Mormon Studies Commons^™

Lay Latitude: Latter-Day Saint Women's Agency In Northwest Arkansas, Andrew Tompkins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The question of women’s agency in gender-traditional religions has been the subject of much scholarly attention over the past four decades, but little research has been done focusing specifically on Latter-day Saint women and their identities and roles within the structure and practice of the Church. In popular media representations, Latter-Day Saint women are often depicted as submissive or surviving, either powerless pawns or resistant warriors. However, many Latter-day Saint women find fulfillment and empowerment within and because of, rather than outside or in spite of, the institutional Church. In this thesis, I explore women’s agency in Northwest Arkansas’ Greendale …

“Wissenschaft Des” Mormonism: Jewish Studies As A Framework For Exploring Mormon Studies, Trevan Hatch

Faculty Publications

Recently, a significant amount of attention has been directed at the who, what, where, and how of Mormon studies. For example, since 2009, at least six major forums, comprising sixty-two essays and presentations (with dozens of other stand-alone pieces appearing in other venues), were dedicated to discussing the nature and future of Mormon studies as an academic field. Many of these essays discuss the definitions, challenges, opportunities, research gaps, sources, and disciplines of Mormon studies from a variety of angles. Some are highly nuanced treatments of particular aspects of Mormon studies, and others are more general. This article presents the …

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 …

Mormonism And The Limits Of Scripture, Vincent L. Wimbush

Mormon Studies Review

The complex, modern, US-founded but now international, social-cultural phenomenon categorized most popularly by insiders and outsiders as “Mormons,” the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” and/or simply by analysts as a provocative example of modern “religion,” is, as it should be, approached by the latter through many different disciplines and areas and fields of study and in myriad and overlapping ways. From the historical to the literary-rhetorical, from the scientific/social-scientific to the materialist, from the theological and psycho-social to the aesthetic, and from the comic-farcical to the political—whatever approach has been attempted in terms of examining historical and ongoing …

Review: Scott C. Esplin. Return To The City Of Joseph: Modern Mormonism’S Contest For The Soul Of Nauvoo. Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 2018., James S. Bielo

Mormon Studies Review

One way to imagine and encounter the US landscape is as a religious landscape—that is, a landscape densely imprinted with religious histories and identities. If you were so inclined, you could travel from one religiously memorialized place to another, seemingly without end: historic sites of worship; commemorations of events, persons, and movements; religiously themed museums, theme parks, gardens, shrines, and reenactments; extant and nonextant intentional communities; entire municipalities where local life is closely coupled with particular traditions; and so on. As an “American Original,” Mormonism provides a truly fascinating itinerary of destinations; places integral to the formation, diversification, and expansion …

Finding Documents On The Joseph Smith Papers Website, Kenneth L. Alford Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

The Joseph Smith Papers website (josephsmithpapers.org) is a wonderful resource. With thousands of documents and hundreds of resource pages, though, it can sometimes feel like you’re searching for a needle in a haystack. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how you might use the website to learn more about quotations and documents associated with the Prophet Joseph Smith. This article helps readers learn to use the Joseph Smith Papers website to find specific documents. It also teaches readers how to benefit from the numerous other resources available on the Joseph Smith Papers website.

Evolution Of The Research On Mormonism In Asia, Pierre Vendassi

Mormon Studies Review

The first Mormon attempts to put down roots in Asia date back to 1851. Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as other Mormon denominations such as the Community of Christ are officially present in about twenty Asian countries. While many student dissertations and essays as well as testimonial or devotional books have been written on different aspects of Mormonism in Asia, including both the Latter-day Saints and Community of Christ traditions, the allotted space for this paper as well as my own resources prevented me from providing an exhaustive survey. Instead, I chose a few …

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 …

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 …

Faithful And Fearless: Major Howard Egan, Early Mormonism And The Pioneering Of The American West, Brett D. Dowdle

BYU Studies

As he did with his earlier biographies—My Best for the Kingdom: His- tory and Autobiography of John Lowe Butler, a Mormon Frontiersman and Stand by My Servant Joseph: The Story of the Joseph Knight Family and the Restoration—the late William G. Hartley reminds us of the value and importance of studying the lives of ordinary Latter-day Saints without ecclesiastical position in Faithful and Fearless: Major Howard Egan, Early Mormonism and the Pioneering of the American West. Similar to the stories of both Butler and the Knight family, Hartley shows that, when examined closely, Egan’s life was far …

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?”

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: 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 …

The Use Of Gethsemane By Church Leaders, 1859–2018, John Hilton Iii, Joshua P. Barringer

Faculty Publications

Many commentators have noted that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (herein referred to as “the Church”) has a distinctive focus on Gethsemane.1 For example, Douglas J. Davies has written that the “LDS interpretation of Christ’s garden experience involves a most interesting relocation of the act of atonement within Christian theological accounts that have, traditionally, seen the cross as the prime site of assuming human sin”2 and that “Mormonism relocates the centre of gravity of Christ’s passion in Gethsemane rather than upon the cross and Calvary.”3

Guardians Of Virtue, Tamsen Maloy, Tasia Jensen

Capstones

Guardians of Virtue is a short documentary following Tamsen Maloy as she explores how the church of her upbringing--the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon church)--handles sexual assault. It is quickly revealed that the church does not have adequate resources for sexual assault survivors. On the contrary, the culture and system of the church enables assault and encourages survivors to feel they are to blame.

Link to capstone: https://tantproductions.wordpress.com/

Review Of Sacred Space: Exploring The Birthplace Of Mormonism, Daniel H. Olsen

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

When I was asked to read and review Michael MacKay’s Sacred Space: Exploring the Birthplace of Mormonism, I was expecting to read a straightforward history of Fayette, New York, the story of the founding of Mormonism in Fayette, and the efforts of the LDS Church to purchase and restore the Peter Whitmer Sr. home where, Church members have been told, the Church was organized on 6 April 1830. However, I was quite surprised, as I imagine most Church members would be, to read that the location of the establishment of Mormonism is highly contested within some Mormon history circles. Some …

Lydia Dunford Alder: The Life Of The Mormon Poet, Suffragist, And Missionary, Sarah Kate Johnson Stanley

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the life of Lydia Dunford Alder (1846–1923), who was a prominent but now nearly forgotten early Mormon writer, women’s rights activist, missionary, and leader of various women’s clubs. A respected member of the late-nineteenth– and early-twentieth-century Salt Lake City, Utah community, Alder was the colleague and friend of various distinguished Mormon leaders. While these leaders have been studied in-depth by scholars, Alder’s similar achievements have never been examined in scholarship. As the first comprehensive biography ever written on Alder, this thesis explores her birth in England (1846), her immigration to the United States (1850), her return to …

Minds, Bodies, And Objects, Samuel M. Brown

Mormon Studies Review

As I wander ever more deeply into the semantic labyrinths of early Mormon translation, I find myself confronting ubiquitous objects that matter for more than their mere physicality. Seer stones, interpreters, gold plates, Egyptian papyri, locks of hair, underclothing, and scores more. Mormonism is saturated with such objects, pregnant with what some scholars call “abundance” or “real presence.” Mormons don’t call them “relics,” afraid to conjure (that fraught word!) Catholic altars, corpses, and catacombs. Mormons are no idolaters, so there must be no relics. But we who think academically about Mormons may do well to acknowledge the deep kinship Mormons …

Introduction: Small Means, Great Things, Benjamin Peters, John D. Peters

Mormon Studies Review

Mormonism is a media religion: every contribution to this forum makes this point in some way. Of course, the same could be said of most religions, and yet the Mormon tradition in particular incorporates media. How so?

Communing With Compromise: Mormonism And The Early Internet, Gavin Feller

Mormon Studies Review

As an emerging technology, the internet stirred a fascinating brew of excitement, anxiety, and fear for Jew and Gentile.1 It challenged both grassroots and top-down notions of intimacy, authenticity, and control. For Mormonism, a religion whose chronology parallels uncannily the development of electronic communication technologies, the internet joins a host of media dripping with ambivalence. In tracing the contours of Mormonism’s evolving and uneasy relationship with the twentieth-century internet—from early listserv communities to institutional web development—this brief essay presents only a morsel of the richness the religion offers for the study of technology, culture, and power.

Review Of What Is Mormonism? A Student’S Introduction, By Patrick Q. Mason; Mormonism: The Basics, By David J. Howlett And John Charles Duffy, Jennifer Graber

Mormon Studies Review

Two introductory texts on Mormonism have much to offer scholars, like myself, who are not specialists in the tradition yet regularly return to it when teaching undergraduate classes in American religions and American history. Mason’s volume, What Is Mormonism? A Student’s Introduction, focuses on the Latter-day Saints and explores the tradition’s historical development, global expansion, daily practice, and function as a response to existential problems. Howlett and Duffy’s book, Mormonism: The Basics, surveys the Latter-day Saints, the Reorganized Latter Day Saints (RLDS, now Community of Christ),

and fundamentalist groups with an emphasis on Mormon history, relations with non-Mormons, ritual life, …

Review Of Real Native Genius: How An Ex-Slave And A White Mormon Became Famous Indians, By Angela Pulley Hudson, Elise Boxer

Mormon Studies Review

Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians adds to the growing body of literature that probes the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and religion in the study of Mormonism. Author Angela Hudson considers how Mormons constructed ideas of “Indianness” and how the reinforcement or subversion of those ideas “influenced nearly every aspect of antebellum culture, often in surprising ways” (p. 3). She uses the lives of “professional Indians” Warner McCary and his wife, Lucy Stanton, as a lens to explore not just how they, as non–Native Americans, accessed indigeneity, but how they constructed and …

Mormonism And The Archaeology Of Media, Mason K. Allred

Mormon Studies Review

Mormonism has a legacy of digging up the dead. It had early desires to excavate the past, not only metaphorically (through meticulous record keeping and strong ancestral ties), but literally by actually digging up dead material. Think Alvin, Zelph, gold plates, treasure, spirits, and angels.2

Forging The Mormon Myth, Maryanne Hafen

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

The work of the forger Mark Hofmann frames many key problems and changes in Mormon historiography. More specifically, it reveals a tension between versions of Mormon history that are propagated in the religion. On one hand, there is a documented and literal history. On the other, a sacred and engaging myth. However, these two cannot coexist harmoniously.

Out Of The Best Books: Mormon Assimilation And Exceptionalism Through Secular Reading, Lauren Ann Fields

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to explore the relationship between Mormon assimilation, exceptionalism, and their endeavors in secular reading by analyzing Out of the Best Books (OOBB), a 1964–71 five-volume reading guide and reading program on secular reading established by the Mormon Church for its women’s organization, the Relief Society. Examining the approaches to secular literature in the OOBB program suggests that Mormons can respond to their competing desires to separate and assimilate by making efforts that fulfill both aspirations simultaneously rather than moving exclusively in one direction. Yet OOBB’s efforts to achieve both objectives did not amount to an entirely seamless …

Cosmos, Earth, And Man, David H. Bailey, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, John S. Lewis, Gregory L. Smith, Michael R. Stark

Interpreter Foundation Books

I’ve long resisted the claim, typically (as in C. S. Lewis’s allegorical exchange between the pilgrim John and Mr. Enlightenment) assumed rather than explicitly argued, that no well-educated person, and certainly nobody with a solid grounding in modern science, can rationally choose to be a religious believer.2 So I was delighted with the proposal that The Interpreter Foundation organize and sponsor a conference on the relationship between science and Mormonism. When Dr. David Bailey called me regarding the possibility of such a conference, I jumped at the opportunity.

Melville's Mardi And The Book Of Mormon, Giordano Lahaderne

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

While Melville’s Mardi has long remained a puzzle to both readers and critics, scholars agree that his third novel marked a significant turning point in his writing career. It is with Mardi that Meville realized the novel as a form suited to grapple the various philosophical and religious questions he would famously explore in his following book, Moby Dick. Although scholars have already pinpointed many various sources for Mardi, this thesis examines the heretofore overlooked connections between Melville’s third book and the esoteric volume of American scripture, the Book of Mormon.

The first chapter of this thesis examines …