Park, Benjamin E. “Mormonism in Antebellum America.” In The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States Since 1775, pp. 175-183. Routledge, 2025.

Mormonism began with a text steeped in political protest. When the Book of Mormon rolled off the press in early 1830, its first readers immediately recognized its connection to America’s inchoate democratic climate. The scriptural work spoke of kings, judges, and sovereignty. It warned about the dangers of majoritarian rule and the promise of millennial reign. Mankind would not know true peace and full liberty until God ruled as a divine monarch. But more than the words itself, it was the text’s sheer presence that struck at the cultural context: here was a new book of scripture produced by an unlearned farm boy that claimed equal status to the Bible. Put simply, the Book of Mormon had something to say about the role of religion in politics. As one of the first cynics noted, “while gospel thunders are abroad,” and “‘Church and State’ is all the word,” the new “Gold Bible” appealed “to the loafers” through disruptive ideas that overturned democratic stability and threatened a tenuous civil religion. Put another way, the Book of Mormon challenged contemporary conceptions of religion’s role in the political sphere.

Yorgason, Ethan. “Geographical Implications of MormonismTs Shifting Media Representations.” Handbook of the Geographies of Religion (2025): 989.

Though not the only branch within the category, media representation of Mormonism revolves around what is by far the largest group, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, centered in Salt Lake City within the United States. In the past, when this church expanded rapidly, such representation was notable for the ways in which it both placed and even exoticized this institution and its members within its Utah environment as well as geopoliticized its actions within American and global space. Recent decades have seen decreased growth rates for this group, accompanied by something of a reworking of media narratives. This chapter explores the geographical implications of these representational shifts, as “Mormon space” becomes ever more strongly written into accounts of the ideological regionalization of American space. In particular, these Mormon spaces help bolster the sense of Mormonism as an internal Other. The chapter describes, explains, and illustrates these trends especially through analysis of a handful of films and documentaries recently available through streaming media.

Edwards, Emily Lynell. “Digital pioneers: Mormon mommy bloggers and building the “Bloggernacle”.” Internet Histories(2024): 1-21.

This article examines the influence of Mormon mommy bloggers (MMBs), as key web architects and content creators starting in the early 2010s. MMBs, referring here to Mormon content creators whose blogs focused on topics such as childrearing, domesticity, and lifestyle themes, were significant players during Web 2.0 through their usage of the longform blog. MMBs transformed the invisibilized domestic labor of mothering and housekeeping into monetizable content within the Mormon blogosphere or “Bloggernacle.” The aspirational monetization and professionalization of the blog offered a tangible occupation for Mormon stay-at-home mothers in a religious culture where working outside the home was discouraged. MMBs, through blogging, attempted to situate themselves not simply as caretakers but enterprising, digital cultural creators aligning themselves with a (neo)liberal feminist ethos of entrepreneurialism and individualistic influencing. Using a corpus of web archives from Brigham Young University’s digital collections, this article enlists the Archives Research Compute Hub (ARCH) to process archival data into derivatives to illuminate this underexplored period of web history, employing the methods of feminist thematic and social network analysis. By combining cultural and quantitative analysis of MMBs, this article highlights how MMBs were crucial creators who paved the way for contemporary trends of feminized influencing and the uneasy blending of feminist and commercial content which has increasingly defined contemporary mother-influencers.

Huan, Tzung-Cheng TC, Anestis K. Fotiadis, and Nikolaos Stylos. “Religious Tourism.”Contested religious heritage: differing views of Mormon heritage Daniel H. Olsen and Dallen J. Timothy

No abstract. 

Tait, Lisa Olsen. “Origins and Myths: Revising the Founding Story of the Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization.” Journal of Mormon History 51, no. 1 (2025): 40-59.

No JMH articles have abstracts

Veach, Hyrum. ““The Priesthood and the People”: Political Unity, Dissent, and the Twilight of Theocracy in Utah Territory.” Journal of Mormon History 51, no. 1 (2025): 60-85.

Harper, Jennifer Sebring, and Steven C. Harper. “Can Christ be Cambodian?: What the International Art Competition of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Signals about (De) centralization.” Journal of Mormon History 51, no. 1 (2025): 118-129.

Jensen, Robin Scott. “Imagining the (Largely Non-Extant) Whitmer Family Archives: An Additional Approach to Understanding Early Mormonism.” Journal of Mormon History51, no. 1 (2025): 1-39.

Ulvund, Frode. “Resistance and Intervention in the Contact Zone: Mormon Missionaries as Organizational Migrants in Norway c. 1900.” Journal of Mormon History 51, no. 1 (2025): 86-117.

Núñez, Gabriel González. “Mormonism through the Lens of Translation Studies.” Hikma 23, no. 2 (2024): 1-23.

Most religious movements often have an invisible relationship to translation. This is the case for major religious traditions, such as Christianity. Among the Christian denominations, Mormonism is perhaps particular due to a quite visible relationship with translation. As a religious tradition that is very much rooted in and experienced through translation, it has caught the eye of translation scholars who have studied it to theorize on the nature of translation. However, much of this scholarship seems somewhat uninformed as to what scholars in the field of Mormon Studies have also been exploring regarding translation. And the opposite seems to also be true. Thus, in what could be an obvious space for interdisciplinary exploration, these two disciplines, for the most part, do not engage each other. This paper will explore that common space, the intersection of translation and Mormonism, in an attempt to highlight possible areas for better collaboration.

Frederick, Nicholas J. ““When Ye Shall See These Things Come among You” A Survey of Teachings on Modern Secret Combinations.” Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel 25, no. 1 (2024): 5.

One of the purposes of the Book of Mormon is to warn latter-day Gentiles about the dangers of modern-day secret combinations.” Such combinations led to the destruction of the Jaredites and the Nephites and, we are told, should not be dismissed or overlooked in our own modern day. So how ought we to identify a modern secret combination? What would such an organization look like? How can religious educators discuss secret combinations in a responsible manner? This article explores how modern prophets have described and defined secret combinations, from Joseph Smith up through the present.

Rappleye, Neal, and Stephen O. Smoot. “Stephen Burnett versus the Eight Witnesses An Exercise in Mature Historical Thinking.” Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel 25, no. 2 (2024): 5.

This article critically examines the credibility of the claims made by Stephen Burnett about the experience of the Eight Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. A disaffected Latter-day Saint who lost his faith in Joseph Smith after the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society in 1837, Burnett wrote a scathing letter in early 1838 in which he claimed he heard Martin Harris admit that the Eight Witnesses did not physically see and handle the gold plates as claimed in their printed testimony. This article argues that Burnett is not a credible source for accurately understanding the experience of the Eight Witnesses. It uses Burnett’s letter and the controversy surrounding it as an example of how students can develop mature historical thinking skills when they are confronted with potentially faith-damaging information.