Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman share a common pattern of scholarship. Both seek to put the Mormon experience into a broad cultural and historical framework. Both seek engage us by bringing Mormon history into dialogue with the broader history of our shared civilization. This is part of an encouraging direction in serious Mormon scholarship that seems to be moving beyond myopic focus of endless chronicles. Givens’ work had the added benefit of good prose that is actually fun to read. Read More

This story begins at the bitter end, with suicide in a Butte brothel. Read More

His fruitful new study provides lots to chew on this winter. Read More

Terryl Givens’ new book, People of Paradox, provocatively explores how distinctive features of Mormon faith are expressed in Mormon culture. Times and Seasons has decided to hold a symposium to review it, and to take up the conversation it begins. The symposium will include Read More

Here’s a post for your afternoon stupor. What were your mission Thanksgiving meals like? Tell us in the comments. Read More

What’s going to be on your plate tomorrow? Read More

Today, my older brother, James Daniel Fox, turns 40. That’s right: 40. Forty! Which means I’m thirty-nine, and that’s plain crazy. Something has gone dreadfully wrong, I know it. Read More

People of Paradox is unusual: Givens sets out four major paradoxes in Mormon thought and then shows how various aspects of Mormon culture (the life of the mind, architecture, visual art, dance, film, etc.), at various moments in history, negotiate those dilemmas. Read More

People frequently claim that Mormonism is an essentially atheological religion. It is not always exactly clear what is meant by this statement, but it generally seems to me something like we place right practice and sacred stories at the center of our faith rather than an abstract set of propositions. Whatever the merits of this claim, I think that it is hard to deny that the concept of “church doctrine” is enormously important within the church discussions. Read More

When we read the Book of Mormon, whose voice do we think we are hearing? Trying to answer that question, I think, is one of the essential moves in a Mormon mode of interpretation. Consider, for example, 2 Nephi 2:17, where Lehi pauses to speculate on Lucifer’s origins: Read More

In 2004, the church issued True to the Faith, a First Presidency-approved booklet discussing many points of church doctrine. The booklet includes a discussion of birth control. How does that official, First Presidency-approved discussion compare to both President Beck’s recent talk on Mothers Who Know, and to the anti-Beck statement at the What Women Know website? Read More

Is “multiply and replenish the earth” one commandment, or two? Read More

Several women I know and like recently signed on to an anti-President-Beck’s-talk statement. Read More

In Moses 7, Enoch sees God weep because of the wickedness and suffering of his children. When does God’s weeping end? Read More

Check out these wacky ads, straight off of today’s Gmail sidebar. Read More

The recent conference on Mormonism and American Politics at Princeton University, organized by former Times and Seasons blogger Melissa Proctor, was–from the perspective of this participant at least–a resounding success: plenty of exchanges, ideas, and arguments, some presented formally through papers and many others emerging informally through conversations after and between sessions, all packed into a little more than a single cold, grey Saturday in New Jersey. Reports on the conference are already making the rounds (see Matt B.’s excellent summary here, for example); those seriously obsessed with Mormon studies will be happy to here that the entire conference was… Read More

How an obscure academic article yielded marketing gold. Read More

John Varah Long was cited to appear before church officials in 1866 for, among other reasons, “belonging to the young men’s social club, and other conduct unbecoming a saint.” Is it possible that the social club, one cause of Long’s excommunication, was also a model for the church’s Mutual Improvement Associations? Read More

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Read More

I have long thought that there ought to be an online clearing house for research papers related to Mormonism. My proposed model is SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, where scholars in law, economics, and other disciplines upload copies of working papers and published articles. Each article is accompanied by an abstract, and all of them become text searchable and available for downloading. (Scholars who either cannot or will not upload copies of their articles can still upload abstracts.) At present there are about 132,000 scholarly papers up on SSRN. Mormon studies, I have long thought, ought to have something… Read More

Go read this. Then return and report. Read More

That time of year thou may’st in me behold Read More

Ben called my attention to this discussion. David Bokovoy, who is working on a PhD in Hebrew Bible at Brandeis and is the CES director in Boston, sets out this argument: Read More

A recent change in the wording of the Book of Mormon may suggests a shift in the church’s view of the relationship between Lamanites and American Indian tribes. The prior introduction, written just 26 years ago by Elder McConkie, stated that the Lamanites were “the principal ancestors of the American Indians.” Read More

Reading the Book of Mormon is a lot like reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Read More

In the summer of 1879, a meteor streaked across the sky above Utah, and people throughout the state tried to describe what they had seen and heard. Read More