mormon studies review

When Spencer Fluhman became editor-in-chief of the Mormon Studies Review in 2013 he envisioned a periodical that would “track what is now a vibrant, varied, and international academic engagement with Mormon institutions, lives, ideas, texts, and stories.”As promised, its review essays, book reviews, and roundtable discussions have chronicled and assessed the developing field of Mormon studies, offering readers a comprehensive venue capturing discussions of current scholarship on Mormonism.Five volumes into his editorship, Fluhman says the Review has built considerable goodwill for the Institute, for BYU, and for Mormon Studies.“MSR has gathered LDS scholars and almost an equal number of non-LDS scholars together in dynamic exchanges on a range of topics,” Fluhman said. “The number of women, people of color, and scholars from varied religious backgrounds reflects the diversity of the modern American and international academy. In its diversity, scholarly standards, and the quality of its broad intellectual engagement, it is a critical meeting place for scholars of the LDS tradition.”Fluhman said part of the Review‘s uniqueness pertains to its intended audience. While BYU already produces several publications for a wide Latter-day Saint audience, such as BYU Studies Quarterly and Religious Educator, the Institute was eager to fill a void where audiences in the academy were concerned. The Review places Mormon studies within larger contexts and speaks to scholars across relevant disciplines.To help extend the Review‘s reach, the Institute is excited to announce a new publishing partnership with the University of Illinois Press.Beginning with volume six, the Mormon Studies Review will be published by the University of Illinois Press for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Editorial direction and oversight remains at the Maxwell Institute, while the University of Illinois Press will handle production, subscription, and distribution duties—including placing the Review in JSTOR, one of the largest digital repositories of scholarly periodicals in the world.As the Review‘s reach expands, our hope is that scholarship on Mormonism will become ever more vibrant. More information about subscriptions is forthcoming. In the meantime, we invite you to browse through our past issues to either remind yourself of, or to become acquainted with, what the Review has offered thus far. Rachel Cope is managing editor of the Mormon Studies Review and an associate professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. She received a PhD in American History (with an emphasis in women’s history and religious history) from Syracuse University

From Benjamin Park, an associate editor of the Mormon Studies Review Another November means another issue of Mormon Studies Review. This year marks a half-decade of production, a fact of which we are proud. We hope our readers will find this year’s contents both stimulating and rigorous.Volume 5 features two roundtables, one focused on a book and the other on a theme. The review panel zeroes in on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (Knopf, 2017), a monumental book written by a prestigious scholar. The three reviewers represent divergent angles: Ann M. Little, a noted microhistorian in her own right, examines Ulrich’s craft and context(s); Paul Reeve, a leading historian of Mormonism and Utah, places the book within those fields; and finally, Sarah Carter writes from the perspective of someone familiar with the history of polygamy outside of Mormonism. Ulrich then responds to these reviews, offering some personal context to the book. We're providing free access to this roundtable here.The next roundtable is a forum on a relevant and engaging topic: Mormonism as media. Benjamin Peters and John Durham Peters, both recognized authorities in the field of communications, gathered six scholars to write about what Mormonism can offer those who study “media religion”—that is, how does religiosity use, and how is it used by, different forms of media. Examples range from music to seer stones, and from Broadway musicals to Jell-O. The introduction and each of the six essays make provocative arguments, survey a broad range of scholarship, and offer tentative suggestions for future work. Together, the forum would work exceptionally well for religious studies courses that wish to introduce scholars to new methodological approaches.As always, the Review's bread and butter is found in the individual book reviews. We have a single review essay this volume, a state-of-the-field essay by Amy Harris on how Mormon studies can learn from and add to recent developments in the field of genealogical scholarship. We then have sixteen shorter reviews by distinguished scholars surveying many of the recently published academic books that touch on Mormonism.In looking over the reviews collectively, a few themes stand out. Volume 5 reviews a number of documentary histories, including Kathleen Flake overviewing the Joseph Smith Papers Project’s Council of Fifty volume, Brent Rogers surveying William MacKinnon’s history of the Utah War, and Beverly Wilson Palmer engaging the collection of LDS women’s discourses published by the Church Historian’s Press. We have a duo of reviews that evaluate work on Mormons of color—with Sujey Vega on the Indian Student Placement Program and Elise Boxer on Warner McCary—as well as another duo that highlight interdisciplinary work, with reviews from Stephen Taysom and Cory Crawford. Professors will especially enjoy the review by Jennifer Graber on two new textbooks on Mormonism, with an eye toward what can be assigned in the classroom.And that’s not even to mention reviews from illustrious scholars like Leigh Eric Schmidt, Matthew Avery Sutton, and Seth Perry. In fact, we're giving everyone free access right away to Perry's review of Ann Taves's new book, Revelatory Events.We at the Mormon Studies Review aim to be the gauge with which scholars who might not be devoted to the field can nevertheless keep up with its developments. A one-stop-shop for scholarship on Mormonism, if you will. We hope readers will find this newest volume another contribution in that tradition.Subscribe to the digital MSR for only $10 here. Free Sample Pieces Review panel on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A House Full of Females, including Ann M. Little, W. Paul Reeve, Sarah Carter 'Sounding Mormonism,' by Sharon J. Harris and Peter McMurray Review of Ann Taves, Revelatory Events, by Seth Perry

Sharon J. Harris and Peter McMurray are here to tell us about the surprising connection between Mormonism and headphones. This guest post is a supplement to their full essay, “Sounding Mormonism,” from the Mormon Studies Review vol. 5 (2018). Volume 5 will be available tomorrow, but you can read Harris’s and McMurray’s essay right now. It is part of a fascinating forum on Mormonism as Media, edited by John Durham Peters and Benjamin Peters. What does it mean to look at sound? Or more precisely, how do we experience images of devices and objects that we immediately understand as being profoundly sonic? In the latest Mormon Studies Review we wrote an essay called “Sounding Mormonism.” It anchors Mormonism’s sonic history in material objects, and for each sounding object we include an image. In some cases, like that of Joseph Smith’s seer stone, the object might imply a more obviously visual dimension than sonic one. (If it’s not immediately apparent why the seer stone is in fact a sonic object, you’ll have to check out our essay!)Each image presented its own difficulties, whether because of permissions (we would have loved to include an image of the iconic playbill/program from The Book of Mormon if Broadway had cooperated) or availability.The biggest challenge was the image of headphones, invented by Nathaniel Baldwin, a Mormon, in his Utah home in 1910. Finding contemporary images of the headphones took some sleuthing, but even the nomenclature for the object was tricky in this case: Baldwin’s company marketed them as “radio head-sets” rather than as headphones. And it’s not hard to find popular media articles online that tell of a longer history of headphones—depending how one defines the term and parameters.But even once we had agreed on the wording, the question of what images to include posed difficulties for us. We eventually tracked down a selection of images that we thought had relevance. We’re including them here with a very short description of what we found appealing about them in clarifying Baldwin’s project.1 1. Single-unit headphone Click to enlarge

Mormon Studies Review, volume 4, is available now. Before you dive in (and don’t miss the two free sample articles linked at the bottom of this post), I thought I’d reflect for a moment on continuing questions about audience and voice. Who is writing in the Review, what are they writing about, and whom is the Review for?I saw intellectual storm clouds gathering on the horizon over my little guild of Mormon history scholars, and I told them so at an academic conference in 2015. Self-serving for the editor-in-chief of the Mormon Studies Review, yes, but I provoked them with the question of Mormon history’s relationship to the rise of academic Mormon studies. After all, a thunderclap from that morning’s conference session on Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon—featuring a packed room and stimulating presentations by two literature professors and a critical care physician—was still ringing in my ears as I spoke. Could we historians eventually be crowded out by anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and religious studies scholars?As academic religious studies continued its rowdy ascent and as the academic study of the Latter-day Saint tradition is increasingly shaped by it—I note that all the endowed chairs in Mormon studies sit in religious studies departments—I knew we should expect more discussions between scholars from varied backgrounds in the future. Publishing venues related to Mormon studies should follow these conversations carefully.I was trained in both history and religious studies, and I’m a bit of a disciplinary anarchist at heart anyway, but my reappointment as editor-in-chief of the Mormon Studies Review in 2015 has kept issues of audience, method, and tone at the forefront of my mind. My 2016 appointment as executive director of the Review’s publisher, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, has me seeing these conversations in another light still, since the Institute aspires to engage meaningfully with multiple audiences, and all within the context of both academic rigor and LDS identity and faith commitment.I can summarize the issues I consider most pressing with an observation and an assertion.The observation: Mormon studies and Mormon history share complicated relationships with Latter-day Saints.The assertion: As a result, the journals that serve the field (or is it fields?) still have more thinking to do about audience and voice.I’ll wax anecdotal. A couple of years ago, Maxwell Institute leaders asked me to advise them on the future of the Mormon Studies Review. They were interested in engaging more fully with the rising academic field of the same name, but wondered if the journal should even continue given the already crowded periodical field. My response was brief—well, brief for me—and would not have impressed any capitalists in the room. Don’t worry about the LDS audience, I said. Other journals have that covered. Speak instead to scholars, period. Who cares about subscriptions?As my brief career as a publishing consultant concluded, I wondered who in their right mind would be willing to edit it.After my somewhat ironic appointment a few months later, our first editorial advisory board meeting provided the opportunity to test my off-the-cuff instincts. I read the self-descriptions of the journals in the wide Mormon studies universe and, sure enough, several aimed to translate intellectual life for educated Latter-day Saints. Others, like the Journal of Mormon History or Element, were more discipline-specific. Yes, I reassured myself, there is space here. We’ll translate too, but in the other direction—towards scholars.The Review’s advisory board cured any lingering conflicted feelings. Drop any hybridity goals, they urged, and tilt unreservedly towards the academy. So as it stands, it’s the Institute’s humble Mormon studies endeavor that seems least interested in a broad audience—which isn’t to say educated Latter-day Saints should feel uninvited!Pressing questions remain. Perhaps most fundamentally for us: if a journal is published and tens of people subscribe, does it really exist? I joke—hundreds of you read the Review in print and many more on our website. My serious point is that the academic reading market makes questions of audience, voice, and intellectual life unavoidable and visceral.Secondly—and this has been a recurring issue for us at the Review—can Latter-day Saint scholars effectively translate their work for a mixed scholarly community? Should they? Without question, our most common editorial directive to LDS authors is to revise with a more mixed audience in mind. What might it mean for the field that getting the Saints to face away from the choir seems to be a persisting problem?Complicating these sorts of questions for me these days is the fact that much of what we do at the Maxwell Institute unapologetically faces the LDS choir. Our Living Faith book series, much of our work on LDS scripture, and to a smaller extent the Maxwell Institute Podcast—these are intended, first and foremost, for a Latter-day Saint audience.All this helps explain why the Mormon Studies Review’s tilt towards the broader scholarly community is not the sign of an insidious secularism spreading at BYU. For us, it’s primarily a question of audience, voice, and scholarly niche. Our work in the Review thus relates to a recent insight offered by LDS scholar Grant Hardy: “It used to be that the only people who cared about Mormonism were Mormons themselves and anti-Mormons. This is no longer the case. Thanks to pluralism and postmodernism, there is more room in academia for the perspectives of believing scholars. Academics have little interest in debates about whether Mormonism is true or false, but they are increasingly interested in Mormonism as religious and social movement.” ((Grant Hardy, “More Effective Apologetics,” 2016 FairMormon Conference, August 4, 2016.)) We at the Review recognize the costs, both in terms of audience and direct influence on the rank-and-file LDS Church membership. Even so, we see our scholarly “translation,” bridge building, and academic orientation as a service of its own to the community of minds that engages the LDS tradition and, perhaps as profoundly, to the institutions that sponsor us. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught, “For a disciple of Jesus Christ, academic scholarship is a form of worship.” ((Elder Neal A. Maxwell, “The Disciple-Scholar,” in On Becoming a Disciple-Scholar, ed. Henry B. Eyring (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1995), 7.)) * And now it’s my privilege to introduce you to volume 4 of the Mormon Studies Review. Rather than giving you a full run-down of the contents, I’ll simply point to the table of contents and say we’re thrilled about our coverage of more than twenty important books on Mormon women and feminism, the Joseph Smith Papers, politics, music, and more. Fenella Cannell’s opening essay on Mormonism and anthropology is as engaging a piece as we’ve published so far.

Joseph Smith himself recorded or dictated at least four accounts of what Latter-day Saints have come to call his First Vision. The first known account was part of his attempt to write a history of the church in 1832. Here's an excerpt: ...therefore I cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go and to obtain mercy and the Lord heard my cry in the wilderness and while in attitude of calling upon the Lord a piller of fire light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me and I was filled with the spirit of god and the opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph thy sins are forgiven thee. go thy walk in my statutes and keep my commandments behold I am the Lord of glory I was crucifyed for the world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life... This account was discovered by church historians in the 1960s. In addition to sparking some debates in Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, it received attention in the soon-to-retire church magazine Improvement Era and in a 1971 book by LDS historian Milton Backman. ((The latter two references are cited in the LDS Church's new Gospel Topics essay on the First Vision accounts. Other discussions included James B. Allen, “The Significance of Joseph Smith’s ‘First Vision’ in Mormon Thought,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (Autumn 1966): 40–41; and Dean C. Jessee, “The Early Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” BYU Studies 9, no. 3 (1969): 275–94. In 1982 Marvin S. Hill wrote a retrospective on the 1960s First Vision debates for Dialogue.)) It hasn't challenged the official canonized version in the Pearl of Great Price (originally recorded in 1838) for pride of place in LDS thought.Recently the LDS church made each account (and a few other secondhand accounts) more widely available than ever as part of a Gospel Topics essay called 'First Vision Accounts.' Images of the handwritten records and transcripts prepared by specialists provide unprecedented access to the raw material for anyone with an Internet connection. (Thanks, Joseph Smith Papers Project!) Anyone can analyze the various accounts by asking about differences, consistencies, and what these things suggest about the accuracy or intent of the reports. How reliable is human memory?Not everyone will be interested in these questions, but it's becoming increasingly clear that those who are interested can't be neatly divided into apologetic or anti-Mormon camps. Volume three of the Mormon Studies Review features a dialog between two scholars of religion—one Latter-day Saint and one not—who carefully analyzed the recorded accounts together. ((See Ann Taves and Steven C. Harper, 'Joseph Smith's First Vision: New Methods for the Analysis of Experience-Related Texts,' Mormon Studies Review 3 (2016): 53–84.)) Assessing the accuracy of 'experience-based' witness accounts is difficult. It calls for more nuance than you typically get with Reddit, Buzzfeed, or Twitter.The technical language these scholars use isn't a smokescreen. It helps them expose their assumptions and to identify and explain their interpretive differences as they seek common ground. It helps them hold each other accountable. It prevents them from talking past each other. It allows them to draw a 'relatively clear distinction between the evidence' from the written accounts on one hand, and their 'interpretations of the evidence' on the other. Then they can offer more specific reasons for their interpretations. ((Ibid., 76. They make good use of a model Taves will lay out more fully in Revelatory Events: Unusual Experiences and the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths (forthcoming, Princeton University Press).))By reading their exchange we begin to see the imaginative element of historical work, ridding us of the fantasy that the past is a solid set of facts everyone can agree about so long as they're reasonable like us. *Subscribers can read Ann Taves and Steven C. Harper's exchange here. Purchase a digital subscription to all three Institute periodicals here.

I’m pleased to announce that volume three of the Mormon Studies Review is now available in print and digital formats. Digital-only subscriptions include access to the MSR in addition to the Maxwell Institute’s other periodicals, the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and Studies in the Bible and Antiquity. That’s three subscriptions for the price of one! Please read, enjoy, and tell your colleagues and friends.As with previous volumes, our third addresses a wide variety of topics and reviews a selection of great new books. Here's a brief overview of what’s inside. You'll notice we've included links to two pieces that are available free of charge to everyone right away. Forum: Lived Mormonism Volume three opens with a collection of essays about 'lived Mormonism'—that is, the way that both institutional and grassroots notions and practices interact to produce the full experience of Mormonism. As editors, our aim was to give our readers a taste of the variety of ways that our understanding of Mormonism can be enriched by paying attention to people's lived experience. Though it would have been impossible to be comprehensive, we are excited about what these essays show.Stacilee Ford’s essay on lived Mormonism in Hong Kong, for example, displaces what is too often the default (Utah-centric) view of the faith. Ford provides a window on the Mormonism of Filipino, Indonesian, and Nepalese hospitality and domestic workers in Hong Kong, as well as the political and cultural dynamics that emerge from their interactions with more Western-oriented members on the island.Next, in one of two preview essays, Megan Sanborn Jones returns our attention to the Western U.S. to explore the intersection of scripture and sacred history, ritual, and theater as these play out in the pageants that many Latter-day Saints participate in every year. You can download a free copy here.Josh Probert discusses the deep significance that can be read off of even the most mundane, “non-language-based” material objects in order to tell the story of Mormonism. Kate Holbrook discusses leadership patterns and practices, and Danille Elise Christensen considers how scholars of living cultures can expose and explore assumptions and stereotypes that are often unacknowledged but which can lead scholars to relevant points of tension and dynamism within a religious community. Essays and Review Essays Next we have two very different essays. The first is the transcript of a fascinating exchange between Ann Taves and Steven C. Harper at the 2014 conference of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego about the nature and status of the gold plates in the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. The other is an authoritative “state of the literature” essay by George B. Handley on Mormon environmental scholarship.Three review essays of particularly significant recent titles in Mormon studies follow: Michelle Chaplin Sanchez evaluates Terryl L. Givens’s history of Mormon theological thought, Wrestling the Angel; Sylvester A. Johnson reviews W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness; and Cristine Hutchison-Jones reviews J.B. Haws’s The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception. We decided to make the review of Reeve’s book available outside the subscription paywall as a way of encouraging more people to read and subscribe. Download it here and pass the word along. Review Panel It is unusual to do a multi-author book review, but then again, Reaching the Nations by David Stewart and Matthew Martinich is not your average book. It is a massive undertaking that aspires to compile statistical and demographic information about the worldwide membership and operations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Recognizing that no solitary reviewer was likely to have the area expertise to competently assess all aspects of this project, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye assembled an international team of scholars to comb through the information and offer what we hope will be received as a fair appraisal of this important resource’s strengths and weaknesses. Book Reviews Finally, we include reviews of seven significant recent works, including Michael Hicks, The Mormon Tabernacle Chior: A Biography (reviewed by Stephen A. Marini), Craig Harline’s Way Below the Angels: The Pretty Clearly Troubled but Not Even Close to Tragic Confessions of a Real Life Mormon Missionary (reviewed by Anne Blue Wills), and Adam Jortner’s review of Jedediah S. Rodgers, ed., The Council of Fifty: A Documentary History.Thanks are due once again to the contributors, editorial board, editors, and production staff. You'll notice this volume includes DOIs (digital object identifiers) for the first time. This is a small but significant accomplishment (thanks to the work of Don Brugger and Blair Hodges) that will make our articles easier to find online and crosslink to other scholarship in the future.We hope you enjoy volume three! You can subscribe here. D. Morgan Davis is the director of the Maxwell Institute's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative and an associate editor of the Mormon Studies Review.

Melissa Inouye, associate editor of the Mormon Studies Review, offers this update on Mormon studies on an international scale, including a preview of relevant panels at the upcoming conference of the Mormon History Association.

Laurie Maffly-Kipp has taught university courses on Mormonism off and on for over a decade. During that time she also edited the Penguin Classics edition of the Book of Mormon. She's currently working on a book on international Mormonism. Though not a member of the LDS Church herself, she brings a wealth of experience, understanding, and sensitivity to her work.Maffly-Kipp reflects on her experiences in the latest volume of the Mormon Studies Review: 'As I tell the students in the first week, my goal is not to convince them that the Mormon faith is good or bad, right or wrong. I do seek to help them become better informed about the tradition and, by extension, about their own religious beliefs (if they have any) and the dynamics of religious communities, broadly conceived. What they do with that knowledge has varied. I have taught inactive LDS students who decided after graduation to go on missions, evangelicals who continued to divinity school, atheists who read further in the Book of Mormon, and Muslims who found new conversation partners in local wards. Their journeys never fail to surprise and delight me.' You can read Maffly-Kipp's full essay here. It's part of MSR volume 2's forum on 'Teaching Mormon Studies.' You can subscribe to the digital edition of this volume for only ten dollars.See here for more details.

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye of the University of Auckland is an associate editor of the Mormon Studies Review. She’s here to announce the publication of MSR volume 2 and to provide access to three free sample pieces.—BHodges

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye is joining the Mormon Studies Review editorial team as an associate editor alongside Morgan Davis and Benjamin Park. Review editor Spencer Fluhman invited Inouye especially in order to broaden the Review’s reach in international studies. “We’re thrilled to have Dr. Inouye join our editorial staff,” Fluhman said. “She brings world class training, a sharp editorial eye, and a global vision for Mormon studies. The Review will certainly benefit from her intellectual gifts.”

We’re still working on making a digital subscription to the Mormon Studies Review available. In the meantime, volume one of the Review is now available in a digital edition for just ten dollars. Help us spread the word!Now’s the perfect time to catch up on Matthew Bowman’s discussion of the work of Terryl and Fiona Givens, David Howlett’s review of the new Brigham Young biography, Susanna Morrill’s reflections on gender in Mormon studies, Kathryn Lofton’s take on Paul Gutjahr’s Book of Mormon biography, and many other outstanding contributions.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the Mormon Studies Review, what are you waiting for? Perhaps a few sample pieces from volume 1 will pique your interest. The editors chose three pieces that are representative of the kind of work you’ll find in this and forthcoming issues of the Review. Each is available for free on the Maxwell Institute’s Publications page.

Benjamin E. Park is an associate editor of the Mormon Studies Review and a PhD candidate in history at the University of Cambridge. Hard copies of the new issue are in the mail. If you haven’t done so yet, you can subscribe to the Review here. We’re still working out the details about online-only and reduced-price subscriptions. —BHodges

J. Spencer Fluhman, Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University, has been named editor of the Mormon Studies Review. Fluhman earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and is the author of A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). In this post, Professor Fluhman responds to seven questions about his editorship. Questions and comments can be sent to blairhodges@byu.edu, or leave a comment on the Maxwell Institute’s Facebook wall.