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2021

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Full-Text Articles in Mormon Studies

Entrenching A Fundamental: Use Of The First Vision In General Conference, Ryan S. Gardner Apr 2021

Entrenching A Fundamental: Use Of The First Vision In General Conference, Ryan S. Gardner

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

When President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in the October 2002 general conference that the strength of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “rests on the validity” of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, most people in the congregation likely felt that he was only affirming a basic tenet of the Restoration—but this unique theophany was not always so prominent. Not until the mid-1960s did scholars and historians affiliated with the Church begin a more thorough exploration of the historical emergence of Joseph Smith’s 1820 theophany, now known as the First Vision, and its subsequent elevation in the spiritual consciousness and …


Teachings Of Church Leaders On Christ’S Final Seven Statements, John Hilton Iii, Megan Cutler, Emily K. Hyde Apr 2021

Teachings Of Church Leaders On Christ’S Final Seven Statements, John Hilton Iii, Megan Cutler, Emily K. Hyde

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

In 1929 Reverend James Reid wrote about the Savior’s directive from the Sermon on the Mount to “pray for them that despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44). Although many might feel this is an impossible task, Reid offers a reminder: “Yet the words stand, and challenge us today, because He who spoke them passed His own test, and passed it triumphantly. . . . For, as [Luke] tells us, when they crucified Him, and had done their devilish work on his poor body. . . . His first word [on the cross] was a literal prayer for His enemies, ‘Father, forgive …


Full Issue Apr 2021

Full Issue

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

No abstract provided.


“Thou Wast Chosen Before Thou Wast Born”: An Egyptian Context For The Election Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot Apr 2021

“Thou Wast Chosen Before Thou Wast Born”: An Egyptian Context For The Election Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

Arguably the most important doctrinal contribution of the Book of Abraham is its teaching about the premortal existence of humankind. As John Gee has recognized, “The largest effect that the Book of Abraham has had on Latter-day Saint thought is its concept of the premortal existence and the purpose of life. Although other Latter-day Saint scriptures discuss the premortal existence, the Book of Abraham provides the clearest explanation of this key Latter-day Saint doctrine.” The importance of the Book of Abraham’s teaching about the premortal existence is confirmed by surveying the LDS Scripture Citation Index, which reveals that General Authorities …


Clogs And Shawls: Mormons, Moorlands, And The Search For Zion, Amy Harris Apr 2021

Clogs And Shawls: Mormons, Moorlands, And The Search For Zion, Amy Harris

BYU Studies

Born in turn-of-the-century Bradford, Yorkshire, the eight Whitaker sisters were raised as Latter-day Saints, all eventually immigrated to Utah, and all remained members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout their lives. Their lifelong faithfulness was an important cornerstone of their family story, a story Ann Chamberlin, a granddaughter of one of the sisters, situates within a larger narrative about their family culture—both its positive and negative elements and the parts that tipped into becoming family mythology.


Full Issue Apr 2021

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.


Mezuzah On My Doorpost, Heather Thomson Apr 2021

Mezuzah On My Doorpost, Heather Thomson

BYU Studies

When my husband and I moved across the city into a Jewish community in Montreal four years ago, we discovered the previous owners of our newly purchased home had left their mezuzah on the front doorpost. I don’t remember now if I’d noticed it when we first stepped through the doorframe of the mid-century, red-brick bungalow on a Friday evening—so unused to the rhythms of Jewish religious observance were we then that we’d unwittingly requested a showing that fell just before sunset, the beginning of Shabbat. But we did see the mezuzah when we moved in a month later, on …


Mercy, Elizabeth Smith Apr 2021

Mercy, Elizabeth Smith

BYU Studies

I merge into surging highway wind, my backseat baby babbles to the Tim-Tams macaroni yogurt burger cookies and bananas, and a crackling alto announces the world this hour: buildings burst in a distant port, scoundrel stabs doctor in a clinic past the mountains, furious inferno feasts on trees, towns just south of here.


Review: Clyde A. Milner Ii And Brian Q. Cannon, Eds. Reconstruction And Mormon America. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Joshua Paddison Jan 2021

Review: Clyde A. Milner Ii And Brian Q. Cannon, Eds. Reconstruction And Mormon America. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Joshua Paddison

Mormon Studies Review

“Reconstruction seems to be getting bigger and bigger all the time,” observes Rachel St. John in her contribution to Reconstruction and Mormon America, a new collection of essays edited by Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon. Indeed, over the past two decades historians have steadily expanded the parameters of “Reconstruction,” both spatially and temporally. Traditionally used to describe the US government’s physical and political reconstruction of the former Confederacy during the years 1865 to 1877, scholars have now created a hemispheric vision of Reconstruction that stretches back in time to the US-Mexico War and forward in time to …


Global Mormonism In Political Context, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp Jan 2021

Global Mormonism In Political Context, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Mormon Studies Review

In 1976 Ezra Taft Benson, a long-standing member of the Quorum of
the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
delivered a fireside address at Brigham Young University in Utah. Benson,
born in Whitney, Idaho, and raised as a farmer in the heart of
Mormon country, represented the conservative wing of his religious
community. He had also spent much of his life working for the LDS
Church and traveling throughout the world, so he had a keen understanding
of the challenges of spreading his religious message in international
contexts. His talk that evening was unequivocal: America …


The First Days And The Last Days, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw Jan 2021

The First Days And The Last Days, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

Interpreter Foundation Books

Like a perfectly formed pair of bookends, the Book of Moses and Joseph Smith’s inspired translation of Matthew 24 (JS—Matthew) bracket within their pages the essential survival guide for our times. In the “first days,” Adam and Eve looked forward to Christ’s coming; in the “last days,” we look backward to Christ’s mortal life and forward to His return in glory. In the beginning, Enoch learned the ordinances and covenants that would allow his people to dwell in the presence of God; to the end, we will treasure the same ordinances and covenants. Through faith in Jesus Christ and faithfulness …


Hugh Nibley Observed, Jeffren M. Bradshaw, Shirly S. Ricks, Stephen T. Whitlock Jan 2021

Hugh Nibley Observed, Jeffren M. Bradshaw, Shirly S. Ricks, Stephen T. Whitlock

Interpreter Foundation Books

Our purpose in creating this volume is twofold. For readers who are already familiar with the life and work of Hugh Nibley, we hope this book will provide a more full account of the story behind the writings—their biographical, historical, literary, and scholarly contexts. For the many more who have never read anything by him, we hope that the fascinating, mostly secondhand accounts in this book will provide encouragement for them to read Nibley’s own works. To read these works is to understand the man — and to better understand the gospel of Jesus Christ and the cause of his …


Tracing Ancient Threads In The Book Of Moses, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, David Rolph Seely, John W. Welch, Scott A. Gordon Jan 2021

Tracing Ancient Threads In The Book Of Moses, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, David Rolph Seely, John W. Welch, Scott A. Gordon

Interpreter Foundation Books

After nearly two years of research and preparation by the conference organizers, presenters, staff, and their supporting organizations, we are pleased to bring you the proceedings of the two “Tracing Ancient Threads in the Book of Moses” conferences, held on September 18–19, 2020 and April 23–24, 2021. The conferences were sponsored by the Interpreter Foundation, Brigham Young University Religious Education, Book of Mormon Central, and FAIR. For more information on the conference, including links to videos of the presentations, see https://interpreterfoundation.org/ conferences/. There you will also find a bibliography of books and articles on the Book of Moses, as well …


Full Issue Jan 2021

Full Issue

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.


Front Matter Jan 2021

Front Matter

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.


Mormons And Politics In New Zealand, Peter Lineham Jan 2021

Mormons And Politics In New Zealand, Peter Lineham

Mormon Studies Review

In the contemporary world, the long tail of colonialism has left deep discomfort within the Protestant missionary movement. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often reflects the position of traditional Protestants, for in so many ways the Utah-based church sought to impose its very White and colonial values on its non-White and non-American converts. It did not easily evade the charge of aiding and abetting American political goals in foreign places. But if this was the intent of the Latter-day Saint missionary movement, it could be subverted by the peculiarity of particular contexts. New Zealand was such a …


Provincializing Secularism: On Protohomonationalism And Its Counterpossibilities, Tisa Wenger Jan 2021

Provincializing Secularism: On Protohomonationalism And Its Counterpossibilities, Tisa Wenger

Mormon Studies Review

This is a book you will want to sit with, think with, mull over, and then read over again. It was not until my second reading that I saw the double entendre of the title—Make Yourselves Gods—and how well it captures the layers of Coviello’s analysis. The phrase is first of all a quote from Joseph Smith, and it signals the expansive ambitions for divinization that early Mormons embraced with a prophetic fervor that culminated in the practice of polygamy. Despite the patriarchal order that came to define polygamy, Coviello argues, early Mormon women too reached for the embodied ecstasies—prophecy, …


Review: Darren Parry. The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History. Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2019., David W. Grua Jan 2021

Review: Darren Parry. The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History. Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2019., David W. Grua

Mormon Studies Review

Darren Parry’s The Bear River Massacre is a poignant retelling of the January 1863 killings of approximately four hundred Shoshone men, women, and children near the Bear River (Boa Ogoi), present-day southern Idaho, by Colonel Patrick E. Connor’s California Volunteers. More than a history of the event itself, though, Parry’s book presents a broad narrative of the impact of the killings on the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, of which Parry is the chairman. He includes in his narrative the conversion of many of the Shoshone survivors to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1873. Parry’s …


Review: P. Jane Hafen And Brenden W. Rensink, Eds. Essays On American Indian And Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Christen Mucher Jan 2021

Review: P. Jane Hafen And Brenden W. Rensink, Eds. Essays On American Indian And Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Christen Mucher

Mormon Studies Review

The past few years in Mormon studies have seen an increase in scholarly turns to critical race, gender analytics, and, even more recently, decolonial approaches.1 Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, edited by P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) and Brenden W. Rensink, definitively adds Indigeneity to that list of critical terms. The result of a 2015 seminar at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University,the collection aims to bring together scholarship on Mormon-Indigenous relations with that on Indigenous Mormons to examine the influence of Mormonism on Indigenous peoples and identities, as well as to highlight the …


Review: Etga Ugur. Faith And Politics In The Public Sphere: The Gülen Movement And The Mormon Church. Syracuse, Ny: Syracuse University Press, 2019., Jean-François Mayer Jan 2021

Review: Etga Ugur. Faith And Politics In The Public Sphere: The Gülen Movement And The Mormon Church. Syracuse, Ny: Syracuse University Press, 2019., Jean-François Mayer

Mormon Studies Review

When I accepted the invitation to review this book, published in a valuable series on Religion and Politics of which I had enjoyed reading several volumes, I assumed that it was a study of interactions between the Gülen movement (also known as Hizmet [service], emphasizing the social service projects for which the movement is well known) and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—something that I found intriguing, since I could not conceive how such a topic might deserve a full volume. I realized my mistake as soon as I started to read it. No sensational revelations about hidden …


Review: Kim Östman. Mormonit: Historia, Oppi Ja Elämä. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2019., Titus Hjelm Jan 2021

Review: Kim Östman. Mormonit: Historia, Oppi Ja Elämä. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2019., Titus Hjelm

Mormon Studies Review

Growing up in Finland in the 1980s, it was practically impossible to hear someone speak Finnish with an accent. In a time when immigrants were more or less nonexistent, it would have been difficult to imagine why anyone would bother learning the language spoken by five million people at the northern periphery of Europe. That is, apart from a handful of immaculately dressed and groomed American men. Although never as ubiquitous as Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on doors, the Mormon missionaries and their perfect, if accented, Finnish left a deep impression on one young person, who later became a sociologist of …


Review: Elisha Mcintyre. Religious Humor In Evangelical Christian And Mormon Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018., John-Charles Duffy Jan 2021

Review: Elisha Mcintyre. Religious Humor In Evangelical Christian And Mormon Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018., John-Charles Duffy

Mormon Studies Review

In 2005 Sunstone magazine published an essay I had written, “The New Missionary Discussions and the Future of Correlation.” To make it look less boring on the page, Sunstone’s editorial staff decided to illustrate the essay with cartoons related to Latter-day Saint missionary work. I was invited to propose cartoon concepts, which would then be executed by Jeanette Atwood, a cartoonist Sunstone often employed. I sat down with my husband to brainstorm. In one of our cartoon concepts, which Sunstone accepted, two missionaries are teaching the plan of salvation with the aid of a flip chart. One missionary tells the …


Review: Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister In The Gospel: The Life Of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019., Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Jan 2021

Review: Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister In The Gospel: The Life Of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019., Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Mormon Studies Review

In Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth Century Black Mormon, Quincy D. Newell explores the earliest years of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints through a biography of Jane James, an African American convert whose devotion to the church situated her amid some of its most pivotal moments. Beginning with Jane’s birth to free parents in Connecticut in the 1820s and ending with her death in Salt Lake City in 1908, Newell documents how race and gender shaped Jane’s experiences of Mormonism, as well as how Jane’s and other Black Mormons’ …


Review: Jedediah S. Rogers And Matthew C. Godfrey, Eds. The Earth Will Appear As The Garden Of Eden: Essays On Mormon Environmental History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Camden Burd Jan 2021

Review: Jedediah S. Rogers And Matthew C. Godfrey, Eds. The Earth Will Appear As The Garden Of Eden: Essays On Mormon Environmental History. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Camden Burd

Mormon Studies Review

The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History fits into an established trend in environmental history. Over the past decades, historians from Lynn White Jr. to Mark R. Stoll have established the religious roots of environmental change in human history.1 Like those scholars, the contributors to this collection seek to understand the complicated and interconnected relationship between theology, faith, and the natural world. Divided across three sections, The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden provides a much-welcomed examination of the environmental aspects of Mormon theology, culture, and history.


Review: Candy Moulton. The Mormon Handcart Migration: “Tounge Nor Pen Can Never Tell The Sorrow.” Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Megan Ann Stanton Jan 2021

Review: Candy Moulton. The Mormon Handcart Migration: “Tounge Nor Pen Can Never Tell The Sorrow.” Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Megan Ann Stanton

Mormon Studies Review

After surviving the overland trail as a member of the Martin Handcart Company, Heber McBride asserted, “tounge nor pen can never tell the sorrow and suffering” (81). At the age of thirteen, he and his adolescent sister Janetta had tended to their ailing parents and younger siblings while moving the family’s handcart themselves. They buried their father during their journey and, together with other members of the ill-fated Martin and Willie Handcart Companies, they faced life-threatening weather and starvation. Indeed, at least one-seventh of the Willie and one-fifth of the Martin handcart migrants perished during their 1856 treks.


Review: Erik R. Seeman. Speaking With The Dead In Early America. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2019., Tricia R. Peone Jan 2021

Review: Erik R. Seeman. Speaking With The Dead In Early America. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2019., Tricia R. Peone

Mormon Studies Review

Erik Seeman’s Speaking with the Dead in Early America traces the development of a cult of the dead among Euro-Americans in the Northeast over a period of three hundred years. This impressive study explores religious and popular views toward communication with the dead and the surprising role of those views in shaping Protestantism. Seeman seeks to explain how Protestants understood otherworldly communication prior the emergence of the Spiritualist movement in the late 1840s. The eight chapters in this volume follow chronological order from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, with some chapters focused on material objects and others on texts …


Review: Craig S. Smith, Ed. The Selected Letters Of Juanita Brooks. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Claudia L. Bushman Jan 2021

Review: Craig S. Smith, Ed. The Selected Letters Of Juanita Brooks. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Claudia L. Bushman

Mormon Studies Review

This book reproduces 222 letters of the more than nine hundred extant letters of Juanita Brooks, the fiercely honest and highly respected historian of Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The letters in this collection, written to fellow scholars and friends, date from 1941 to 1978 and trace the development of her historical projects and her interaction with many of her contemporaries. Craig S. Smith has chosen to include the letters in their entirety, rather than editing them for specific facts and quotations, arranging them chronologically in subject groups. That Brooks typed those letters, filing away …


End Matter Jan 2021

End Matter

Mormon Studies Review

No abstract provided.


Full Issue Jan 2021

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.


A Novel Idea, Chris Crowe Jan 2021

A Novel Idea, Chris Crowe

BYU Studies

The following is a transcript of a forum address presented by Chris Crowe, recipient of the 2020 Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award. Crowe is a professor of English at Brigham Young University and an author who writes books for the young-adult market. This forum assembly took place on May 25, 2021.