Mormon Studies Commons^™

Review: Joanna Brooks And Gina Colvin, Eds., Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching A Postcolonial Zion. Salt Lake: University Of Utah Press, 2018, Jon Bialecki

Mormon Studies Review

It is no secret, even as Christianity appears to be waning as a cultural and demographic force in many of the North Atlantic nations that it is commonly associated with, that religion—or at least, certain forms of that religion—are very much waxing in other parts of the world. In regions such as Africa, South and Central America, Oceania, and even parts of Asia, modes of Christian practice, belief, and organization, some with ties to Euro-American denominations, but also many without, are spreading at such a pace that authors such as Philip Jenkins (2011) can speak about the churches there as …

Review: Carol Cornwall Madsen. Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2017., Catherine O'Donnell

Mormon Studies Review

In Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History, Carol Cornwall Madsen reveals the rich and painful inner life of a woman who was for decades the most famous female member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Drawing on an extraordinary “paper trail of thousands of pages from diaries, letters, newspaper articles and editorials, and a volume of poetry” (vii), Madsen offers an astute and sympathetic portrait of a woman who accomplished and suffered much.

Review: Brent M. Rogers. Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons And The Federal Management Of Early Utah Territory. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 2017., William Deverell

Mormon Studies Review

Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory accomplishes a number of impressive feats. In the hands of a less-skilled scholar, these objectives might clash and unduly complicate a book and its narrative. Not so in historian Brent M. Rogers’s fine study of antebellum tensions regarding the Mormon political and cultural experiment in the Great Basin.

Review: Richard E. Turley Jr., Janiece J. Johnson, And Lujean Purcell Carruth, Eds. Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. 2 Vols. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2017)., Nathan B. Oman

Mormon Studies Review

The story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is much told, most recently in the comprehensive account produced by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard under the auspices of the Church Historical Department.1 Massacre at Mountain Meadows, however, ends with the mass murder of immigrants by Mormon militiamen in 1857. The authors’ original plan was to produce a second volume that would extend the story to include the subsequent efforts by Mormons to deflect responsibility for the massacre and the pursuit of the perpetrators by federal officials (pp. xi–xii). Much of the research for this effort was …

Review: D. Michael Quinn. The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth And Corporate Power. Salt Lake City, Ut: Signature Books, 2017., Thomas G. Alexander

Mormon Studies Review

D. Michael Quinn’s The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power is the third book in a series on the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The first volume, published in 1994 and subtitled Origins of Power “emphasizes the development of ecclesiastical and theocratic powers in Mormonism, primarily during the lifetime of its founder Joseph Smith (1805–44), but also including Brigham Young’s transfer of the Mormon hierarchy to Utah in 1847.” (Origins of Power, p. x) Volume 2, published in 1997 and subtitled Extensions of Power, details the development of the spiritual and temporal power of Mormon …

Review: Matthew J. Grow And R. Eric Smith, Eds. The Council Of Fifty: What The Records Reveal About Mormon History. Provo, Ut: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City, Ut: Deseret Book, 2017., Janiece Johnson

Mormon Studies Review

Since the late 1960s, the minutes of the Mormon Council of Fifty in Nauvoo have been the Mormon documentary “holy grail” (p. viii). What Mario DePillis called “one of the most secret of the Mormons’ sub rosa organizations” and Klaus J. Hansen labelled the “most important key to an understanding of the Mormon past” was a topic for speculation over decades.1 Lack of prior availability did not inhibit prior commentary, but also spurred on attentive archival work. Code words veiling theocratic claims topped with rumors of a self-appointed king could only be met with great suspicion in a democratic republic. …

Neither Fairyland Nor Dystopia: Taking Western Europe Seriously In Mormon Studies, Julie K. Allen

Mormon Studies Review

Although Mormonism is intimately associated, externally and internally, with American history and culture, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has older ties to western Europe than to anywhere else outside the United States and Polynesia. Without the influx of approximately eighty thousand convert-immigrants from the UK and continental Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the fledgling church would not have been able to successfully colonize the intermountain West. Although church membership levels in Europe have remained low in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, a robust network of Latter-day Saint congregations across the European continent and the British Isles supports …

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.

Review: Terryl L. Givens. Feeding The Flock: The Foundations Of Mormon T Hought: Church And Praxis. New York And Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017., J. B. Haws

Mormon Studies Review

Terryl Givens has been calling, for some time, for a broader and more serious engagement with the theology of the Church of Latter-day Saints—and he has framed that call in memorable language, as only he can. Here’s what he wrote for the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Martin Marty Center in 2012: “In the century since the [1893] Chicago [World’s] fair, Mormons have been lauded for their choirs and their football. They are largely respected as good, decent, family-centered people, who are welcome to sing for presidents and dance with the stars—and everyone agrees to avoid theological questions.”1 Not if …

Faith-Promoting History/ History-Promoting Faith, Martin E. Marty

Mormon Studies Review

An excerpt from a long poem by W. H. Auden comes to mind as a framework for assessing these two publications featuring Mormon historian Leonard J. Arrington. He was poised—we might say surefooted—in his Mormon faith and by commitments to the church. At the same time, Arrington consistently made clear that his calling was to be a scholar who excelled in the writing of history in modes acceptable among university-based researchers and writers of many faiths, or of non-faith. There was never any doubt that he pursued his vocation imaginatively and steadfastly through the decades. While these books give evidence …

Review: Mark Ashurst-Mcgee, Robin Jensen, And Sharalyn D. Howcroft, Eds. Foundational Texts Of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018., Michael Hubbard Mackay

Mormon Studies Review

In 2005, Robert Orsi argued, “The world of the text is really not the world.”1 In remarkably clear prose Orsi promotes a kind of praxis-oriented methodology that has similarly begun to emerge from within the Joseph Smith Papers Project and subsequent volumes produced by its editors. As Orsi explained, he is interested in “what people do with religious practice, what they make with it of themselves and their worlds.”2 This short review essay will briefly examine Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen, and Sharalyn D. Howcroft’s edited volume Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources. As a by-product of the …

Review: Mette Ramstad. Conversion In The Pacific: Eastern Polynesian Latter-Day Saints’ Conversion Accounts And Their Development Of A Lds Identity. Kristiansand, Norway: Høyskoleforlaget, 2003., Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Mormon Studies Review

Mette Ramstad’s Conversion in the Pacific: Eastern Polynesian Latter-day Saints’ Conversion Accounts and Their Development of a LDS Identity was published in 2003. Although it is over a decade old, it remains a refreshing, smart contribution to the field. Unlike many scholars of Mormonism, Ramstad is not a historian. Instead, she writes as an anthropologist of religion. The result can be a bit disconcerting for individuals used to narrative histories. Like many social scientists, she categorizes the experiences of her subjects and uses them as case studies for understanding concepts that have been important to the academic study of religion. …

Review: Mark Ashurst-Mcgee, David W. Grua, Elizabeth A. Kuehn, Brenden W. Rensink, And Alexander L. Baugh, Eds. The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 6: February 1838-August 1839. Salt Lake City, Ut: T He Church Historian’S Press, 2017)., Angela Bell

Mormon Studies Review

The most recent volume of The Joseph Smith Papers, Volume 6 is a contribution long-awaited by students of Mormon history, members of faith traditions, and scholars of American religion. The collection chronicles the tumultuous time in Mormon history from Joseph Smith Jr., and Sidney Rigdon’s removal from Kirtland, Ohio, in early 1838 through the establishment and early settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois, during the spring and summer of 1839. In the tradition of the first f ive volumes of documents, this work compiles all known documents written, dictated, and received by the prophet from February 1838 to August 1839 and provides …

Review: Marjorie J. Spruill. Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’S Rights And Family Values That Polarized American Politics. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017., Colleen Mcdannell

Mormon Studies Review

With polarization in American politics possibly at an all-time high, historians frantically search the past for the origins of our current malady. When did we become so alienated as a people, and why is it that we seemingly cannot understand each other’s behaviors? Marjorie J. Spruill provides another reflection on how we came to be what we are in Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics. Spruill sees gender as the theoretical place where we need to begin our exploration and the 1970s as the defining years. Passing up the easy targets …

Review: David T. Smith. Religious Persecution And Political Order In The United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)., Charles Mccrary

Mormon Studies Review

In this careful comparative study, David T. Smith develops a useful framework for analyzing US state actors’ reactions to and participation in religious persecution. To set up the problem, Smith identifies three interlocking puzzles: (1) the United States has always valued religious tolerance and has had legal frameworks preventing persecution; and (2) these protections have worked, in large part; but (3) when state agents have persecuted religious groups or encouraged or at least allowed for their persecution, it has been against those we might not expect, namely Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Derived from these puzzles are two basic questions that …

Review: T Homas W. Simpson. American Universities And The Birth Of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940. Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2016., Ronit Y. Stahl

Mormon Studies Review

“Good for what? Good for whom?” It’s been a long time since I took historian of education Larry Cuban’s “Good Schools” class, but I will never forget the pair of questions he asked every meeting, about every reading. And it’s these two questions, “Good for what? Good for whom,” that I kept returning to as I read Thomas W. Simpson’s American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940. For whom were American universities good? For what purposes? Or, more specifically, “For which Mormons did American universities serve what purposes to what ends?”

Trajectories In The Evolution Of Mormon Studies On Faith And Science, Steven L. Peck

Mormon Studies Review

The relationship between science and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been and continues to be a complicated story. Concerns and differing perspectives about science provided the underlying context for a number of formal and informal institutional directions taken by the church in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Often, these were influenced by differences in opinion about science among various leaders of the church. Areas in which science played a role include: the relationship between secular and church education, a battleground in framing doctrinal questions about creation—including syncretic influence from the rise of Christian fundamentalism and …

Review: Rachel Cope, Amy Easton-Flake, Keith Erekson, And Lisa Olsen Tait, Eds. Mormon Women’S History: Beyond Biography. Madison, Nj: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017., Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Mormon Studies Review

“Women shaped Mormonism from its outset.” Simple, isn’t it? With all that scholars now know about the distinctive emphasis on family and childbearing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint tradition, it seems obvious that women have played a crucial role in the development of Mormon history and community life. Yet, as the framing essays in Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography so amply demonstrate, the broader narrative histories of the tradition remain willfully fixed on its patriarchal organizational structure and male leadership. Despite an abundance of work in social and cultural history beginning in the 1970s, women’s roles …

Review: Max Perry Mueller. Race And The Making Of The Mormon People. Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2017., Brandi Denison

Mormon Studies Review

Max Perry Mueller’s Race and the Making of the Mormon People argues that “for early Mormons, the construction and deconstruction of what it meant to be, to act, and to look black, white, and red were as much literary projects and they were literal ones” (p. 8). Mueller positions his book as both a case study of how nineteenth-century Americans wrote about and constructed race through text as well as a “particular case unto itself” (p. 9). Through the book, Mueller aimed to capture the voices of nonwhite Mormons in the nineteenth century and how they “resisted, acquiesced, and sometimes …

Review: Kerry William Bate. The Women: A Family Story. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2016., Francesca Morgan

Mormon Studies Review

Bate brings the stringent methods of trained historians and scholarly genealogists to bear on the sometimes-fanciful genre of the family genealogy: a publication focusing on only one set of interconnected lineages. His result is a warts-and-all portrayal of everyday life in isolated desert and mountain towns in southern Utah, throughout Mormonism’s f irst century up until the Second World War. His scrutiny of forebears extends to levels of schooling, disease, infant mortality, old age and the end of life, poor financial decision-making, sex before wedlock, and marital tensions. He describes uncongenial personalities when he finds them among his kin. The …

Review: Lincoln A. Mullen. The Chance Of Salvation: A History Of Conversion In America. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2017., Ben Wright

Mormon Studies Review

This bold and exciting book convincingly demonstrates how the crucible of the nineteenth century transformed American religion from something inherited to chosen. Conversion drove this rise of religious choice, and Lincoln Mullen asserts that despite the great variety of conversion experiences, “conversions have created a common understanding of religion as choice” (p. 9). Mullen even acknowledges that most Americans in the nineteenth century remained in the religious tradition into which they were born, but by the end of the century, Americans came to think of even this stasis as a conscious choice. Whether they changed traditions or remained, by the …

Mormon Studies In Africa, Amy Hoyt

Mormon Studies Review

Mormon studies, as understood by scholars, includes the scholarly examination of all of the traditions that have stemmed from Joseph Smith Jr. This essay will review the state of the field of Mormon studies in Africa and pay particular attention to two of these traditions, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Mormon Studies In Latin America And The Caribbean: State Of The Field As Of 2018, Carter Charles

Mormon Studies Review

Renewed interest in a global approach to Mormon studies calls for an assessment of the scholarship available on Latin America and the Caribbean in order to provide direction for future research in this subfield, which is still in its infancy. After some remarks on methodology, existing contributions to the subfield will be introduced, followed by a subjective conclusion.

Review: Jonathan A. Stapley. The Power Of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy And Cosmology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018., Matthew Bowman

Mormon Studies Review

Jonathan Stapley’s new book is only 129 pages of text, but it feels much longer. This is not, happily, because the prose slogs. Rather it is one of those books that makes every word count. There is no fluff here, only finely sanded insight after insight, with all redundancy polished away. Stapley’s strengths are twofold. First, his archival work is unparalleled. For every assertion he has an anecdote. He meticulously marks fine nuances in opinion among his subjects, and those subjects are as frequently obscure figures like Steven Markham, John Steele, or Margaret Anderton as they are more familiar Mormons …

Review Of At Sword’S Point, Part 1: A Documentary History Of The Utah War To 1858; At Sword’S Point, Part 2: A Documentary History Of The Utah War, 1858-1859, Edited By William P. Mackinnon., Brent M. Rogers

Mormon Studies Review

In two hefty and wide-ranging volumes that represent the culmination of some sixty years of dedicated and careful labor, William P. MacKinnon delivers the most thorough investigation into the complex history of the Utah War to date. Readers will have to wade through more than eleven hundred pages of documents and editorial commentary— as well as more than fifty pages of bibliographic data—to realize the benefits of MacKinnon’s sleuthing, but anyone who takes the time to carefully sort through the unexpected turns and intrigue of MacKinnon’s presentation will ultimately be rewarded with a deeper

understanding of a significant federal-territorial conflict …

Review Of Mormonism And The Making Of A British Zion, By Matthew Lyman Rasmussen, Douglas J. Davies

Mormon Studies Review

Through eight chapters and four appendixes, Rasmussen develops a book from a previous postgraduate dissertation on the emergence and organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Great Britain. As with numerous regional-national histories of Mormonism, Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion includes basic elements of Mormonism’s emergence in the US, but always with a keen

eye on the UK and, more specifically still, on North West England. While Liverpool was the key seaport for early missionaries traveling to the UK, and for the emigration of converts to the US in the last half of …

Review Of Charles Ellis Johnson And The Erotic Mormon Image, By Mary Campbell, Leigh E. Schmidt

Mormon Studies Review

Through the lens of photographer Charles Ellis Johnson (1857– 1926), Mary Campbell captures the subtleties of Mormon visual culture at the turn of the twentieth century as the Latter-day Saints struggled to jettison plural marriage and adapt themselves to the demands of American citizenship. In Johnson’s vast stereographic archive, Campbell has a treasure trove, which she frequently alchemizes into interpretive gold on everything from Victorian tourism to chorus-girl sexuality to Mormon historical memory to women’s rights activism. Hers is a visually sumptuous book, filled with close and often sparkling explications of particular images. At its center is the enigmatic Charles …

The Medium Is The Institution: Reflections On An Ethnography Of Mormonism And Media, Rosemary Avance

Mormon Studies Review

I began studying media in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2009 as a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. The field of communication, and more specifically the disciplines of media studies and critical cultural studies, provides important frameworks for a rich understanding of the nuances of religious messaging, including proselytization, ritual, institutional control, identity, and belonging. When I’m asked why I chose Mormonism as the focus of my research, I tend to give an easy answer: Mormonism, more than any other faith, is a media religion. But the truth is more …

Review Of When Race, Religion, And Sport Collide: Black Athletes At Byu And Beyond, By Darron T. Smith, Richard Kimball

Mormon Studies Review

On the cusp of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in March 2011, Brigham Young University announced the suspension of star center Brandon Davies for violating the school’s honor code. Until that point in the season, the African American Davies had helped the Cougars to a number-three ranking in the national polls and had established himself as an outstanding sophomore center. The suspension became fodder for commentators on every side and spent a short time in the national spotlight. Davies’s reinstatement for the following season prompted

much less discussion and seemed to forestall further dialogue about the handling of the suspension …

Review Of The Bible, Mormon Scripture, And The Rhetoric Of Allusivity, By Nicholas J. Frederick, Cory Crawford

Mormon Studies Review

In this monograph Nicholas Frederick tackles the directional literary relationship between canonical Mormon scripture and the King James Bible with a methodology more secure and transparent than has been applied in the past. He advances substantively the study of Latter-day Saint sacred texts by trying to get an analytical handle on what attentive readers detect easily, namely, that the rhetorical space created and occupied by Joseph Smith’s canonized writings, produced in English, is inseparable from the English of the King James Bible in ways that complicate the question of historicity and translation. For Frederick, detecting and decoding allusion in LDS …