelf

With over 100 million copies in print, the Book of Mormon has spawned a vast religious movement, but it remains little discussed outside Mormon circles. Now Terry L. Givens offers a full-length treatment of this influential work, illuminating the varied meanings and tempestuous impact of this uniquely American scripture.

Givens examines the text's role as a divine testament of the Last Days and as a sacred sign of Joseph Smith's status as a modern-day prophet. He assesses its claim to be a history of the pre-Columbian peopling of the Western Hemisphere, and later explores how the Book has been defined …

Fasting In England In The 1560s: "A Thinge Of Nought"?, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

We continue to learn about the unsettled condition of the Elizabethan religious settlement in the early 1560s. “Perceived deficiencies” associated with a woman's sovereignty and supreme governance of the realm's reformed church dictated that counsel be “insistently proposed to and, at points, imposed upon” Elizabeth I “by her godly male subjects.” We now appreciate, however, that the queen was not drawn or driven to the left by puritans, as John Neale influentially suspected in the 1950s. And we may conclude from David Crankshaw's recent study of the Canterbury provincial convocation of 1563 that the bishops her government appointed were not …

"This Great Modern Abomination": Orthodoxy And Heresy In American Religion, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

In chapter 4, Terryl Givens provides a new view not only of the Christianity of Mormons but also more specifically of the religious motivations and methods for persecuting LDS people in nineteenth-century America. Givens's chapter is especially important as an examination of one of the worst examples of systematic religious intolerance in American history. According to Givens, for Americans' self-conception as a religiously tolerant nation to remain intact, a hegemonic rhetoric needed to emerge in the public sphere that denied the religious nature of Mormonism and instead described it as a political threat or social evil. Under the cover of …

Prophesying Again, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Discusses the lay involvement in the prophecies or exercises devised by Elizabethan reformers in England as in-service training during the 16th century. Attitude toward prophesying during the period; Exercises of the refugee churches; Efforts to suppress the prophesying.

How Socially Conservative Were The Elizabethan Religious Radicals?, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals--puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics--were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the "firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish" promoted a "sense of social distance" between themselves ("the better sort") and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson's …

Diehard Homoians And The Election Of Ambrose, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

It has been an excellent stretch in English for the Latin Arians of the fourth century. They have gotten heftier, more robust, more formidable. Daniel Williams' Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts challenges what he calls "the prevailing view" that they "posed little, if any, serious threat" to the Nicene faith of the western European churches from the 350s through the 380s. Neil McLynn's Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital insists that the Milanese Arians complicated Ambrose's career more than previous chroniclers of christological conflict and the biographers of the bishop ever …

[Introduction To] The Viper On The Hearth: Mormons, Myths, And The Construction Of Heresy, Terryl Givens

Bookshelf

Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and popular romances. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people--the "viper on the hearth"--who sought to violate the domestic sphere of the mainstream. While other critics have mined the socio-political sources of anti-Mormonism, Givens is the first to reveal how popular fiction, in its attempt to deal with the sources and nature of this conflict, constructed an image of the Mormon as a religious and social "Other."

Philanthropy As A Virtue In Late Antiquity And The Middle Ages, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

"Philanthropy," "charity," and related concepts were well known to late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Rulers, wealthy individuals and, early on, the Christian church founded hospitals, distributed food, and established forms of relief for the needy of various sorts throughout the period. The problem comes in interpreting these activities, their motives, and their goals. Is the philanthropia of a pre-Christian philosopher of a piece with the agape, or Christian love, of a fourth-century bishop? When the Roman emperor provides bread and circuses, what does he intend and why does he do it? Does the twelfth-century nobleman intend the same? As …

Religion On The Run, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

"At one time English religion had emphasized the static or the recurrent aspects of worship. Then for a century or more, England was conscious of acting a sacred history as opposed to reenacting it". Sommerville's observation should shock no one familiar with his "century or more," roughly 1530 to 1660, although the declared opposition between "acting" and "reenacting" is likely to strike those who still read Bale, Foxe, Dering, or Dell as rather forced. Yet, so many of the contrasts in Secularization are terribly suggestive, announcing that religion "was changing from devotion to deliberation".

What may surprise some historians, however, …

Much In Prayer: The Inward Researches Of Elizabethan Protestants, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Examines some Elizabethan Protestants' reasons for praying and the controversy over forms of prayer during the period. Calvinists' rejection of prescribing times for prayer; Premium on feeling of misery in prayer; Godly sorrow; Suppression of rational judgment; Debate on fixed and impromptu prayers; Prayer as art.

Social History, Psychohistory, And The Prehistory Of Swiss Anabaptism, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The article discusses a variety of issues concerning social history, psychohistory and the prehistory of Swiss Anabaptism. It explores the contextualist approach to the history and practice of Anabaptism. It traces the prehistory of Swiss Anabaptism and the normative vision of Anabaptist origins. The article also examines the theology of martyrdom according to Conrad Grebel, father of Anabaptist.