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35 responses
The Bloggernacle has been awash lately in awards: Mormon of the Year, Mormon of the Year, 1950-present, and the Boggs-Doniphan Award. This last one asked for the most influential non-Mormon on Mormonism within the last year, for either good or ill, named about Missouri’s Governor Lilburn Boggs who infamously issued an Extermination Order against the Mormons in 1838 and for Alexander Doniphan, a Missouri militia leader who refused to execute Joseph Smith and other church leaders during the same conflict. In that same spirit, my question is: Which outsider has most influenced Latter-day Saint history, either positively or negatively? Read More
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36 responses
Of late I have been thinking of late about how to read Mormon scriptures. In particular, I have been working on some passages in the Book of Mormon on legal interpretation and thinking about how best to approach these sections. By and large, it seems to me that there have been three basic models of how to read LDS scriptures. First, there has been what I think of as an external, sectarian reading. This consists essentially of proof texting in debates and discussions with Protestant outsiders. There is a sense in which this is the oldest kind of LDS hermeneutic. The first… Read More
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20 responses
I recently finished The Theocons: Secular America Under Seige and put up a short post on it elsewhere. But as I continue to mull it over I have a different idea to float than I discussed in the other post, namely that the rejection of Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate by religious conservatives in the Republican Party marks a triumph of sectarianism over politics that will undermine (or already has) the political influence of the theocons, to whatever extent you grant they have had influence. Read More
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20 responses
Nineteenth-century polygamy provoked a decades-long national shouting match over the evils and virtues of the practice. It also prompted a fascinating contemplation by Elizabeth Kane of women’s rights and marital sexuality. Read More
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In a day when new temples are being announced by the handful, it’s easy to forget how far we have come in making priesthood ordinances available, convenient, and even non-life threatening. Read More
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4 responses
Next Thursday, February 19th, David Hall of Harvard Divinity School will be giving a free public lecture at the Claremont School of Religion. Below is the text of the announcement; you may also download a color PDF version of the event flyer. Read More
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15 responses
On June 20, 1854, Elizabeth Kane received a note from her husband that he had invited some “common men” for dinner. Elizabeth, then 17, had been married to Thomas Kane, her second cousin, for a little over a year. Read More
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24 responses
In Mormon country, Thomas L. Kane is remembered, if at all, as the nineteenth-century defender of the Latter-day Saints and the hero of the Utah War of 1857-58. Read More
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15 responses
I am very glad to introduce to you our next guest blogger, Matt Grow. We thought this would be a good time to have Matt blog with us because he just had a book come out last week from Yale University Press, Liberty to the Downtrodden: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer, on an important and colorful figure in early Mormon history. Adam and I knew Matt when we were all graduate students Read More
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Deadlines are approaching for paper submissions to the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology 2009 Annual Meeting (due February 13th), and for applications to the Summer Seminar on Orson and Parley Pratt with Terryl Givens and Matt Grow (due February 15th). Read More
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22 responses
Blogger and journalist Rod Dreher posted an op-ed piece at USA Today, “How much ‘truth’ is too much?” It reviews in passing the author’s personal journey from faithful Catholic journalist reporting on the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to Orthodox Christian who prefers to avoid repeating that experience a second time in his new church. Read More
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The train known as the Pacific Express (No. 5, Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway) pulled out of Erie, Pennsylvania on the afternoon of December 29, 1876, headed toward Chicago. Two locomotives, christened “Socrates” and “Columbia,” towed its two passenger cars, three sleeper cars, two baggage cars, two express wagons, a smoker, and the caboose. The Pacific Express reached Ashtabula, Ohio, early on that snowy evening. When it pulled out of the Ashtabula station, 159 passengers and crew members were aboard. Read More
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85 responses
At the blog Text Messages, an interview with Julia Duin, who is the religion editor at the Washington Times and author of the book Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What To Do About It. Here are a couple of highlights from the interview. Read More
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I’ve been thinking about this week’s Relief Society lesson. Read More
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27 responses
5-year-old son: Mom, he hit me with his backpack! Me: Did you hit your brother? 11-year-old son: No. 5-year-old: Yes, he did! He did! Read More
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23 responses
While I don’t really have a television, there are a couple of shows that I regularlly watch through Netflix or hulu.com. Among them is The Office. I actually think that some of C.S. Lewis’s thoughts on the nature of love help to make sense of Michael Scott. Read More
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… and if you had lived in the Mormon Corridor or somewhere else with a fully organized Primary, you would have become a Trail-Builder when you turned 10 in 1925, and you would have received one of the new “First Year Books” to track your progress during the year as your learned to do some really cool boy stuff. Your handbook was decorated with the pine tree, your class emblem, and you learned how this tree represented the kind of boy you were learning to be: Read More
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Continuing part 1 , part 2, and part 3. Nephi’s response to his brothers directly attacks their understanding of Moses’s significance. Read More
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49 responses
Seven Storey Mountain is Thomas Merton’s autobiographical account of his increasing restlessness with a worldly life. He converts to Catholicism and eventually enters one of the most strict (the strictest?) Catholic orders: a Trappist monastery. What has fascinated me Read More
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Utah’s 19th century silk industry was one of those projects encouraged by Brigham Young to stimulate home production and reduce Mormon dependence on a hostile world. Period literature is heavy on sermons advocating sericulture, treatises on raising worms and the mulberry trees they fed on, and praise for the quantities and artistry of finished articles. What I’ve never seen before is the memoir of a child who assisted in the enterprise. Read More
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David G. at Juvenile Instructor (the blog, not the periodical) has just posted Mormonism’s Unbroken Past: Transcending the 1890 Rupture, noting that 1890 is as historically significant to the Mormons as that year is to the wider history of the West: For us, the 1890 Manifesto marked as great a shift in outlook, traditional Mormon historical thinking goes, as the 1890 “closing of the frontier,” declared in 1893 by Western historian Frederick Jackson Turner, signaled in the development of all that was distinctively American. Read More
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13 responses
A comprehensive bibliography? A portfolio of LDS-owned companies? No, it’s a measure of food-storage activity by preparedness-minded Mormons, as revealed in a feature at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “The Mormon Index is a rising sign of troubled economy.” Read More
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It’s not too late to send in a proposal for this year’s Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference, May 8-9 at Aspen Grove and BYU, Provo, UT. Speaker John Caputo and individualized scholarly mentoring opportunities are special highlights this year. Read More
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Friedrich Schulzke Read More
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19 responses
We are delighted to announce that Ardis Parshall’s posts will be returning to T&S. Read More
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42 responses
Thanks for all the comments on site design. We’re still making use of that feedback. Here is a two sidebar option that gives a great deal of info up top, but then quickly drops off to just let you read in peace as you get farther down the page. Take it for a spin. Read More
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8 responses
Continuing part 1 and part 2. Laman and Lemuel offer up their gloss on the story of Moses in verse 22 and in so doing model a particular type of scriptural and legal interpretation. They say: And we know that the people who were in the land of Jerusalem were a righteous people; for they kept the statutes and judgments of the Lord, and all his commandments, according to the law of Moses; wherefore, we know that they are a righteous people; and our father hath judged them, and hath led us away because we would hearken unto his words;… Read More