spencer fluhman

For immediate release. From Y News.

This guest post comes courtesy of Spencer Fluhman, co-editor (along with Brent L. Top) of a festschrift in honor of Robert L. Millet which comes out on January 15. Fluhman is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and editor-in-chief of the Mormon Studies Review. Latter-day Saint scholar Robert L. Millet’s 2014 retirement provided an opportunity for those who consider him a mentor, colleague, and friend to pay tribute to his prodigious career of nearly four decades. Both in terms of his staggering literary production and in his broad collection of colleagues, it is not an overstatement to place Bob, as he’s affectionately known to us, among the most influential Latter-day Saint voices of the past quarter century. Let Us Reason Together is a collection of nineteen essays written in his honor—a modest monument to his remarkable career as an administrator, teacher, and writer. Bob’s students number in the thousands, his readers number perhaps ten times that, and his friends in academia, the Church Educational System of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and around the globe in many faiths would be difficult to number indeed. That these pieces range across topics, disciplines, and even religious traditions seems especially appropriate given Millet’s own broad reach.Few Latter-day Saints have had as big an impact on the Church’s interreligious relationship with other Christian faiths as Bob. His interest in building bridges of understanding can be traced to his Southern American upbringing with an LDS father and Methodist mother, but a particular encounter with a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles also played an important part. When Brigham Young University’s Religious Education department needed a new dean they looked to Millet, who met with members of the Twelve to discuss his appointment in 1991. According to Bob’s account, Elder Neal A. Maxwell provided needed counsel: “We had a wonderful conversation. He gave some encouraging counsel. Then he came around and put his hands on my head and said, ‘By the power of the Holy Apostleship’—that got my attention. . . . He said a lot of things that I still can’t remember. I remember how inspired I felt by his blessing. But then words that he repeated three different times through the course of what he was saying. ‘Brother Robert, you’ve got to find ways to reach out to those of other faiths more.’ ‘Now Brother Bob, you need to build some bridges between us and those of other faiths.’ And then he said again just before he closed. And it just weighed on me.” Bob has gone on to author, co-author, or edit over 70 books and 180 articles and book chapters, many of which explore Latter-day Saint belief in comparison to other Christians. Much to his credit, the authors gathered in Let Us Reason Together may or may not agree with Millet on any given topic. He has long been confident that Mormonism can more than hold its own under intense scrutiny, and he’s keen to set a big table for the discussion.Simply put, he has personally mentored a large number of Mormon educators and has won the trust and respect of a significant contingent of Protestant fellow travelers. We who count ourselves grateful recipients of his generous influence hope this volume’s collective thinking, faith, and lively conversation form a worthy “thank you” to our cherished colleague and friend. * * *Let Us Reason Together: Essays in Honor of the Life’s Work of Robert L. Millet is a co-production of Deseret Book, BYU’s Religious Studies Center, and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.

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.

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University is pleased to announce the inauguration of a new annual periodical that will address the needs of a growing community of scholars who contribute to the interdisciplinary field of Mormon studies. The Mormon Studies Review will publish reviews of important books and other publications relevant to the academic study of Mormonism, along with review essays that will chronicle the field and assess its development.M. Gerald Bradford, executive director of the Maxwell Institute, has appointed J. Spencer Fluhman, Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University, as the first editor of the new Review.

...with reflections on the Maxwell Institute's mission Over the past decade, Richard Mouw evangelical (Calvinist) president of Fuller Theological Seminary has been in dialogue with various Latter-day Saints in order to better understand Mormonism and to help Mormons better understand evangelical Christians. During Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns he became one of the go-to sources in news reports about Mormon/Evangelical relationships. He's taken a lot of heat for this within his religious community, going as far as apologizing to the Mormon community on behalf of evangelicals who he said had sinned against Mormonism by misrepresenting their beliefs and practices. His latest book Talking with Mormons: An Invitation to Evangelicals is an effort to educate the evangelical community about his ongoing work with Mormonism.

Here's an excerpt from Spencer Fluhman's editor's introduction to volume 1 of the Mormon Studies Review: As an object of study, religion has been reborn in American universities. When my own discipline of history recently announced religion as the largest subspecialty for historians working in the United States, it con�rmed what many of us had experienced anecdotally: religion continues to thrive in modern American life, and scholars are growing increasingly attuned to its signi�cance in the past and present. This phenomenon has had profound implications for the study of Mormonism. As scholars have grown more and more sophisticated in their study of religion, and as it has assumed a more prominent place in many disciplines, academic interest in Mormonism has �owered correspondingly. And when the public spotlight �nds its way to prominent Mormons or to the growth and institutional in�uence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, scholars and pundits alike crave understanding of the faith.

The Religious Educator, published by BYU's Religious Studies Center, is aimed largely at the Church's Seminary, Institute, and BYU Religious Education instructors. I'll highlight two excellent pieces from the most recent issue, one of its best ever, over the next week. Back issues are available online, but nonsubscribers must wait a year before accessing the latest issue. (You can subscribe for ten bucks here.) The following excerpt is from Dana M. Pike's 'Mormon Studies and Religious Studies: A Conversation with Spencer Fluhman.' Fluhman is editor of the Maxwell Institute's Mormon Studies Review. Preceding this excerpt, Fluhman describes the rise in academic interest about Mormonism over the past decade. Fluhman's responses give a good sense of the Maxwell Institute's developing vision for Mormon studies. We thank the Religious Educator for providing this excerpt for our blog. BHodges