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.
Year: 2009
Missionaries to Dinner, 1854 Style
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.
Understanding Thomas L. Kane
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.
Welcome Guest Blogger Matt Grow
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
Reminders: SMPT & Summer Seminar
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).
Too Much Truth?
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.
The Ashtabula Horror
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.
Why Are the Faithful Fleeing?
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.
Elijah and the Sealing Power
I’ve been thinking about this week’s Relief Society lesson.
Intentions
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!
Michael Scott and C.S. Lewis
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.
If You Had Been a Mormon Boy Born in 1915 …
… 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:
Commentary on 1 Ne. 17, concluded
Continuing part 1 , part 2, and part 3. Nephi’s response to his brothers directly attacks their understanding of Moses’s significance.
Intellectual Conversion
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
A Child’s-Eye View of the Mormon Silk Experiment
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.
Expected Value of A Fetus
A thoughtful reader asked me if there were any economic tools that could be brought to bear in valuing a fetus. Of course there are! And in fewer than a 1000 words, no less!
“The ‘Wild West’ Has Ceased to Be”
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.
The Mormon Index
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.”
The Political Uses of Debt and Mormon History
Yesterday’s discussion got me thinking about debt, in particular the political uses of debt. Here, I think that the experience of the American Revolution and the failure of the Confederacy may have something to tell us about Mormon history.
Extended Deadline: Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference
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.
Friedrich Schulzke: “It Fell to My Lot to Guide the Little Branch”
Friedrich Schulzke
If You See Her, Say Hello
We are delighted to announce that Ardis Parshall’s posts will be returning to T&S.
Brand New Day
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.
Commentary on 1 Nephi 17, pt. 3
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; yea, and our brother is like him. (1 Ne. 17:22) There is a great deal that is going on in this sentence.
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
We’ve spiffed up our design a little bit. Have a look around and let us know what you like and what you don’t. We may not do anything about your comments; but then again, we might, and the venting should be good for you regardless.
Spooky action at a distance
I am a total NPR dork. I would LOVE to have Carl Kasell’s voice on my answering machine; when I was in middle school, I felt betrayed when I learned that Lake Woebegone wasn’t a real place; and I admit that I joined Ira Flatow’s Science Friday Facebook group (“for those who love Science Friday. Or Ira Flatow.”). In fact, all my scientific knowledge pretty much comes from either Science Friday or the SciFi channel. That’s essentially my disclaimer before I jump into a discussion of quantum mechanics: my knowledge of quantum entanglement is limited to how much Ira Flatow could fit into a 22 minute segment. In other words, nowhere near enough knowledge to respond to the inevitable cries of exasperation by the all the quantum physicists who regularly read T&S…
Commentary on 1 Nephi 17, pt. 2
Laman and Lemuel make their appearance in chapter 17 in verse 17, where they say:
Elder Ballard on the Inauguration
“We need to exercise our prayers and help [President Obama] accomplish the great objectives that he has set.” Discuss.
A Psalm for Inauguration Day
Ooooobama!
The swearing-in of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States is just around the corner. It’s an exciting time to be living in Washington, DC – even if we don’t dare leave our house to brave the swarm of people descending on the nation’s capital to watch the inauguration. Even our not-quite-two-year-old daughter is catching Obama-fever. We haven’t gone out of our way to teach her anything about Obama, but she still has absorbed quite a bit (it helps that the city is absolutely SATURATED with Obama-related stuff). She now points to pictures of Obama and yells, “Oooooobama!!“