Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, January 2025

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January 30, 2025

Bialecki, Jon. “The Mormon Archive’s First Ten Thousand Years: Infrastructure, Materiality, Ontology, and Resurrection in Religious Transhumanism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2025): 1-19.

One of the chief debates in the academic study of transhumanism is whether or not this emergent movement that advocates for the technological overcoming of the limits of humanity should be considered religious in nature. This question stems from the fact that, while the vast majority of transhumanists explicitly reject established religion, elements of transhumanism seem strikingly similar to Christian eschatology. This article explores this question by asking how the ontology of an avowedly religious transhumanist movement, the Mormon Transhumanist Association, differs from the informatic ontology identified in secular transhumanism. It shows how contemporary Mormon Transhumanist imaginings of various forms of technological resurrection are informed by the infrastructure and materialist ontology associated with the Mormon practice of “Proxy baptisms” (otherwise known as baptisms for the dead) and other initiatory rituals conducted by proxy on behalf of the deceased. This influence suggests that, at least in this case, there are identifiable differences between secular transhumanism and religious transhumanism that complicate any easy reading of secular transhumanism as being crypto-religion.

Brunson, Samuel D. Between the Temple and the Tax Collector: The Intersection of Mormonism and the State. University of Illinois Press, 2025.

The founding and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints run parallel to the rise of the modern tax system and administrative state. Samuel D. Brunson looks at the relationships between the Church and various federal, state, local, and international tax regimes.

The church and its members engage with the state as taxpayers and as members of a faith exempt from taxes. As Brunson shows, LDS members and the Church have at various times enacted, enforced, and collected taxes while also challenging taxes in the courts and politics. Brunson delves into the ways LDS members used their status as taxpayers to affirm themselves as citizens and how outsiders have attacked the Church’s tax-exempt status to delegitimize it. Throughout, Brunson uses the daily interactions between the Latter-day Saints and taxation to explain important and inevitable holes in the wall between church and state.

Enlightening and informed, Between the Temple and the Tax Collector provides general readers and experts alike with a new perspective on a fundamental issue.

Calvert, Isaac, A. LeGrand Richards, and Jessica Ashcraft. “Examining “The Mormon Puzzle”: Progressive Education and Mormon Educational Ideas in Late Nineteenth-Century Utah.” History of Education Quarterly (2025): 1-38.

This article describes the multifaceted origins and dynamics of pedagogic progressive edu- cational ideas among Mormon educators in the Utah Territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We propose four principal avenues through which progres- sive educational ideas reached these Mormon educators. These include the exigencies of desert frontier living that predisposed early Utah Mormons to progressivism’s focus on practical education; the arrival of denominational schools sponsored by the New West Education Commission (NWEC), which sparked educative improvement within Mormon communities; the Pestalozzian teachings of Karl Maeser via the Brigham Young Academy’s Normal School; and the visits of eastern progressive educationalists through Benjamin Cluff’s leadership at the BYA Summer Institutes. We additionally situate nineteenth- century national perceptions of Mormon educational ideas within this more nuanced backdrop of the migration of progressive ideas to Utah. We describe unique dimensions of Mormon educational progressivism that might set it apart from educational progressivisms elsewhere, including tensions within Utah’s Mormon educative community.

Hutchins, Zachary McLeod. Shall I Have Pleasure?: An Answer for Sarah. Greg Kofford Books, 2025.

Shall I Have Pleasure? An Answer for Sarah explores the complex relationship between faith, desire, and the pursuit of joy through a spiritual and philosophical lens. Drawing from religious narratives, scriptural analysis, and theological insights, the book delves into how pleasure is perceived within Christian traditions, particularly among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Through reflective anecdotes, historical context, and doctrinal interpretations, the author challenges the tension between spiritual duty and sensory enjoyment, encouraging readers to reconcile divine purpose with the pursuit of happiness.

Rooted in scripture and enriched by personal storytelling, this thought-provoking work invites readers to reconsider long-held beliefs about pleasure and self-denial. By examining biblical stories like Sarah’s incredulous laughter at the promise of joy in old age, as well as Christ’s compassionate acceptance of human love and generosity, the book offers a fresh perspective on living a life of spiritual fulfillment that embraces joy as an essential part of divine intent. Through this lens, Shall I Have Pleasure? becomes a call to rediscover pleasure as a God-given gift intertwined with human purpose and eternal potential.

Schettini, Clara Varjão. “Latter-day Saints in Brazil: The Reaction of Religious Leaders in the South, 1923–1935.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 15-24.

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Matas, Caroline. ““They Get Zero Say in How We View It”: Ex-Mormon TikTok as Spectacle.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 46-56.

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Stanton, Megan Ann. “Community of Christ: Developing an Independent Message.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 4-14.

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Davis, Kate. “Technologies of the Selfie: Mormon Influencers and the Performance of Gender Online.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 35-45.

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Coviello, Peter. “Have Joy: Queer Theory and Mormon Studies.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 57-69.

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Comments

One response to “Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, January 2025”

Ivan Wolfe

January 30, 2025

This is what I see – it says “article extract” rather than abstract, but should at least give an idea:
:

Schettini, Clara Varjão. “Latter-day Saints in Brazil: The Reaction of Religious Leaders in the South, 1923–1935.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 15-24.

“I took a course entitled “Humanity and Transcendence” at a Brazilian Catholic university in 2018. During class, the professor began to tell a story about two young men from the United States walking down the street wearing suits with black cards in their pockets. At that moment, he stopped the story and asked if any Mormons were in the room. When I raised my hand, I noticed his embarrassment. He quickly summarized the story without making much connection to his broader point.

I soon realized that informing my professors and student colleagues about my religious affiliation caused surprise and curiosity. A comment I heard several times was that I did not seem like a Mormon. When I asked why, some told me it was because of how I dressed (casually, in jeans and a T-shirt), the fact that I spent part of the day away from home instead of solely…”

Matas, Caroline. ““They Get Zero Say in How We View It”: Ex-Mormon TikTok as Spectacle.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 46-56.

“In late 2022, a trend took over TikTok wherein users repeatedly made the Italian che vuoi or “pinched fingers” hand gesture while offering a tour of their homes to the soundtrack of Louis Prima’s “Che La Luna.” Often, these videos showed off niche elements of the user’s culture, such as “things in my Deaf household that just make sense,” “things in my lesbian moms’ household that just make sense,” or “things in my Pentecostal grandmother’s house that just make sense.” For many ex-Mormon users, this trend presented an opportunity to showcase the physical relics of their transition out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Several popular ex-Mormon TikTok creators offered tours of “Things in My Ex-Mormon Household that Just Make Sense.” Wandering through the house, they panned the camera to their dusty scriptures, desk drawers full of Moroni sculptures, and framed devotional artwork that they could neither…”

Stanton, Megan Ann. “Community of Christ: Developing an Independent Message.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 4-14.

“For much of its history, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as Community of Christ, struggled to articulate its core message.1 Its leaders and members knew what they were not: they were not members of their rival sect headquartered in Utah. They rejected the spectacle that followed from adherence to Brigham Young and his successors. As a result, much of the early RLDS Church message focused specifically on disassociating from the peculiarities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Mormon image, writ large. Theirs was a defensive posturing designed to prove to themselves and to non-Mormon Americans that the RLDS Church did not belong within the specters of LDS spectacle. However, such strategies also fostered an awareness of being seen, and an attention to others’ opinions of them. Even as RLDS Church members rejected the LDS Church’s message . . . ”

Davis, Kate. “Technologies of the Selfie: Mormon Influencers and the Performance of Gender Online.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 35-45.

“Colleen McDannell, in her book Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy, observes that “in the American imagination, Mormon women still have not left the nineteenth century.”1 The public perception of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is colored by media portrayals that position them as the Other twice over: first, as members of a so-called weird religion and, second, as either victims or, as Mormon feminist blogger Heather Sundahl put it, handmaidens of the patriarchy.2 Since the 1990s Mormon women have been utilizing the internet and digital technologies as technologies of the self, tools of identity creation that at various times have challenged or upheld this public perception.

This tension is representative of wider cultural impulses. Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler states, “One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body and . . .”

Coviello, Peter. “Have Joy: Queer Theory and Mormon Studies.” Mormon Studies Review 12 (2025): 57-69.

“The encounter between the archive of Mormonism and the conceptual edifice of queer theory, if it seems in some respects improbable, can feel from other angles nearer to inevitable. It is improbable not least because of the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ devout and, in frequent effect, purgative adherence to the notion of “family” in its very most, as the phrase goes, “traditional” iterations. One can offer counterreadings of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” one can forage about for uncollapsed spaces for living among its varied addresses to gender as “an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose,” and one can dutifully note the church’s several recent forays into secular rhetorics of “tolerance.”1 Still, nobody would mistake the LDS Church’s official stance toward gendered and erotic noncompliance as notably, say, commodious. This is so superabundantly the case that one hardly. . . “

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