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Episode 28 of the Mormon Book Review features W. Kesler Jackson, author of Elijah Abel: The Incredible True Story of a Black Pioneer. Host Kirk Caudle talks with Jackson about the possibility of two Elijah Abels, the Latter-day Saint priesthood/temple ban for black members, and Mormonism's early proselytizing efforts toward the black community. About W. Kesler Jackson After completing a bachelor's at BYU in Asian studies, Jackson went on to earn a master's degree in the humanities from Penn State and a PhD in history from Syracuse University. In his position at Syracuse University's department of history, Jackson has developed curricula for a number of courses, including 'History of South Asia,' 'History of the 'Muslim World,'' 'Competing World Histories to 1500,' and 'Competing World Histories from 1500.'He's also the creator of Adventure Journey (now ExpeditionBase) and TextbookCheck. He is the author of The Tibet Gamble: Unraveling the Separate Struggle for the Land of Snows and numerous articles for a variety of academic journals, magazines, newspapers, high-level government reports, and websites.AUDIO QUALITY FOR THIS EPISODE DOES NOT MEET THE STANDARDS OF THE MIPODCAST AND SO WE HAVE REMOVED THE FILE FROM OUR FEED. IF YOU WOULD LIKE A COPY OF THIS EPISODE, PLEASE SEND A REQUEST TO MIPODCAST@BYU.EDU. You can subscribe to the Maxwell Institute Podcast through iTunes. Help our podcast grow by rating and reviewing it there. The podcatcher RSS feed is mi.byu.edu/feed/podcast. Send questions or comments about this and other episodes to blairhodges@byu.edu.

Episode 27 of The Mormon Book Review features Brittany Chapman. She received her undergraduate degree in humanities at Brigham Young University with an English emphasis and music minor. She received her MA in Victorian Studies from the University of Leicester in England. Her thesis focused on women's life writings (diaries and autobiography) and Utah women's suffrage, club movements, and plural marriage, using the experience of one woman—Ruth May Fox—to illustrate these larger social movements.Through this project, Chapman got to know people at the LDS Church History Library, where she eventually interned before being hired full-time. Chapman now works at the Church History Library, specializing in LDS women's history.In this episode, host Kirk Caudle interviews Chapman about the Church's 'Women of Faith' project, reasons women had for entering into polygamy, and why the history of LDS women is often neglected.To listen to this episode, 'Brittany Chapman on Women of Faith in the Latter Days,' right click here and select 'Save as.'You can subscribe to the Maxwell Institute Podcast through iTunes. Help our podcast grow by rating and reviewing it there. The podcatcher RSS feed is mi.byu.edu/feed/podcast. Send questions or comments about this and other episodes to blairhodges@byu.edu.

We're pleased to announce the launch of the new Maxwell Institute Podcast, featuring interviews with scholars specializing in biblical and scriptural studies, Mormon studies, and religious studies more generally. In addition to episodes hosted by Blair Hodges (formerly of the FAIR Podcast), we've invited Kirk Caudle, host of The Mormon Book Review podcast, to bring his show under the new Maxwell Institute Podcast umbrella. Over the past year, Caudle's show has featured a number of authors including Terryl and Fiona Givens, Patrick Mason, John Turner, and others.Caudle received a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies (Bible and History) from Cascade College and a master's in interdisciplinary studies (Spiritual Traditions and Ethics) from Marylhurst University. He initiated and co-chairs the Mormon Studies Special Topics session of the American Academy of Religion, Pacific Northwest Region conference. He's also spent the past three years as a New Testament instructor at the Portland, Oregon LDS Institute of Religion.We're working on integrating the podcast directly into our blog, and soon you'll be able to subscribe through iTunes. In the meantime, check out Caudle's latest episode, a brief discussion with Blair Hodges about the new Maxwell Institute Podcast.To listen to this episode, right click here and select 'Save as.'

This MIPodcast Moment is from the transcript of N. T. Wright's interview, now available in full HERE.BLAIR HODGES: So, a minute ago you mentioned the book series you did on the New Testament, the “For Everyone” series— N. T. WrightN. T. WRIGHT: Yes, yes.HODGES: —and as a New Testament scholar, have you received any pushback on the idea of “pop scholarship”—things produced for popular audiences?WRIGHT: I’ve done a lot for popular audiences because I’ve always been working in the church. I’ve been active as a preacher and a teacher and I’ve led Sunday school groups and confirmation classes and done that sort of thing. So, I’ve always been aware there’s a need to translate the big academic stuff into popular mode. And for me the vocational moment—though I didn’t realize it at the time—was when I was quite young and I read C. S. Lewis saying that there ought to be a compulsory exam for clergy or theologians which would be to translate a work of academic theology into a popular idiom. And he said, tellingly, if you can’t do that you either don’t understand it or you don’t believe it—HODGES: Right.WRIGHT: —and I thought, oh my goodness! That’s quite a challenge! So simply as responding to that challenge it’s been fascination. But also because I grew up in a family which didn’t consist of theologians, we were church goes, but nobody was reading academic theology. And both at home when I was growing up and then with my own wife and children, none of whom are theologians, if I would say something at the Sunday lunch table about the sermon that we’d heard that day, and if I started using long words, they would say “Come on, dad! You know we don’t talk that silly language. What do you actually mean? Can you say it plainly?”So, I’ve been on the spot. And I enjoy that. I think that’s exactly right. If we can’t say it straight up, then we haven’t thought it through and we’re fudging with artificial fluffy language. That’s not a healthy way to be. So, I’ve done my best to resist that. And as it happens—very nervously when I was quite a young scholar, like about twenty-five or thirty years ago—I started to think “What I’ve been preaching and teaching on this and that, I wonder if that would make a little book!”And then one of the publishers that I’d had conversations with said to me one day, “Tom, you’ve read this, that, and the other, haven’t you?” It was 1992, when the funny books on Jesus by A. N. Wilson and Barbara Thiering and Jack Spong came out. And I said, “Yeah, I’ve read that.” And he said, “Well, why not just write it up, just four or five chapters, and it’ll be a nice little book just before Christmas.” And I thought, “eh, what?” And then I thought, hey that’d be rather fun! And so I had a go, and in its way—I mean, none of us write bestsellers—but as Christian books go it was, for a week or two, a bestseller. So, okay, maybe I can do this.Then I did some journalism and I was asked to write on various topics to the Church Times in London, and then for one or two of the broadsheets—at the Times and The Guardian and The Independent in London—the regular newspapers, in other words. And I found again, that was fun. I enjoyed doing it. And if you can, and if you’ve got something to say and people say, “hey, that was good, I liked seeing what you did” then you carry on doing it. But I’ve never wanted that to take over from the serious side of my work, which is the big chunky tomes like the we’re talking about here.HODGES: Have you received any pushback from more traditional believers within your own tradition about some of the ways that you try to bring scholarship into the conversation?WRIGHT: Well, in my own tradition, which is the Anglican Church, the Church of England, occasionally people say various things about “Oh, well no, we’re not sure we can cope with this.” But in England particularly, we have—surprisingly considering our heritage—we have a very anti-intellectual culture. A lot of people, including people who would be ashamed not to know the basics of nuclear physics or whatever it might be, they see a book of four or five hundred pages on Jesus or Paul or something, and they say, “Oh, no no…that looks, that looks really… that’s a bit much, I mean uh it’s quite expensive, too, uh I think I’ll go for this little one” and they’ll pick up something sort of eighty pages. And I’m thinking, come on, you know, A, the book doesn’t cost you any more than you would pay for a night out at the theater, probably a lot less actually especially if you live in London. And B, you’re perfectly capable of reading quite serious arguments about other things, why not this?So, I’ve had to push against that, really, the sort of sense that we only want the short popular version, the thing we can read on a Friday evening in the bathtub or whatever, rather than the big serious thing. And so it’s been one of my minor missions in life to encourage people in my tradition that actually they can and should read the bigger things. And I’ve tried to write the bigger things in a way which is enjoyable. You know, I don’t believe in writing stodgy tedious prose if I can help it. “MIPodcast Moments” are transcribed excerpts of interesting extracts from the MIPodcast for your quick consideration. See our growing list of transcripts HERE.