Life On Gold Plates

Review, Tom Mould, “Still, the Small Voice”

2011-11-30T18:03:00.001-07:00

Title: Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition
Author: Tom Mould
Publisher: Utah State University Press
Genre: Religion/Folklore
Year: 2011
Pages: 448
Binding: Cloth
ISBN13: 978-0-87421-817-6
Price: $39.95 (e-book $32.00)

Wordsworth, should I believe you?

"Sweet is the lore which nature brings,
Our meddling intellect
Distorts the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect."

Replace “nature” with “religion” above and you raise one of the most difficult problems I see in the study of religion, especially as I’ve studied my own faith. The wind bloweth where it listeth and we try to catch it in jars, measure it with our rulers, weigh it in our hands, graph it in our charts, fold it up and tuck it between the pages of our books. The letter alone killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

Perhaps no gospel subject perplexes me more than personal revelation. This is due to the simple fact that as a practicing Mormon, I believe it encompasses the ways God speaks to me, so it’s relevant to the way I understand my day-to-day experiences. When does dissection of such a foundational belief become “murder” so to speak, rendering the belief lifeless on the academic table? I admit this is the issue that weighed most heavy on my mind as I began reading Tom Mould’s new book, "Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition." Soon enough the weight became lighter than a feather, not merely because Mould (an associate professor of anthropology and folklore at Elon University, and a non-Mormon) so ably describes LDS thought, but because he also provides fresh perspectives I hadn’t considered before. For an academic book, then, I found this one to be oddly intellectual and devotional, inhabiting a liminal space between my brain and my heart.

In this review I’ll describe the general arc of Mould’s narrative, discuss the undergirding method and assumptions, analyze its usefulness for insiders and outsiders alike, and situate it within the broader Mormon studies movement. Hopefully, when it all comes together you’ll understand why I’m calling "Still, the Small Voice" my absolute favorite Mormon book of 2011 (with all the respective weight you want to put behind that).

Outline in a Nutshell

Chapter one describes LDS thought on revelation in broad strokes—what it is, who expects it, when, why, etc. Chapter two discusses “performance norms,” or informal rules about how and when members of the Church share stories (60). Chapter three shifts to the “formal qualities” of our stories, developing a typology of prescriptive (solicited and unsolicited) and descriptive revelation. This delves into how cultural expectations help shape the ways we experience revelation, as well as the ways we relate it to others (137). Chapter four lists the “building blocks of the narrative tradition,” which are common motifs that crop up in the stories you hear in sacrament meeting and Sunday School (192). Chapter five focuses more broadly on the “echoes of culture” found in our stories, the over-riding and recurring themes our stories often revolve around, which include domestic life and church work (242). It discusses ways that region and era, age and gender impact the stories. Mould finds, for instance, that women are much more likely than men to relate stories of being prompted to protect children in the domestic sphere whereas men are much more likely to receive revelation on the location of a home (261-288; see also 316, 353, 420), following typical gender role expectations. Chapter six is unique in terms of what typically receives attention in folklore studies. Rather than paying exclusive attention to oral contexts, Mould recognizes the need to discuss the relationship between written texts like journals and official Church publications and oral story-telling (327). His rhetorical analysis of all twelve issues of the 2007 "Ensign" is fascinating (347, 349, 371), while throughout the book he includes many specific stories of personal revelation from a variety of printed sources in addition to his oral transcripts.

Mould’s Method

Mould’s over-riding goal in this book is to describe the ways Mormons understand personal revelation, but more broadly he focuses on the “social dimension of personal revelation,” which is the dimension of sharing our stories with each other:

"Experience and narrative are drawn together in a complex relationship guided by the abilities of the human mind to comprehend the divine; the communicative abilities to express the ambiguous, the visceral, and the spiritual; and the cultural norms and expectations for narrative, performance, and the construction of social identity" (381).

This is a fancy way of saying that Mould explores Mormon beliefs and values by paying attention to the stories we tell each other about what God tells us. The stories he analyzes come from official Church publications ("Ensign," "Preach My Gospel," all the way back to stories in the "Juvenile Instructor") Mormon diaries, folklore archives, transcripts of personal interviews he conducted as part of his research, his notes from sacrament meeting talks, and a host of other sources. (Speaking of transcripts, many of them are based on his own recordings and some go on for multiple pages. How cool would a Kindle book be with embedded recordings?)

Note that “folklore” in the academic sense doesn’t equate to “falselore.” Folklore, according to Mould’s view, is assumed to be “true” in the sense that it actually reflects the values of the tellers and listeners, though it may or may not “be supported by historical evidence” (4-5). Folklore studies take a close look at questions of “artistic performance”; the structure of a narrative, common motifs, the impact of genre, morphing, etc. (5). He neither accepts a folktale at face-value, nor does he dismiss the apparently fantastic as beyond the realm of possibility. Did I mention he’s not a Mormon? This approach bears directly on my initial fear—that academic study simply has little to say on the ways I feel the Spirit (which I admit should not be the guiding expectation for reading a book like this). As my description suggests, I detected three strategies Mould uses to compensate for the ways that the “letter killeth”:

1. Separating “temporal” from “spiritual” revelation, the former dealing with other “facets of life, including daily, ongoing decisions” as James E. Faust described (40), the latter bearing directly on the truth-claims of LDS doctrinal propositions. This may seem like an easy out for Mould, but he found that “in the folk narrative tradition of personal revelation…temporal revelations dominate” (40). He still spends a few pages describing conversion narratives and testimonies, but the bulk of the book focuses on the “temporal” (see also 40-5, 244, 328, 383). In order to show you how inclusive Mould’s book is, here are the index entries listed under “themes in personal revelation narratives” (447): children, church work, conversion and baptism, danger, death, finding a home, genealogy, guidance finding scripture, guidance speaking, healing, helping others, marriage, missionary work, preparation, spirit children, temple work, travel.

2. Focusing the assessment of personal revelation narrative accounts on the values they communicate, rather than attempting history-directed debunkery. He recognizes that “folklore can distort [values] through accentuation and omission,” but folklore theory helps analyze such distortions as well (5). One quick example of how this plays out: Mould relates the oft-told story of Wilford Woodruff, who was prompted to move the wagon his family was sleeping in during the night. Had he not immediately obeyed his family would have been destroyed by a fallen tree. Woodruff’s account contains elements found in more recent “prompting” stories, including the fact that obedience saved the day. In later iterations of this story, however, a new motif common to later “prompting” stories emerges. Woodruff is depicted as initially hesitant to follow the prompting, waiting until he is prompted multiple times before obeying. Absent from the initial tellings, this new motif is retroactively added by current members filling in the gaps with their memories (197-201).

3. Approaching narratives from an “emic,” or insider, perspective (4). This is an “experience-centered approach that honors, rather than dismisses, the belief systems under study” (6). Mould does a remarkable job in this regard. He’s finely attuned to LDS concepts, repeatedly helping the outsider by providing descriptions of LDS jargon and culture, describing the standard works, current structure of LDS worship services, pass-along cards, “greenies,” “the Y,” etc. etc. He doesn’t always nail it—he says D&C 124 was received in 1841 “in the specific context of having to abandon Nauvoo” rather than Missouri (408); conflates the word “atonement” with “repentance and forgiveness” (217); refers to Joseph F. Smith as Joseph Fielding Smith (301), and once refers to “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” as “the Proclamation on Marriage” (261) . These nit-picky errors only serve to show how often Mould is right on the emic money; they’re the only glaring errors I noticed in the whole book, and they’re negligible.

Mould for Insiders and Outsiders

Due to the emic approach, Mould’s analysis can actually help members of the church better assess the stories they’ve heard, the stories they tell, and even the ways they experience personal revelation. (See especially the discussion of reactions to failed revelations on 176.) Of course, it also means that some of the included narratives irritated me, like the MTC trainer who tells about a missionary who takes a shotgun blast to the chest, only to rise up and convert the would-be murderer who later becomes a Stake President “or something like that” (214). Plenty of other stories inspired me, like the “white-haired sister by the name of Needum” who showed up in the nick of time to administer a healing blessing to a dying baby, having “been set apart in the temple to bless the sick with her prayers” (217-8).

Mould notes that one of the biggest benefits of writing as an outsider is the “silent train” phenomenon, whereby insiders sometimes overlook aspects of the culture which are “so normalized that they are ignored” (404). Mould frequently makes the sort of observations I’ve come to expect from careful outsiders who take insiders seriously. One particularly striking example is his likening of family stories to Mormon ritual:

Family stories draw relatives closer together, binding them in story just as sacred temple rites such as sealings and baptisms of the dead bind them in eternity (330; this idea seems to be implicitly articulated by a Church member on 336, though Mould as observer explicitly makes the point in a way that wouldn’t have occurred to me).

Mormons will feel at home with the stories he relates, even the cringe-worthy ones (he knows many of us may clench our teeth as little Primary children recite parrot-monies, p. 234) . But what about the academic application? He isn’t always as careful to make the academic jargon understandable to Mormons, who perhaps aren’t his main target audience. The sometimes-pedantic descriptions can sound pretty funny at times: “Dreams and promptings are part of the same revelatory phenomenon. A thrice-repeated revelatory dream is equal to a thrice-repeated prompt” (203). Seeing the process of revelation depicted on Mould’s charts and graphs may seem a bit much, but they are useful tools for depicting his points. These elements signal that Mould’s book is intended for the wider audience of folklore studies, and it makes several important contributions to that field using Mormons as the subject through which broader principles are explored. Sometimes this wider application is quite jarring, as when he suddenly begins writing in archive-ese for a page (216). But more often the application is natural, as when he situates the common appearance of the number three in Mormon narratives with broader Western culture (202-203). In contrast with prior Mormon-themed folklore studies, Mould focuses on the concept of personal revelation, rather than particular categories of lore, like the Three Nephites or J. Golden Kimball stories. Theme, rather than story type, drives the book; something other folklorists could emulate to great advantage (25).

Mould and Mormon Studies
When I make a reflexive initial assessment of a new book I consider a few currently fashionable expectations about what constitutes “good academic scholarship,” or good Mormon studies. Having now read the book I can confidently say Mould knocks it out of the park on almost every point. First, Mormon studies is heavily dominated by insiders who hope to be joined by more outsiders. Enter Mould.

Second, Mormon studies have been dominated by the genre of history; most of the existing work focuses on 19th and early 20th century Mormonism. Mould focuses on the contemporary church while still paying due attention to the history, and makes use of new resources like Preach My Gospel, recent General Conference talks, church magazines, and member interviews.

Third, good Mormon studies not only says “look, scholarship on Mormonism can be quality scholarship like yours.” More than that, it says “look, scholarship on Mormonism can make an important contribution to your field in addition to its Mormon content.” In other words, this isn’t an academic book about Mormons, it’s a book about folklore using Mormons as a lens through which broader principles are examined. Of course, folklore studies have been doing this sort of thing for decades; folklore’s focus on value over “truth claims” anticipated the “new, new Mormon history” by a few decades (see 4-5, and esp. 242).

Fourth, Mould himself recognizes his book is limited by the relative homogeneity of his sources (9). For lack of space and resources, Mould wasn’t able to fully explore variations in “other regions and other countries.” He points to a “nascent body of scholarship” trying to pay due attention to these wider contexts and issues a call for more attention to “social, cultural, and religious contexts around the world [in order to] provide a more accurate picture of Mormonism as a global religion” (386). The closest he comes to such analysis are his discussions on the importance of dreams in Latin American Mormon contexts (50). But this is a wonderful first step, sets the grounds for many exciting prospects to come.

Conclusion

Returning to my initial concern, the one about how dissection of personal revelation carries the potential of leaving it dead on the table. Mould repeatedly analyzes how culture shapes the stories we tell and raises the question of whether this makes our stories natural, purely cultural, or whether they can be considered to be revelation from God (139, 149, 185, 196). He recognizes the trickiness of analyzing truth claims (321-3, 227, 383. Above all, Mould is trying to advance “a theory of interpretation that validates both personal experiences and shared cultural patters” (324, emphasis in orig.) He wants to bracket the truth-claim issue, leaving the reader the space to form a conclusion:

Experience dictates the “data” one can draw upon to narrate, while personal choice guides which of those experiences one chooses to share. Both reflect the hand of God as well as of men and women. Revelatory experiences reflect God’s concerns for people’s well-being as well as people’s own concerns in what they choose to pray about…Analyzing the themes in personal revelation narratives, therefore, can reveal both the intent of God in heaven and the concerns of people on Earth. For LDS members, the former is of greater interest. For the modest scope of this book, it is the latter that takes center stage (243).

There is a bit of blood involved in the dissection here, but Mould wields his scalpel with care. Believe it or not, this over-long review is a mere snapshot of Mould’s excellent work. Despite some very tough competition, and quite surprisingly to me, "Still, the Small Voice" is my absolutely favorite Mormon book of 2011 (with all the respective weight you want to put behind that).

Review: N.T. Wright, "Simply Jesus"

2011-11-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

Title: Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters
Author: N.T. Wright
Publisher: HarperOne
Genre: Christianity
Year: 2011
Pages: 240
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-06-208439-2
Price: $24.99

There are a lot of great things I could tell you about N.T. Wright’s latest book Simply Jesus. I could praise the way Wright, former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, clarifies Jesus’s claims about “the Kingdom of God” by situating him alongside Judah the Hammer, Simon the Star, Herod the Great, and Simon Bar-Giora–historical figures who, before and after Jesus, declared their kingdoms (105-117). I could analyze Wright’s seven-point typology of the Exodus as he depicts it playing out in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth (63-66, 174-176, etc.). I could explain the way Wright challenges the notion that Jesus was simply a good moral teacher by placing Jesus’s actions and claims within their ancient cultural context, trying to discover what he thought he was doing based on the very Hebrew scriptures he quoted and enacted (166, 170, etc.). I could dissect Wright’s employment of key Old Testament texts regarding the coming Kingdom of God, texts which Wright views as crucial to understanding Jesus’s claims and various reactions to them (151-166). I could engage in debates about properly interpreting the identity of the “servant” in the book of Isaiah (153-158). I could even hook you in by outlining the interesting, often compelling ways Wright tries to answer questions like “Look out the window…If you think Jesus is already installed as king of the world, why is the world still such a mess?” (198).

Indeed, there is plenty of stuff in Wright’s latest book which makes for compelling review fodder. Instead of any of the above, I’ll describe the clever central metaphor Wright employs throughout Simply Jesus in order to paint “A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters.”

Wright knows there has been a ton of debate about who Jesus was, who he believed he was, who others believed he was, and a host of other questions. Why write another book to add to the pile? Wright answers by employing a metaphor of “the perfect storm” (13). As the film of that title depicts, a fishing boat called the Andrea Gail was trapped between a cold front pushed in by a western wind on one side and a high pressure system coming from another direction–perfect ingredients for a huge storm. But a third factor, the left-overs from Hurricane Grace, swept in from the Atlantic to complete the perfect, that is utterly disastrous, storm. Wright uses this as an analogy for current debates about Jesus. The “high-pressure system” of conservative Christianity’s literalist biblical interpretations meets up with a “skeptical ‘western wind’,” which depicts Jesus as a man who wanted to teach good moral stories to people, or perhaps form a radical social program, all apart from heavenly direction (17-18). The third element is “the sheer historical complexity of speaking about Jesus” in the context of “first-century Palestinian Judaism,” the hurricane which completes the triple threat (20). Wright separates this third element from the second element: “the western wind of modernist skepticism and the eastern hurricane of historical puzzle are not the same thing” (22). This is his way of easing the minds of readers who believe serious scholarship is only a covert way of putting down religious faith (22). Rather than destroying faith, Wright understands careful historical and textual examination as the best way to demonstrate Jesus’s initial message, as well as his contemporary relevance.

Thus, context is king throughout Wright’s narrative of Jesus’s ministry, which is also framed using the “perfect storm” metaphor. Wright situates the trial and crucifixion of Jesus within the triple threat of pressure from the Roman Empire and the thousand-year-old expectations of Israel concerning deliverance from oppression, with God’s hurricane-like overriding plan executed through Jesus completing the ingredients (13-14; 151-152). In all of this Wright emphasizes Jesus’s Kingdom message, by which God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven. Wright emphasizes this theme over and over:

“First, it will not do to suppose that Jesus came to teach people ‘how to get to heaven.’ That view has been immensely popular in Western Christianity for many generations, but it simply won’t do. The whole point of Jesus’s public career was not to tell people that God was in heaven and that, at death, they could leave ‘earth’ behind and go to be with him there. It was to tell them that God was now taking charge, right here on earth; that they should pray for this to happen; that they should recognize, in his own work, the signs that it was happening indeed; and that when he completed his work, it would become reality” (144-145; see also 148, 184, 192, 194).

Reading Wright feels like curling up next to a fire on a dark, brisk night in a little cabin at the edge of the world. I’m not quite sure exactly why, but that’s how I feel when I’m reading Wright. I really like how he works with the New Testament. Here’s another excerpt:

“Layer upon layer it comes, dense and rich within the texts, echo upon echo, allusion and resonance tumbling over one another, so that for those with ears to hear it becomes un-missable, a crescendo of questions to which in the end there can be only one answer. Why are you speaking like this? Are you the one who is to come? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What sign can you show us? Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners? Where did this man get all this wisdom? How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Who are you? Why do you not follow the traditions? Do the authorities think he’s the Messiah? Can the Messiah come from Galilee? Why are you behaving unlawfully? Who then is this? Aren’t we right to say that you’re a Samaritan and have a demon? What do you say about him? By what right are you doing these things? Who is this Son of Man? Should we pay tribute to Caesar? And climactically: Are you the king of the Jews? What is truth? Where are you from? Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One? Then finally, too late for answers, but not too late for irony: Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us! If you’re the Messiah, why don’t you come down from that cross? [...] And Jesus had his own questions. Who do you say I am? Do you believe in the Son of Man? Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? How do the scribes say that the Messiah is David’s son? Couldn’t you keep watch with me for a single hour? And finally and horribly: My God, my God, why did you abandon me? [...] The reason there were so many questions, in both directions, was that–as historians have concluded for many years now–Jesus fitted no ready-made categories” (167-168, emphasis in original).

One particular way Wright has tried to refresh the story of Jesus for the present tense is by creating his own New Testament translation: The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011). It was released in October 2011 and can be had for around 20 bucks, a real steal. Without calling attention to the fact, Wright uses this new translation throughout Simply Jesus to great effect:

After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and James’s brother John, and led them off up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transformed in front of them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as light. Then, astonishingly, Moses and Elijah appeared to them. They were talking with Jesus.
Peter just had to say something. “Master,” he said to Jesus, “it’s wonderful for us to be here! If you want, I’ll make three shelters here–one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah!”
While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them. Then there came a voice out of the cloud. “This is my dear son,” said the voice, “and I am delighted with him. Pay attention to him.”
When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were scared out of their wits. Jesus came up and touched them.
“Get up,” he said, “and don’t be afraid.”
When they raised their eyes, they saw nobody except Jesus, all by himself. (Matt. 17:1-8; Simply Jesus, p. 142; cf. Kingdom New Testament, p. 34-35)

Wright has a ton of books out there. You could just as well begin with any of them to find out if you’re interested in Wright’s typical approach. Many of them, including Simply Jesus, attempt to merge ”the academic and the pastoral” to educate and inspire a wider audience (ix). The book has a mere seven asterisk footnotes, includes several useful chronologies (62, 106, 108, 113) and highlights the poetic nature of Hebrew scripture verses through formatting. Oddly, Simply Jesus includes a handy scripture citation index but lacks a topical index. I guess I could criticize him for making yet another book on some of the same themes he’s discussed in previous books like Surprised by Hope (2008) and Simply Christian (2006). All his books cross paths with each other. At the same time, I once again found myself having fun with this latest effort, losing track of time in the pages. Wright overcomes overlap by providing fresh metaphors, using different biblical texts, and by referring the reader to his other work when too much content overlap looms. Simply Jesus showcases Wright’s characteristic wit and charm, his perceptive exegesis and theological biases, and his overriding sense of urgency for making Jesus better understood and thus more relevant in his ancient and our present contexts.

If you’re on the fence about this one, HarperCollins has a nice preview of the book available here. I reviewed Wright’s previous book (Scripture and the Authority of God) here. Given the choice between the two I’d start with Simply Jesus, although I enjoyed both books.

Review: Davis Bitton, “Knowing Brother Joseph Again: Perceptions and Perspectives”

2011-11-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

Title: Knowing Brother Joseph Again: Perceptions and Perspectives
Author: Davis Bitton
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Biography
Year: 2011
Pages: 197
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 978-1-58958-123-4
Price: $19.95 (Kindle, $9.95)

The fluidity of personality; the fallibility of perception; ambiguous memory construction; the happenstance instances of recording; the ravages of time. Just a few minor things to consider when trying to recall important events in my own life. And if I face such challenges regarding the things I’ve personally witnessed, how much more cautious should I be when dealing with history? With a particular historical figure? Named Joseph Smith. Who was he? So many different Josephs to choose from.

This is the general lesson LDS historian Davis Bitton hoped to convey in his book, Knowing Brother Joseph Again: Perceptions and Perspectives (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011). In each of ten chapters, Bitton traces “how Joseph Smith has appeared from different points of view. It is the image of Joseph Smith rather than the man himself” Bitton seeks to uncover (ix). Beneath the “different, flickering, not always compatible views” of Smith, Bitton still maintains that “Joseph Smith was either a true, authorized prophet of God or he was not. In recounting his visions he either spoke the truth or he did not” (x). From this introductory statement I anticipated a book of pro et con arguments, but Bitton is able to present much more variety throughout the book.

Bitton begins with “Joseph Smith as Hero” and situates him “against the backdrop of nineteenth-century heroism” (1). Here Bitton draws on various “attribute” lists from other scholars and contrasts anecdotes about Smith with Andrew Jackson. In chapter two, “A Prophet—In the Book of Mormon,” Bitton locates scripture verses which seem to match instances from Smith’s biography, although he is careful to distance himself from certain scholars who “suggest that the book is only a reflection of Joseph Smith’s life.” (These include William D. Morain, Robert D. Anderson, and Dan Vogel, p. 25). Here Bitton also leaves open the possibility that the Book of Mormon’s “process of translation was sufficiently flexible that he used words and feelings of his own precisely at points where they were appropriate in describing other prophets who, human beings after all, had anticipated some of his experiences and emotions” (25-26). The next chapter carries the same approach through the rest of the LDS Standard Works, pointing out biographical similarities with various biblical figures including Abraham and Paul. Some of Bitton’s connections here are a little stretched, but he also shows how Smith himself and other Latter-day Saints up to the present have explicitly identified such parallels (27-40).

As a chapter, “In the Mormon Folk Memory” is a little weak on folklore analysis. Bitton proposes a loose “taxonomy” in which to situate various recollections of Smith, including human qualities, physical strength, miracles, doctrinal sayings, and prophecies. Here as elsewhere, Bitton briefly discusses problems historians face when analyzing such sources: “Anecdotes about Joseph Smith told in later generations are not, in and of themselves, a reliable source of Latter-day Saint doctrine…But rejecting all later testimony out of hand, perhaps on the grounds that the testifier is not available for cross-examination, is going too far” (54-55). He offers a weak rubric: “Many of the anecdotes ring true. If they can be pinned down close to the actual time and place they were supposed to have occurred, if they are consistent with the rest of what is known about the Prophet, and especially if there is confirmation from other evidence, they have credibility” (55). He also adds that such recollections are useful, if not for direct access to a reliable past, “then for [understanding] his popular image among his people” (55). The subsections on “prophecy” and “doctrinal sayings” and practice and policy” would make for fascinating study. Imagine a work which compares these with Islamic hadith, for instance.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter, and most representative of the entire collection, is “Joseph Smith and the Scholars” (115-135). It’s a narrative bibliography of scholarship on Joseph Smith, beginning with pre-academic attempts like Charles Mackay’s The Mormons, With Memoirs of the Life and Death of Joseph Smith (1852) and ending with various academic books and articles written in the 1990s. Knowing Brother Joseph Again is an updated version of Bitton’s earlier book Images of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Aspen Books, 1996). Hence my confusion when I read that Donna Hill’s 1977 Joseph Smith, the First Mormon "is perhaps the most satisfactory full biography yet to appear” (122). Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling and Dan Vogel’s Making of a Prophet are included in a footnote (133), and Bitton’s introduction identifies RSR as “the most thoughtful full biography” of Smith (1). Bitton passed away in 2007 before completing the manuscript, which was completed by Kofford Books under JoAn Bitton’s approval (publisher’s preface).[1] It isn’t clear which pre-2007 references were added by Bitton or the publisher. The footnote references are usually limited to the early 2000s with a few exceptions, which include multiple Kofford Books publications and the recent collection of Eliza R. Snow poetry published by BYU Studies.

Here, as elsewhere in the book, Bitton’s approach is somewhat uneven, switching between disinterested chronicler, open advocate, and devil’s advocate. His temperate assessment of Fawn Brodie’s Smith biography (“We do not agree with its conclusions and basic interpretation but think it silly to deny that it possesses positive qualities,” 120) is offset by a footnote dismissing John L. Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire (“For my negative review of Brooke’s misguided polemic, which predictably was lauded by secular professional historians and current anti-Mormons, see BYU Studies…” 134). Moreover, Bitton’s footnotes don’t always point to the most up-to-date sources even for the time period in which he wrote. The chapter concludes with a brief list of roles Smith in which scholars place Joseph including politician, magician, mystic, psychopath, genius, and prophet (130).

He concludes this chapter by noting that “Most believing Mormons are unfamiliar with these scholarly reappraisals. To the extent that they might find such analyses convincing, however, they would simply insist on combining models…Cutting through to the heart of the matter, they are usually content to view Joseph Smith as a prophet” (130-131). Turning from this thought, Bitton’s epilogue reads a bit like an Andy Rooney piece (the more serious-themed ones, not the shopping lists/minor annoyance stuff). Here a historian sits back, reflecting briefly on the presuppositions and assumptions people, including himself, bring to Joseph Smith. More specifically, he outlines an “undisclosed syllogism” which he believes people always employ when considering the question of whether Joseph Smith was a “prophet,” as opposed to having strictly academic concerns: “Major premise: a true prophet would not do X. Minor premise: Joseph Smith did X. Conclusion: Joseph Smith was not a true prophet…Such logic is indeed airtight, but the conclusion is embedded in the rigid definition of the major premise” (139-140). As a historian, Bitton notes, he can only go so far with the methodological tools available.[2] But as a believer, he hopes for more:

“Back in the days…before the flattening of our reality into a stark, naturalistic, horizontal plane, there used to be a name for the leap, the signing on to something magnificently demanding and all-encompassing, the living out of something as if it were true, the growing conviction of the reality of things hoped for, things unseen. It used to be called faith” (140).

Bitton didn’t seek to be exhaustive in this book, although he included a 33-page “Select Bibliography” as of November 2005 (143). It includes references to primary sources, books, articles, theses, dissertations, church magazines, and unpublished papers specifically covering Joseph Smith. For Smith aficionados there isn’t much new in this volume, and it certainly isn’t Bitton’s magnum opus. Bitton’s is a thought-provoking, if uneven, overview of various ways Joseph Smith has been known by others during his own lifetime up to the present day. I’d certainly feel comfortable recommending this book to those members of the Church who—only being familiar with the version of Joseph Smith depicted in official Church publications and films—would profit from a more complex view of the prophet.

______________________________________________

Footnotes:

1. See James B. Allen, “Davis Bitton: His Scholarship and Faith,” FARMS Review Vol.19 No. 1 (2007): 1—8, for a tribute to Bitton.

2. For an interesting discussion about methodological considerations when dealing with religion in academic research, see “Finding the Presence in Mormon History: An Interview with Susanna Morrill, Richard Lyman Bushman, and Robert Orsi,” Dialogue, Interviews and Conversations, June 4, 2011.

Review: Stephen Carter, "What of the Night? Personal Essays"

2011-11-11T09:58:00.001-07:00

Periodically, (usually when a collection is published) we see reflections on the literary genre of the "personal essay" in Mormonism. Here's mine. The footnotes provide links, which themselves provide further suggestions on the subject if you're interested.

Title: What of the Night? Personal Essays
Author: Stephen Carter
Publisher: Zarahemla Books
Genre: Personal Essay
Year: 2010
Pages: 168
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 978-0-9843603-1-4
Price: $14.95 (Kindle, $2.99)

Having grown up Mormon I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know what a “testimony” was. Like breath, sleep, and family, testimony’s a natural part of my life. The genesis is lost to me, but I can remember instances when my conception of “testimony” was sharpened. As a kid in Primary I learned that a testimony ought to be a list of things I know are “true,” and these things were all things I’d learned about at Church. Usually us Primary kids would also sneak a few extra things onto the end of our testimony lists, like the fact that we loved our brothers and sisters and dads and moms. As I got a little older I learned we could include a personal experience or two in our testimonies. I usually enjoyed listening to these ones a little more, but the list still came at the end as it should; the general thrust of testimony remained the same.

This changed a little when a seminary teacher parsed different ways we “bear” our testimony. He said we bear it by speaking it out loud, but he mentioned a few new things for me to consider. First, “bearing” testimony can also simply refer to the way we are, the way others see us. Jesus said to be the light of the world, so we bear our testimonies by loving and serving others, he said. Then he said sometimes we have to “bear testimony” as a burden—we have to bear the weight of it, bear up under the everyday struggles of life in faith. Jesus said to take up our crosses and follow.

Several years later this latter sense of “bearing testimony” came to mind as I read a personal essay by Eugene England called “The Mormon Cross.”[1] It was written prior to 1978, before the LDS priesthood was finally extended again to blacks, and England bore witness in this last sense, and said the Church itself bore the weight of a cross he hoped would someday be lifted. And in some ways that particular cross has been lifted, but when England wrote it he was still bearing up under great weight. That seems to me to be the predominant characteristic of current Mormon personal essays, which can be found in practically every LDS-themed publication—Dialogue, Sunstone, Segullah, even BYU Studies. Such essays, like England’s, relate personal stories including personal reflection, but not necessarily ultimate resolution as we typically read in official church publications like the Ensign. “Essay,” which I’m told comes from the French essayer, means an attempt.[2] Swimming deep in the perplexity rather than floating high above in the omniscient cloud, is the object. This is another way Mormons testify, and I'm happy we have independent publishers like Zarahemla Books to provide more outlets for testimony. (Minor complaint: I thought the font—large and typewriterish—distracts from the feeling the pieces are meant to evoke. The cover design is cool, though.)

The roots of this latter-day way of bearing testimony are said to run deep. In the Encyclopedia of Mormonism Donlu DeWitt Thayer points out that the current literary form of LDS personal essay was absent in the early days of the Church, despite the proliferation of written diaries and sermons. “By the middle of the twentieth century, however,” she writes, “the Church was essentially at peace with its external surroundings, and a few LDS writers opened the era of the Mormon personal essay.”[3] It’s interesting to think of such personal essays as fruits of the environment in which they grow, with all the influence that entails. Today’s best Mormon personal essays, according to Eugene England, are “rooted in the extremes of honestly revealed feeling and experience, from doubt and inadequacy and anguish to exalted faith and love and encounters with divinity.”[4]

It’s been about a decade since England passed away, but his description of the personal essay still holds up, even in a personal essay written about him, as found in Stephen Carter’s recent collection of personal essays, What of the Night? In “My Brief Tour of England: My Year With Gene,” Carter gives his first-hand account of being England’s office assistant (11-25). Constant phone calls and busy work under Gene’s command are offset by hugs and prayers, and later, cancer, confusion and death. Inspired by England, Carter has become a powerful personal essayist in his own right. In addition to completing an MFA and PhD from the University of Alaska—Fairbanks, Carter, current Sunstone editor, has won multiple awards from the Eugene England Personal Essay Competition.[5] His work was included among the “Best American Spiritual Writing” in 2006.

In this collection Carter seems to dwell slightly more often on the “doubt and inadequacy” side of England’s description as opposed to the “exalted faith and love” side, although his main aim is to “dwell in the tensions” (29). “The Weight of Priesthood” is a masterful rumination on his shifting understanding of the power of the priesthood (33-62). Several essays, in addition to the one about England, deal with death. In “Last Supper” (91-96) he tells the story of a couple killed by a drunk driver, and his prose sings: “Outside, the snow was frozen to the ground; the streets black and slick with ice, reflecting the glow of the streetlamps. Wayne and Elaine have left a centuries-old station wagon, a house with bread and milk still in the fridge, credit-card offers in the mailbox, and maybe no will” (93).

Negotiating relationships between those who leave the church and those who remain is another recurring theme. “The Departed” (115-130) laments for promising members who leave the Church, “Writing As Repentance” includes responses from friends who wonder how Carter can write what he writes and still care to remain Mormon (159-168). But “Smoke and Mirrors” pulled me in more than any other essay on this theme, from the first sentence, too: “Sometimes revelation works through a void. Like the day I realized that I knew next to nothing about my little brother” (62). I can’t relate the strength of this essay in a review, and I can’t spoil the ending, but it really resonated with me. Anyone who knows close family members or friends who have left the Church will find much to identify with here.

Back in 2008 Carter popped up in an online discussion about personal essays. He described his overall reason for writing. I’ll close the review with his description because I think it captures quite well what Carter tries to do in What of the Night? These are essays without many neat endings. Plenty of reflection without much ultimate resolution. But Carter bears his testimony throughout the collection, his testimony of the plan of salvation; the messiness and the hope:

“The essays I’ve published have taken months of my life. Ernest Hemingway’s quote: ‘Writing is easy. You just sit at the typewriter and bleed’ sums up my experience well…The reason to put writing in front of a lot of people is to say, “Here’s something I’ve thought a lot about. I’ve followed a line of thought (or an experience) through difficult territory. I’ve questioned myself; I’ve made false starts and hit dead ends. It’s taken me some time to find a way out the back of conventional wisdom and maxims to find something that resonates deeply with me. I know that you haven’t had my experience or followed this path, so I’m going to do my utmost to communicate it to you.”[6]

It's clear that Carter is doing a little more than just communicating his own experiences, though. This is where Mormon testimony bearing is most obvious in his approach. The fact that the essays most often include a message, a take-away, however implicit, indicates that he hopes his stories demand something of the reader, too. He doesn't always pull this off successfully, and I wasn't always convinced that a given point was true to my own experience in Mormonism. But that's because much of the time Carter is trying to figure out, even while expressing, his own place in Mormonism. And the bearing of such testimony seems very Mormon to me. I'm glad Stephen's still here.

__________________________________

Footnotes:

[1] Eugene England, "The Mormon Cross," Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol. 8:1 (Spring 1973), 78-86. England's book Making Peace has some great stuff too. It's available for free at Signature's online library.

[2] Kris Wright, “An Eye For an I: Looking at the Personal Essay in Mormon Literature,” bycommonconsent.com, 6 February 2006.

[3] “Literature, Mormon Writers of: Personal Essays,” in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992).

[4] Wright, ibid.

[5] I believe this contest has since been renamed as the Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay contest through Irreantum.

[6] Comments section of Kristine Haglund, “Goldilocks and the Art of the Personal Essay,” theredbrickstore.com, 18 December 2008.

Review: Conor Cunningham, “Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong”

2011-11-06T18:40:00.004-07:00

Title: Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong
Author: Conor Cunningham
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Genre: Religion/Science
Year: 2011
Pages: 580
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-8028-4838-3
Price: $35

Conor Cunningham wants to “move beyond the silly impasse brought about by fundamentalism (whether secular or religious)” in regards to the legacy of Charles Darwin (xi). Many atheists and plenty of Christians “tend to sing from the same hymn sheet” on this point: that “Darwinian evolution threatens to annihilate religion at its very root” (xvi). Cunningham disagrees. While Daniel Dennett has called organic evolution a “dangerous idea,” Cunningham calls it a “pious idea.” To be more precise, Cunningham outlines his understanding of evolution as promulgated by “ultra-Darwinists,” which he admits is quite dangerous—not merely to religion, but to the scientific method generally as well. He argues that religious fundamentalists and fundamentalist atheists alike misconstrue what organic evolution entails, and he outlines the boundaries of their misconstrual. Finally, he offers a different way to conceive of evolution from a Christian perspective, that evolution itself can help us understand God and ourselves. In this review I’ll briefly explain Cunningham’s main points, explain why I think he could have done a better job, and offer a few suggestions for further reading.

Cunningham’s Basic Outline:

Cunningham’s opening chapter is a fun exercise in intellectual history. He describes some precursors to Darwin to present a basic overview of the intellectual pool Darwin was swimming in when he developed his theory of evolution. He boils Darwin’s notion of evolution down to three main elements: variation, reproduction, and heritability (20). The next three chapters cover the main debates still raging within Darwinism: the idea that natural selection works at many levels (not simply at the gene, organism, or group level); the question of whether natural selection is all-powerful or whether it is one among multiple mechanisms shaping the material world as we know it; and whether evolution involves direction or is purely random. Throughout these chapters he discusses the danger of believing in the so-called “God of the gaps,” by pointing to yet-to-be-solved puzzles of science as the places where God can be detected. Such gaps change; this is not a firm foundation, he says.

Chapter 5 extends the discussion to wider applications of Darwin’s theory to fields like eugenics, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology. Here he takes a long pause to explain one of his most important points: the sketchy epistemology which an ultra-Darwinist account or evolution leaves us with. In a nutshell, if we’re merely material evolved creatures and our cognitive abilities are evolved too, then survival, not “truth,” would be the reigning principle in our thought. We could easily experience “true lies,” (215, 225).

Chapter 6 takes a glance at the “science versus religion” myth while dissecting naturalism, or the belief that all truth can be explained through analysis of and on the terms of the “material” world. Whereas methodological naturalism simply brackets the question on undetectable entities (i.e., provides explanations without resorting to God as part of the story), ontological naturalism goes a step further. Even philosophy must move aside: science must stick to what we take to be natural but also that the natural is all there is, indeed all there ever could be” (266). Cunningham sees certain proponents of “Intelligent Design” operating under that same assumption—an assumption which he sees as inimical to religious faith.

Cunningham’s Rhetorical Approach:

Evaluating the rhetorical success of a book is one of the most subjective things a book reviewer can do. But the ways in which an argument is made often matter just as much, if not more, than the actual points themselves. The Lord may “looketh upon the heart,” but we’re often checking the outward appearance. How we say stuff can impact how people receive what we say. Cunningham is well aware of rhetorical issues, as when he praises the effectiveness of Voltaire’s satirical approach to Leibniz, (90-91). His own approach is often snappy and funny, as with his epigram, “Yabba dabba doo! –Fred Flintstone,” at the beginning of chapter five (179), which must refer to the way he describes Richard Dawkins’s understanding of human nature as being “Neanderthal” (236). While I chuckled about this, I also recalled his stated desire from his introduction to “move beyond the silly impasse” (xi). His snappiness is fun, but not very friendly.

Though Cunningham prizes seeking consensus (in fact, he corresponded with many self-proclaimed atheist natural scientists in the making of his book), he enters the fray with some barbs and jabs which will likely contribute more to war than discussion. In his introduction he points out that one logical end of ultra-Darwinism would be Holocaust denial (xvi), and while I think, on logical grounds he ends up sustaining this contention (220, 268), he could have named any human event there, so this seems like an unfair scare tactic.

In other words, I really liked what Cunningham was trying to do, but I didn’t particularly like how he tried to do it. Not only rhetorically, but organizationally. It seemed quite sloppy. Throughout this medley on evolution, science, and Christianity, Cunningham slips back and forth between intellectual history, philosophy, theology, advocacy, and criticism—all without placing enough signposts along the road for me and without much balance. His sometimes-funny-or-lyrical, always-verbose points can be found more concisely stated by other authors. (For instance, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great article called “Religion and Science” which covers most of the important ground in much less space.) Interspersed throughout the book are discussions of all current hot topics in discussions about science and religion (memes, selfish genes, consciousness, emergence, brain science, etc.) but they appear at random. Cunningham’s final chapter is entirely an exercise of academic Christian theology, which I thought was interesting (he ties in ideas like Creation, the Eucharist and transubstantiation, forgiveness, atonement, etc.), but it somehow felt tacked on. Or perhaps the book was tacked on to it? Or I’m not quick enough to fill in the blanks.

Maybe this book is sort of like geekfan-type stuff—like the extended, live version recording of a band’s entire repertoire which die-hard fans must have, but that average listeners won’t fancy. For LDS readers in particular, Cunningham’s allegiance to the Nicene creed and creation ex nihilo won’t seem to suffice in reconciling Darwin with Christianity. Interestingly, LDS biologist, scholar, awesome-fiction writer Steven Peck has explored many of the same issues Cunningham discusses. At the end of this post I recommend a few of his pieces, alongside Cunningham’s book, which, for all its foibles, covers some fascinating ground. If you’re into that kind of stuff then you’ll enjoy Cunningham’s book. If you’re looking for an even-handed overview of the evolution/creationism debate, this book isn’t the droid you’re looking for. If you’re already part of the ongoing discussions, or if you feel like just jumping right in, Cunningham has a lot of great stuff in Darwin’s Pious Idea.

P.S.--

Cunningham’s BBC documentary “Did Darwin Kill God” can be found here, along with some other interesting discussions of the book.

_______________________

Steven Peck, “Randomness, contingency, and faith: Is there a science of subjectivity?” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Vol. 38 (2003): 5-24.

Steven Peck, “The Current Philosophy of Consciousness Landscape: Where Does LDS Thought Fit?,” Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought Vol. 38 (2005): 36-64, .pdf available here.

Steven Peck, “Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution,” Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, 43, no. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 1-36, .pdf available here.

Review: Steven Pinker, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”

2011-10-28T13:09:00.000-06:00

Title: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Viking
Genre: Science/Philosophy
Year: 2011
Pages: 832
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 9780670022953
Price: $40

Steven Pinker strongly disagrees with the Beatles. Love, he argues, is certainly not “all you need.” At least, not if you’re interested in decreasing human violence (592). But judging by Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he’s also not a cynical pessimist. He’d more likely sing along with another Beatles classic:

It’s getting better all the time…
Better, Better, Better.
It’s getting better all the time…
Better Better Better.
Getting so much better all the time!

Better Angels is physically and intellectually thick, but it’s actually tackling a few very basic things like anger, love, empathy, and reason. Are humans inherently good or evil? Rather than presenting a history of human thought on that question, Pinker makes his own case that human violence has decreased alongside an increase in human intelligence.

Pinker, a cognitive scientist and linguist, includes this important caveat: there seems to be some danger in focusing on a silver lining if we overlook the very real and very serious ongoing suffering and violence in the world. Especially in the “developing world,” Pinker notes, many have employed shocking numbers while “raising money and attention” for noble causes. “But there is a moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not just to maintain credibility,” he argues. “The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars all over the world can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers who might otherwise think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing things that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how altruistic we are” (320).

The twentieth century has been referred to as the bloodiest in human history. Pinker’s method combines statistics with narratives to analyze this claim. He is calling for, and trying to exemplify, a more “scientific” approach to historical analysis (190). Pinker believes the statistics don’t justify the feeling that we’re living in excessively violent times, although he recognizes the numbers will be hard to prove. The biggest obstacle is gathering accurate numbers for world population estimates and death tolls: “The truth is that we will never really know which was the worst century, because it’s hard enough to pin down death tolls in the twentieth century, let alone earlier ones” (193). Despite sketchy records, Pinker tries to rank large-scale human atrocities while adjusting for differences in population. (See the chart, here.) Still, Pinker draws on the best records he could find to trace the history of human violence from primitive times to the present. He detects a change in the taken-for-granted presence of violence in medieval times (including ghastly descriptions of human torture) and more recent reticence to engage in hand-to-hand combat. If his stats can be trusted, rates of homicide, rape, human trafficking, war, genocide, and other forms of violence have declined significantly over the past few centuries. Rather than the world spinning out of control with greater and greater levels of violence, there appears to be a certain entropy of aggression which corresponds with what he sees as an increase in intellectual acumen. We get smarter, we fight less.

For a book that exalts empirical science, then, Pinker is actually making more of a philosophical claim. He combines the Humanities (history, philosophy) with Science (evolutionary theory, neurobiology). Rhetorically, he tends to exalt the latter, but his overall argument testifies to the necessary use of the former. In fact, he falls short in distinguishing between these various methods, to the detriment of his overall argument. That is, he often risks confusing method with ontology (see David Bentley Hart, “Lupinity, Felinity, and the Limits of Method,” First Things, Sept. 30, 2011).

In fact, the first half of the book best exemplifies Pinker’s shortcomings when combining stats and stories. Through seven chapters he traces human history from its primitive origins, through Greece, the Bible, early Christendom and Rome, the Medieval times, early modern Europe, the United States, and on through the twentieth century. He advances the now-familiar myth that religion is essentially responsible for most of the bad past while Enlightenment thinking rescued humanity for a brighter future without faith. Pinker styles himself an “Jewish atheist” (374), and he’s not nearly as acerbic or irrational as most of the so-called New Atheists in regards to religion. He’s more in line with A.C. Grayling’s approach. He clearly doesn’t have a grasp on the history of various religions, although he doesn’t simplistically equate them all as “poison” a laChristopher Hitchens (678). He quite rightfully points out instances of horrid religiously-fueled violence, but that is the only role he tends to see for various religious movements.

While Pinker doesn’t recognize his selective history problem, he is more aware of the classic chicken/egg problem. This is crucial to accounting for observations like: Married men tend to commit less violence. Does marriage decrease the likelihood that men will commit violent crimes, or are men who wouldn’t commit violent crimes more likely to seek marriage (106)? Can we link the obvious rise in the crime rate through the 1960s to the personal violence expressed in popular music by groups like the Rolling Stones (113)? What do mortgage rates have to do with homicide (610)?What should we make of the tongue-n-cheek “Golden Arches theory” of war, whereby no two countries with a McDonald’s have gone to war (285)?

Despite his failures as a historian, Pinker’s overall statistics certainly deserve further examination and debate. He’s done a fine job of presenting them alongside his narrative using plenty of charts and graphs. Do these charts lead him to predict the contents of the as-yet-filled brackets? The two world wars are recent enough to make Pinker loath to predict the future, though he sees these two examples of violence as exceptions to his general picture of decreasing violence (look at the past fifty years, he says.) His book is not an attempt to disclaim the potential of violence in the future, he says, but to argue that “substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times” (361). He does venture a few predictions regarding Islamic terrorism, nuclear weaponry, Iran, and climate change crises, though.

In the second half of the book Pinker shifts from integrating statistics with historical narratives to analyzing the “moral universe” using neurobiology, or brain science (481). Pinker seems to feel more naturally at home here. In his chapter on “Inner Demons,” Pinker presents a five-part taxonomy of violence: predatory, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. When Pinker refers to our inner demons, he’s referring largely to features in the evolved human brain, and environmental factors which interact with these features. He argues that the brain hasn’t undergone a simple trajectory from primitive evil to enlightened good, either.

In one fascinating section he outlines brain processes which occur when a person is deliberating over a particular moral dilemma. Imagine you are the member of a family hiding from Nazis in a cellar with a noisy baby. Should the baby be smothered in order to save everyone else? The brain’s amygdala and cerebral cortex—a more primitive section of the brain—triggers a visceral reaction, a horror at the thought of killing a baby. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which evolved later, begins the intellectual abstract calculations. One baby versus an entire group. A third part of the brain, the anterior cingulated cortex, deals with these conflicting impulses. Thus, the higher evolved parts of the brain are not inner demons or better angels, but are “cognitive tools that can both foster violence and inhibit it” (507-508). Readers will enjoy bits about rabid sports fans (522) and racist babies (523), and most interesting is Pinker’s discussion of the question: would the world be less violent if more women were in charge (526). He also insightfully draws on game theory on questions about tit-for-tat exchanges and cycles of violence.

Through all of this, and for the remainder of the volume, he somehow manages to avoid even raising the question of free will, which is a fundamental aspect of deliberations about fundamental questions from the praiseworthiness of good deeds, to practical questions about criminal justice (for a glimpse at similar questions, see Gary Gutting, “What Makes Free Will Free?”, New York Times, October 19, 2011).

After slogging through eight chapters on human depravity, with sometimes intensely graphic descriptions, Pinker finally turns to focus on our better angels for the concluding chapter. These angels are divided into four overall categories: empathy, self-control, morality, and reason. Here Pinker is not averse to presenting his own beatitude: “The moral rationale [of the New Testament] seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them” (591). This shallow New Testament exegesis is exemplary of Pinker’s failure to seriously engage any theological reflection not expressed by various Enlightenment thinkers and progressives. He finds much to praise in Hobbes and Kant, little to cheer for in Jesus or Aquinas. His philosophical reasoning on rationality being the chief proponent of non-violence also leaves something to be desired (see Gary Gutting, “Pinker on Reason and Morality,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2011).

Significantly, Pinker is not arguing that the process of organic evolution can explain the recent decline in human violence. Human nature, which he defines as “the cognitive and emotional inventory of our species, has been constant over the ten-thousand year window in which declines of violence are visible, and that all differences in behavior among societies have strictly environmental causes” (612. Further details on his approach to human nature can be found in his previous book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature). I wonder how he would integrate studies which claim that London cab drivers appear to “grow” their brains in a certain way on the job. (See “Taxi drivers’ brains ‘grow’ on the job,” BBC News, 14 March 2000.) Eaither way, he sees external environmental causes as leading to our increased uses of pacifying brain bits. Such causes, for Pinker, include “the Leviathan,” when the state uses a monopoly on force to decrease overall violence, “Gentle Commerce,” whereby exchanging goods is cheaper than attacking neighbors, “Feminization,” deflating cultures of manly honor, “the Expanding Circle,” an increasingly cosmopolitan society spreading through literature, trade, and government, and “the Escalator of Reason,” whereby human abstract reasoning skills have seemed to increase over the past century according to the famous “Flynn effect” (690). Despite Pinker’s earlier condemnation of “ideology” in general, he presents his own humanist ideology as the path to less violence for the future.

Although Pinker certainly has nothing specifically good to say about religion, not least of all the LDS Church (which only serves as ‘exhibit A’ for the claim that religions are entirely historically contingent, and thus not divine, p. 678), he does advance several hypotheses which Mormons will find interesting. First, the idea that humans are neither inherently evil nor inherently good (482); Second, that debates over “nature versus nurture” present a false dichotomy, that humans are in some sense both actors and acted upon (483), and that morality itself is in a large sense “relational” (628).

In other words, Pinker’s book has a ton of food for thought. Although I have pretty significant objections to some of his claims and methodology, I still strongly recommend the book. Better Angels is an odd, irreverent mixture of horror and tragedy, hope and progress. It is a good example of the fact that scientific studies may be brought to bear on moral questions while seeking further light and knowledge.

Review: Craig Harline, “Conversions: Two Family Stories From the Reformation and Modern America”

2011-10-28T13:06:00.002-06:00

Title: Conversions: Two Family Stories From the Reformation and Modern America
Author: Craig Harline
Publisher: Yale University Press
Genre: History/Narrative
Year: 2011
Pages: xi, 320
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 9780300167016
Price: $27.50

“The human intellect demands accuracy
while the soul craves meaning.
History ministers to both with stories.”¹

Conversions, a new book by Craig Harline, presents exactly what the subtitle suggests: Two Family Stories From the Reformation and Modern America. In one story, Jacob Rolandus cuts himself off from his Reformed family by converting to Catholicism in 1654. In the other, the pseudonymous Michael Sunbloom converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the late 1970s, devastating his Evangelical Christian parents.

By juxtaposing these two narratives, Harline foregrounds a perennial question about the importance of historical scholarship: “So what?” This is the “relevance” question. Congratulations, Mr. Harline; while you’ve been digging around in dusty old archives or kicking back in your ivory tower, we’ve been out here creating jobs and doing other Important Things.

This is an attitude many historians are familiar with, as Harline himself candidly acknowledges:

The problem is, it’s not always easy to see what some old story, especially a really old story, can possibly have to do with you, right now. If a story is about, say, your ancestor, your religion, or your country, then its relevance may seem obvious enough. But a story about an obscure Dutch family that lived 350 years ago and 3,500 miles away and isn’t related to you and doesn’t speak your language or share your religion can seem as foreign as the moon (19).

It isn’t unusual for a historian to make such remarks in general. But it is unusual for a historian like Harline to make such remarks in the fourth chapter of a history book, and to do it using contractions like “it’s” and “doesn’t.”²
The quote isn’t part of an introduction to a historical essay, or an aside in a academic conference paper, or part of a plea for more funding in a letter written to donors or departments. It’s part of chapter four in Conversions.

Harline doesn’t stop there, either—he’s not simply lamenting the problems of a generally disinterested or distracted public. He’s expressing some of his own very personal reluctances, making explicit a few of the nagging questions a scholar deals with privately, sharing his vulnerability too:

Even when you sense the immediate relevance of such remote stories, as historians often do, you might be reluctant to explore it, because the task of showing how the past connects to the present is just so difficult. The past is strange, and other, and foreign. Sometimes it’s even completely impenetrable, despite your best efforts to understand it. Other times you think you have it right, then it slips between your fingers and fools you…If you can’t ever be sure that you’re right about the shadowy past, then how can you ever hope to compare it to the flesh-and-blood present? It’s a lot safer, and simpler, to stick to the past alone, especially the small corner of the past you’ve chosen to study, rather than to discuss how that past might also be about you today (19).

While a few contemporary scholars still cling to an outmoded understanding of “objectivity,” most historians today bear the scars of postmodern critiques; scars which remind them they don’t sit atop Mount Olympus declaring the absolute way things were. They don’t simply dig up facts from the past and set them in a row on the table for all of us to see. Three respected historians explain it this way: “Lived experience alters the questions historians ask, foreclosing some research agendas while inspiring new ones.”³ Harline himself could have written their description: “all histories start with the curiosity of a particular individual and take shape under the guidance of her or his personal and cultural attributes.”⁴ But those historians make those declarations in a book about history. Harline makes his declarations—then enacts them—in the middle of a history book.

Of course, Harline’s move is unconventional. Conversions is part of Yale University Press’s series, “New Directions in Narrative History.” It is a daring move toward explicit relevance by presenting “creative nonfiction.” It offers “significant scholarly contributions while also embracing stylistic innovation [through the] classic techniques of storytelling” (ii).

Such storytelling techniques are used to draw the reader in, as well as to bridge the past and present by inverting the time gap. Jacob Rolandus’s daring night escape from home in 1654 is narrated in the present tense: “And now the field at last! But here more disappointment: the horse still hasn’t arrived, and the friend waiting with the bag says that he can’t make the journey either, because he has a bad foot” (5). In contrast, Michael Sunbloom’s family reacted to his conversion in the past tense: “When the cousin started asking about Mormonism, and what in the world had moved Michael to convert, Michael hesitated, stepped as far into the hallway as he could [to avoid letting his parents overhear], and took the risk of answering. Big mistake” (76-77). These two stories are told alternately, one chapter relating Jacob’s tale, the next, Michael’s. This back-and-forth, “too be continued” construction naturally pulls readers to the next episode.

The structure of the book also invites readers into the world of a practicing historian. Harline includes pictures of the Da Vinci-esque code he had to crack in order to interpret Jacob Rolandus’s secret journal, a journal he excitedly discovered bundled up in an old archive (9-12). Harline describes how he found the journal, then how the journal’s story began feeling importantly, but vaguely, relevant to him. The journal ended up being connected through lineage to Harline’s own grandparents, which added emotional connection, but he reports: “Something else, someone else, had been working away inside me first, and it didn’t take long to recognize that it was Michael Sunbloom” (44).

I was mistaken above when I described Harline’s book as tracing only two conversion stories. The third, less-explicitly identified conversion story in Harline’s book is his own. By alternately centering Jacob, Michael, and himself as the main protagonists, Harline’s book inhabits a borderland between academic excellence and dangerous self-disclosure/didacticism. The idea of “conversion” itself is the conceptual bridge between radically different times, circumstances, motivations, characters, and outcomes. The heartrending interpersonal conflicts involved in each story tie each narrative to the others, and—more importantly, Harline might hope—ties these narratives to the heart of the reader.

By comparing Michael Sunbloom’s turmoil to Jacob Rolandus’s, Harline is simply doing the sort of implicit work a lot of readers already do when they read history—not least of all Mormons, who often employ history for exemplary moral ends in talks and Sunday School lessons. This moral use of history is certain to make readers squirm, not least of all any historians who believe it only blurs the lines between history and propaganda. While Harline pays close attention to the historical circumstances which made Rolandus’s decision so heartbreaking, he pays no less attention to Sunbloom’s personal context, because he is a living part of it. In fact, it is this same element which will likely make some Mormons increasingly uncomfortable as Harline’s narrative follows up on Sunbloom’s conversion by relating the way Sunbloom eventually drifted from the Church due to his emerging homosexual identity. As a Mormon himself, Harline’s discomfort over Sunbloom’s conversion experiences made Rolandus’s old papers seem all the more relevant to him, despite their deep differences. So his book candidly explores the tragic circumstances bridging three different-but-the-same conversion pathways.

Certainly this is what Yale University Press’s “New Directions” series is aiming for by presenting books which are “intended for the broadest general readership,” which explains the lack of footnotes and index, although he snuck in a very detailed bibliographical essay at the end (273-298). In addition to popular accessibility, the series aims to “speak to deeply human concerns about the past, present, and future of our world and its people” (ii). It will be fascinating to see what sort of reactions his efforts elicit. It’s possible that he could be criticized from a variety of perspectives. In the postscript, Harline describes worrying about what his fellow historians might think of his so explicitly tying the past to the present, his decision to stress “the psychological sameness of the past rather than its otherness” (267). He worries that “fellow Mormons…might dislike my sympathetic treatment of homosexuality,” (after all, he’s a professor of history at Brigham Young University), “while critics of Mormonism might dislike my sympathetic treatment of Mormonism,” (after all, he’s a professor of history at Brigham Young University). Not to mention what his parents, friends, Protestants, Catholics, and others might think (268). Whatever the obstacles, he reports, “I wanted to try anyway” (272).

This is history-as-catharsis:

Suddenly the burden of dealing with contemporary crises was lessened by the awareness that whatever people might do, they are not the first, nor probably the last, who will be forced to wrestle with this human problem.⁵

This is history-as-covenant:

…as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort…(Mosiah 18:8—9).

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Footnotes:

1. Joyce Appleby, Lynne Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), 262.

2. Richard L. Bushman is another model of such academic self-disclosure, though his confessions are found in books like Believing History: Latter-day Saint Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) and On the Road With Joseph Smith: An Author’s Diary (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), not in the middle of his magisterial Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005).

3. Appleby, Hunt, Jacob, Ibid., 271.

4. Appleby, Hunt, Jacob, Ibid., 254.

5. Appleby, Hunt, Jacob, Ibid., 290.

Review: Howard C. Stutz, “Let the Earth Bring Forth: Evolution and Scripture”

2011-10-16T19:13:00.003-06:00

Title: Let the Earth Bring Forth: Evolution and Scripture
Author: Howard C. Stutz
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Evolution/Religion
Year: 2011
Pages: xvi, 87
Binding: Softcover
ISBN13: 978-1-58958-126-5
Price: $15.95 ($9.95, Kindle)

“One of the greatest tragedies in recent times has been the extensive promulgation of creeds that have created chasms between science and religion. At no time in the history of humankind has science provided a more comprehensible panorama of the universe in which we live. Nor has there ever been a time when God has more clearly revealed Himself and His purposes to His children. Why then should there be so much apparent conflict between science and religion?” (xix).

Let the Earth Bring Forth is the culminating testimony of a man who spent his life successfully exploring the realms of faith and science. In addition to earning a Ph.D in genetics at UC Berkeley and teaching at Brigham Young University, Howard C. Stutz (b. 1918) served in various church callings from bishop, to high councilor, to stake patriarch. In university and church settings he interacted with students who were unsure of how to make sense of evolution from a faithful perspective. Shortly before passing away in 2010, Stutz completed his manuscript to “point out the harmony which exists between the theory of speciation by organic evolution and revealed truths contained in hold scriptures” (xv).

Stutz repeatedly emphasizes a few guiding principles throughout the book:

1. Science and religion are not incompatible by nature. Instead, Stutz believes they share a “common quest for truth” and thus often “converge” (64). At times they differ in the types of questions they ask and the methods available to explore the questions, but “there can be no permanent impasse between human discoveries and those provided by the Lord through revelation; they are all His” (xix). Thus, all truth will eventually harmonize (65, 78).

2. As Francis Bacon explained, Stutz believes “the book of God’s word” and “the book of God’s works” must both be consulted in a search for truth (vii). The “book of God’s works” includes things like the fossil record, geographical and ecological distribution patterns of species, embryology, anatomical structure, biochemical patterns, and genetics. Each of these receive focus as Stutz attempts to explain complex scientific theories to a lay audience. While he makes use of scripture to demonstrate scientific principles, he asserts that the Bible is not a science text (67, 77).

3. Organic evolution occurs, and it is the means God prepared for the carrying out of his purposes. “God’s dictum, ‘Let the earth bring forth,’ [Genesis 1:11; Abraham 4:11] is a profound declaration about speciation by evolution,” Stutz writes. “The Earth has brought forth and is still bringing forth species after species after species. The concepts of organic evolution, as I understand them, appear to harmonize with the scriptures. Points of disharmony seem few, and these few disparities appear to be the result of either ignorance or misinterpretation. In either case, they will most likely be resolved as new light and knowledge become available” (65). Stutz is careful to distinguish his conclusions from that of many so-called “Young Earth Creationists” whose theories tend to lay further outside the bounds of mainstream scientific acceptability (xxi, 17, 23, 28, 36, 42, 49, 56, etc.).

Stutz rhetorically makes scientific principles more palatable by using correlative scriptural language. “Phenotypic plasticity” and “genetic flexibility” are described, then related to the LDS concept of “free agency” (7). Such biological processes interacting with different environments provide “beauty and variety to the face of the earth” (62). All of this is in harmony with “the great plan of God” (8, 58). Ultimately, “faith in the truthfulness of scientific discoveries…has come from extensive study, from the testimonies of others, and from personal experiences”on the part of scientists (64). Stutz is also careful to include evidence for organic evolution which residents of the Wasatch Front, presumably a large part of his target audience as well as the area in which most of his research was focused, can observe in person. Cultivated rye at a small BYU nursery, bitterbrush on Utah’s mountain slopes, Juab County saltbush, and dinosaur fossils in Vernal all receive attention as evidence for Stutz’s conclusions (10, 15, 21, 28).

Because Stutz argues that human bodies, like those of various plants and animals, emerged through biological processes over a long period of time, he needs to account for a literal Adam and Eve common to LDS belief. Although he isn’t quite specific on this point, he seems to posit a long evolutionary background preceding a time when God introduced human spirits into bodies which were at last prepared (73). He believes evidence is overwhelming that the creation of human bodies is “not unique”:

Our body is made of the same materials found in other living organisms; we use the same source of energy for growth and metabolism. Our genetic code consists of the same four nitrogenous bases that code the DNA of all living organisms. Biologically, our bodies are not unique (71).

He tackles other common LDS speculations on the origins of humans throughout the text, countering the idea that the earth was formed from multiple other earths, thus leaving a deceptive fossil record (x, 28, 79). He disagrees with the idea that the “days” in the creation accounts were periods of “one thousand years” because the text itself does not require such a reading and the evidence suggests much longer periods of time (65). He posits a general correlation between the scripture accounts and the findings of evolutionary theory: waters and dry land needed to be separated before humans would appear, seasons and atmosphere, plants and animals, creation from the “dust of the earth” all find expression in scientific discoveries (67).

Although the essay was written for a general audience, Stutz covers many complex scientific principles, a few of which left me scratching my head. He also avoids a few nagging questions I wish he would have tackled more directly. For example, he states that “Truths revealed to us through the prophets can in no wise be incompatible with truths revealed to us in our laboratories” (78). He doesn’t mention that some LDS leaders, including one who eventually became president of the LDS church, have condemned organic evolution as a false teaching, or even a “deadly heresy.” The book’s forward, written by BYU professor Duane E. Jeffery, acknowledges that, “Without question, Mormon writers have produced many anti-evolution, indeed anti-science, books” (xi). But he points to other LDS authors who have disagreed with those views. And Stutz, who “brought the first formal training in evolution to students at BYU” as written “the first book by an LDS evolutionary biologist in the strict sense of the term” (xi-xii). Stutz’s faithful fulfilling of various church callings and his multiple-decade professorship teaching such things at BYU witness that faithful members of the Church can find compatibility between the gospel and organic evolution.

Without question, Stutz’s approach leaves more questions to be asked, more puzzles to be solved. Without question, Stutz relates his perspective with wonder, humility, gratitude, and sophistication. Let the Earth Bring Forth is an excellent little introduction to questions about the compatibility of organic evolution with LDS scripture. It also includes a useful index of the scriptural citations Stutz employs. Please recommend it to all your friends who are among the 78% or so of Mormons who don’t accept evolution as “the best explanation for the origins of human life on earth.”*

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*I recognize the question from this 2008 Pew survey is somewhat loaded. Even Mormons who accept the theory of evolution may be uncomfortable not acknowledging God in the process, as the question’s phrasing seems to do. Another fascinating approach to the question of LDS teachings and organic evolution is BYU professor Steven Peck’s article, “Crawling Out of the Primordial Soup: A Step toward the Emergence of an LDS Theology Compatible with Organic Evolution,” Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, 43, no. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 1-36, .pdf available here. Also check out this guest column Peck wrote for the Flunking Sainthood blog. Also see the great (in content) and spacious (in length) discussions on evolution at the newcoolthang blog, before they got taken over by sports fanatics.

Review: N.T. Wright, “Scripture and the Authority of God”

2011-10-14T11:12:00.001-06:00

Title: Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today
Author: N. T. Wright
Publisher: HarperOne
Genre: Bible
Year: 2011
Pages: 224
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 9780062011954
Price: $25.99

N.T. Wright has been called “the C.S. Lewis for our time.” Like Lewis, Wright is Anglican. Like Lewis, Wright’s overriding purpose is to demonstrate Christianity’s relevance for our times (Lewis with modernism, Wright with postmodernism). Lewis wrote Surprised by Joy, Wright wrote Surprised by Hope. Like Lewis, Wright’s style is cleverly engaging. This particular similarity is evident from the first line of Wright’s latest publication:

“Writing a book about the Bible is like building a sandcastle in front of the Matterhorn. The best you can hope to do is to catch the eye of those who are looking down instead of up, or those who are so familiar with the skyline that they have stopped noticing its peculiar beauty” (ix).

Odds are, if you’ve enjoyed Lewis’s theological or devotional writings, you’ll enjoy Wright’s. Some differences between the two deserve attention. Unlike Lewis, who was content to remain a lay Anglican, Wright once served as Bishop of Durham, and sat in the UK’s House of Lords. Unlike Lewis, who was an armchair theologian and literary critic whose fiction largely outranks his non-fiction, Wright is a distinguished Bible scholar who takes higher criticism much more seriously than Lewis could have. Lewis still serves as a safe source for many Mormons who are pleased to find similar theological ground in the works of a non-LDS author. Wright can easily serve a similar purpose for Mormons in regards to contemporary biblical scholarship.¹ He has a knack for making complex academic discussions comprehensible to regular folk like me. It is with this in mind that I recommend his latest book, Scripture and the Authority of God.² It’s a lot thicker than its 224 pages appear at first glance as evinced by this over-long, chapter-by-chapter review, but at least the prose is almost always accessible and the analogies creative!

“Taken as a whole,” Wright writes, Christendom “can’t live without the Bible, but it doesn’t seem to have much idea of how to live with it” (ix). With “no pretense at completeness,” Wright’s Prologue gives an overview of the place of Old Testament scripture within the Christian church beginning with the time of Jesus.³ He contextualizes the writing of the New Testament and outlines the growth of tradition and authority in biblical use up to the Reformation when individual scripture reading accelerated. Reason comes to the fore during Enlightenment debates over scripture, debates which echo today. These periods receive closer attention in subsequent chapters. His prologue concludes with a look at how contemporary culture views scripture in tandem with politics, philosophy, theology and ethics. He sees Bible believers and disbelievers making selective, shallow use of the Bible. So-called conservatives privilege a “literal” reading of Paul while ignoring his “ecclesial, ecumenical, sacramental, and ecological dimensions.” So-called “radicals” in a “gallery stacked with iconoclasts” enjoy saying things like “Paul says this, and we now know he’s wrong” (19). These, and other approaches, receive Wright’s scorn throughout the book.

In the first chapter Wright displaces the Bible as the primary authority by, oddly enough, quoting the Bible as identifying God as its source of authority.⁴ The book doesn’t argue that the Bible should have authority; it’s approaching the question of how a book can have “authority” and what shape that authority can take (16). God, not the Bible, is the authority, and scripture has authority only “in a delegated or mediated sense” (23). Further, the Bible’s over-arching content is narrative; it tells a story. Rather than being a “rule-book” from which we pick and choose things to do, the Bible tells a story within which the reader is also situated. “Scripture is there to be a means of God’s action in and through us–which will include, but go far beyond, the mere conveying of information” (28). Mormons will be comfortable with Wright’s description of a “much older notion of ‘revelation,’ according to which God is continually revealing himself to and within the world he has made, and particularly to and within his people Israel” (29).⁵ This is a key interpretive principle Wright will return to throughout his book.

Chapter two serves to describe scripture as a record of God’s response to evil and suffering in the world through a selected people, Israel. The records tell the story of God and his people, places obligations upon them, and gives voice to prophets who try to call a straying Israel to repentance. “God was equipping his people to serve his purposes,” the establishment of a “Kingdom” (35). Scripture told Israel that God was with them and that he wanted things to get better. “It formed the controlling story” for Israel,” and it “formed the call to a present obedience” (38-39, emphasis in original).

Chapter three brings Jesus into the picture. By analyzing the sayings and actions of Jesus in comparison with the Old Testament, Wright argues that “at the heart of [Jesus's] work lay the sense of bringing the story of scripture to its climax, and thereby offering to God the obedience through which the Kingdom would be accomplished” (41, emphasis in orig.). Thus, sifting through the Old Testament for prophecies about individual acts of Jesus largely misses the point. As the “word made flesh,” Jesus viewed himself as enacting and fulfilling scripture, although this raised some interesting contradictions. Wright identifies the conundrum pressing heavily upon early Christian believers: finding ways to account for continuity and discontinuity with the Old Testament.

This is the bridge to chapter four, which analyzes the early apostolic church’s approach to scripture. When Christians today refer to “the word,” they usually mean the Bible itself. “The word,” Wright argues, clearly preceded the creation of our current canon, though. Early Christians understood “the word” to be the story of Jesus, the enacting of the promises of Hebrew scripture with ongoing obligations and expectations for the new covenant movement (48). Here Wright has set the stage for his “fully Christian theology of scriptural authority”:

“Planted firmly in the soil of the missionary community, confronting the powers of the world with the news of the Kingdom of God, refreshed and invigorated by the Spirit, growing particularly through the preaching and teaching of the apostles, and bearing fruit in the transformation of human lives as the start of God’s project to put the whole creation to rights” (50).

Wright argues that inattention to this narrative-driven nature of scripture results in “the sterile debate between people who say, ‘The Bible says…’ and those who answer, ‘Yes, and the Bible also says you should stone adulterers, and you shouldn’t wear clothes made of two types of cloth.’ We earnestly need to get past this unnecessary roadblock and on to more serious engagement” (122).

Chapter five is eminently interesting, as Wright looks at “The First Sixteen Centuries.” Mormons might be disposed to disregard this chapter on the grounds of the “Great Apostasy,” but Wright doesn’t follow the LDS narrative. Mormons can learn much from careful and charitable examinations of this period especially because the goings-on still affect how people, including Mormons, read the Bible today.

He describes “Four Senses” of interpretation (69): 1. The “literal,” or how the writers understood what they were recording (a complex method because not all scripture was intended to be taken scientifically, historically, etc. and the Bible contains parables, metaphors, etc.) 2. The “allegorical,” whereby Christians discovered (or rather, imputed) “Christian” elements in non-Christian verses. (Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac representing God’s sacrifice of Jesus, for instance.) 3. The “analogical” sense, which Wright describes as “a way of discovering in the text a picture of the future life” (69). A Psalm speaking of going up to Jerusalem became a way to imagine going up to the heavenly city. 4. The “moral” sense, “a way of discovering lessons on how to behave hidden within texts which were not straightforwardly teaching such a thing” (69).

Wright’s at his best here. He recognizes the utility of these approaches: “wherever one opened the Bible one might discover not only what happened in the past, but an open door upon the riches of Christian truth, the glory that lay ahead, and the solid ground of Christian morality” (70). At the same time, he calls attention to the heavy cost: now “almost anything could be ‘proved’ from scripture” (70-71). The tale could easily wag the dog:

“It is no longer ‘authoritative’ in any strict sense; that is, it may be cited as though in ‘proof’ of some point or other, but it is not leading the way, energizing the church with the fresh breath of God himself. The question must be asked, whether scripture is being used to serve an existing theology or vice versa” (71, see also 67).

In the next chapter on the Enlightenment, Wright brings the narrative to the present in order to make a stirring case against anti-intellectualism, but also against the deification of intellectualism. Today, he argues, we ought to be aware what Enlightenment “assertions must be politely denied, which of its challenges may be taken up and by what means, and which of its accomplishments must be welcomed and enhanced” (84).

Speaking of politely denying, the gloves come off in chapter seven where Wright identifies a short list of “Misreadings of Scripture” (107). He acknowledges the over-simplification here, but at the “risk of caricature” he dismisses things like the “rapture,” “prosperity gospel,” the death penalty, and attacks the tacit acceptance of the economic “status quo” (108). He also challenges claims to “objectivity,” “cultural relativity,” grab-bag exegesis, “skin-deep-only appeals to ‘contextual readings’” and a host of other hot-button issues (109-111).

While acknowledging the murkiness of the past, Wright holds that we do, in some sense, have serious and academic methods by which we can “say definitely that some readings of ancient texts are historically preferable to others” (113). In chapter eight, “How to Get Back on Track,” Wright proposes a five-part recommendation for approaching scripture today. As a reminder, up to this point Wright has made a case that “‘the authority of scripture,’ when unpacked, offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community” (115-116, emphasis in orig.) Thus, reading scripture today requires respect for tradition. “They may be wrong” sometimes, he adds, but “every key figure in the history of the church has left his, her, or its mark on subsequent readings of scripture” (118). It requires respect for reason. This includes being self-aware of one’s interpretive context in the wider scheme of things. It also requires “giving attention to, and celebrating, the many and massive discoveries in biology, archaeology, physics, astronomy, and so on, which shed great light on God’s world and the human condition” (120). His five-step model highlights the necessity for both public and private study, academic and devotional approaches.⁶

An interesting underlying tension throughout Wright’s book (and his work more broadly) is that a solid pathway needs to be carved between academic research and devotional application of scripture. In the final two chapters Wright presents models of how his desired approach can refresh scriptural interpretation in regards to the Sabbath and monogamy. One might quibble with his explanation that these two topics were chosen on the grounds that they “have not been particularly hot topics in recent discussion,” hoping that method will be highlighted more than his particular conclusion (xii). Especially in regards to monogamy!⁷ I have a few other quibbles and a few big disagreements with some of Wright’s claims and conclusions. But I appreciate his fresh formulation of the questions surrounding the different ways we use the Bible. I found his attention to historic and contemporary approaches to scripture helpful in identifying shortcomings in my own scriptural interpretations. Wright’s book is a much-needed admonition to exercise a more well-reasoned-while-still-devotional reading of scripture.

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Footnotes:

1. In fact, his work has already been recognized by several LDS authors who commend his approach on the “New Paul Perspective” in the ongoing debate over grace and works. See the Book Notes from the FARMS Review here.

2. The book is a revised and expanded American edition of his previous UK book Scripture and the Authority of God–Getting Beyond the Bible Wars, copyrighted in the US under the title of The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005). Wright has added two “case studies” to the end of the volume, enacting the sort of scriptural approach the book advocates on two specific topics.

3. If you follow biblical scholarship at all, the term “Old Testament” will set off alarm bells. In academic pursuits, words often serve as clues about controlling assumptions. Wright is well aware that the way we say things can easily get in the way of what we’re saying. His preface calls attention to his use of the term, as opposed to “Hebrew Scriptures,” preferring not to “pretend to a neutral set of labels” here because his analysis is Christian-centric (xiii). Other similar decisions will certainly bring criticism. For example, Wright doesn’t delve too deeply here into authorship issues but he’s clearly aware of them, as when he distinguishes between Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews without calling attention to the distinction (21-22).

4. Wright seems aware of this circularity though this book doesn’t address it, presumably because he writes to a Christian audience already assuming some sort of biblical truth. He clearly recognizes the power of appealing to what the Bible says (see for instance 26, 28, 31, 41, 92, etc.).

5. I hesitate to over-emphasize only those ideas which resonate with Mormons. Without a doubt, some of Wright’s positions don’t fit well at all within LDS thought, not least of all his position on the written canon being closed and defense of various Christian creeds (119, 126). Nor his five-part story of God’s history, with creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the church (though he allows for modifications, p. 122). Still, his critique of some Protestant ideas will sit well with many Mormons, and perhaps even laudably challenge a few current problematic LDS assumptions. (I’m thinking particularly of a certain form of biblical literalism or fundamentalism, see pp. 72, 74, 79, 92, and anti-intellectualism, pp. 85-86, 91-92, 134-135).

6. Wright’s Five “Strategies for Honoring the Authority of Scripture”:

1) A Totally Contextual Reading of Scripture: In each word, sentence, verse, chapter, and book, the cultural setting must be carefully examined. “All scripture is ‘culturally conditioned’” (128). Because time keeps moving, this project is never complete; because scripture is recorded by people, it is never wholly pure. Wright calls this an “incarnational reading of scripture, paying attention to the full humanity both of the text and of its readers” (130, emphasis in orig.). This term reminded me of a similar-with-important-differences LDS approach. See James E. Faulconer, “Scripture as Incarnation,” in Historicity and the Latter-day Saint Scriptures, ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2001), 17–62. Most importantly to Wright, the context should include his outlined overarching storyline of God’s creation and desire for the world to be made right again, his calling of a people and his expectation of their mission to the world.

2) A Liturgically Grounded Reading of Scripture: Wright views “corporate worship” as the primary place to hear scripture. When listening “in communion with other Christians across space and time” we follow the example of Israel, Jesus, Paul and others who recognized scripture as requiring a “central place” in worship (130-131). Utmost concern should be paid to selection, not favoring easy or common verses over the whole of the Old and New Testatment story as outlined by Wright earlier in the book.

3) A Privately Studied Reading of Scripture: ”Western individualism tends to highlight individual reading as the primary mode,” Wright says, but this should not replace communal reading. At the same time, it is an opportunity for personal reflection, a way to change a mind and soften a heart by wrestling with scripture. I was particularly impressed with Wright’s description of the “complex pathway whereby each Christian is simultaneously called to worship and prayer, supplied with fresh understanding, puzzled by new questions (and so stimulated to yet more study and questioning), and equipped to take their own place in the ongoing story of God’s people” (134). A paradox in scripture study is the opportunity it affords to find, not only answers, but more questions as well.

4) A Reading of Scripture Refreshed by Appropriate Scholarship: Such scholarship is “a great gift of God to the church,” and I would argue that gift is for Mormons too, and not exclusively written by Mormons. Wright says such study requires careful loyalty and joyful openness, a hard path to negotiate, no doubt.

5) A Reading of Scripture Taught By the Church’s Accredited Leaders: It should be plain by now that Wright seems to include most Christian denominations generally in his label of “church.” Here he calls for various leaders, often hampered by or overly focused on administrative tasks, to become more serious about presenting scripture as “audible sacraments” (139). He wants to avoid a division between “clergy” on one hand and “scholars” on the other. (This issue presents a unique challenge within Mormonism which deserves its own post!)

7. Incidentally, this is the only place Mormonism receives explicit mention, and it’s a confusing mention at that. He says that monogamy is generally assumed in the western world to be the primary and appropriate type of marriage today and adds: “Of course, in America itself, as is well known, the Mormons have made their case, and live their own lifestyle. But that is regarded by most Americans as raising a question, not offering an answer” (176). I’m not sure what he means, other than that he believes “Mormons” still practice polygamy? At any rate, some Mormons might welcome his critique of polygamy’s place in the Bible, which he sees as God’s “winking at ignorance” (a la Acts 17:30). A Mormon view might say it is God’s circumstantial exception (Jacob 2:24-30).

Review: Eric W Jepson, et.al., “The Fob Bible”

2011-10-07T08:45:00.000-06:00

Title: The Fob Bible
Editors: Eric W Jepson, B.G. Christensen, Sarah E. Jenkins, Danny Nelson
Publisher: Peculiar Pages
Genre: Bible
Year: 2009
Pages: 263
Binding: Various ebook, Paperback, Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-9817696-8-4
Price: $3.99-$27.99

During the Sunday morning session of General Conference, Elder Tad R. Callister used an illustration I remember from my mission. It was a dot, representing the Bible, with a bunch of lines running through it in all directions. The lines represented a slew of biblical interpretations. In the face of so many perspectives, a stabilizing way to approach the text might seem welcome.

A second dot is added, representing the Book of Mormon. Callister pointed out, by connecting the two dots, the Book of Mormon is understood as a clarifying tool for the Bible. His illustration is a simple way of saying that, for Mormons, the Book of Mormon is a useful hermeneutical device, not a replacement for, the Bible.

Without disagreeing with that general principle, dissecting the illustration uncovers interesting assumptions and possibilities.

For one, a single dot makes it easy to forget that the Bible itself is a compilation of a variety of perspectives. The Bible isn’t univocal. Its various parts were written by different people at different times for different reasons. With this in mind, do the colorful lines represent these internal perspectives looking out? A single dot may gloss over the book’s internal contradictions.¹

Do the lines represent external perspectives looking in? The Bible has been read so many ways by so many people over the past three millennia, a phenomenon examined through an academic approach called “reception history.” Kierkegaard, Gandhi, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Joseph Smith have drawn on the Bible for inspiration. Some of the most sublime works of literature and art in human history have grown from the Bible’s soil-rich pages. William Blake, Lord Byron, Dante, Milton, and Handel each brought perspectives and talents to the word and returned with their baskets overflowing. The Bible’s voluminous thought-offspring testify “that no individual, school, or group does or can own biblical reception.”²

A humble addition to the reception history of the Bible comes in the form of a new “version” of the Old Testament: The Fob Bible. Fob, or “Friends of Ben,” began meeting as a Utah Valley writing group in 2002. As their introduction explains, “Often, members of Fob might turn to the poetry of the Bible…As is inevitable among talented individuals, these examinations often flowered into creative works” (ii). Fob members share a common “Mormon heritage” though “some [come] from positions of orthodoxy and others from points far removed” (ii).³

Through this spectrum of perspectives, Fob contributors reshape Old Testament stories into 56 new works of poetry, prose, and parody. Each work is accompanied by an illustration by French artist Gustave Doré (1832-1883).

The collection’s parody is evident from the outset in their humorous send-up of the KJV title page. There they refer to the Fob version as “A Quotidian Book of Scripture containing, but not limited to, the juiciest portions of the Old Testament…[etc.]“

The poetic approaches range from the sublime opening, “Creation”…

The moon stretched out her oyster hand
and on the struts she lifted land.
In mercury streams the valleys bled:
the mountain shook its hoary head.
She set the rain in silver sheets
upon the ocean’s stormy streets (3)

…to the Ogden Nash-esque silliness of “Jeremiah, a la Ogden Nash”: “If you’ve read the Bible once or more,/you know that Jeremiah’s a bore.” According to this interpretation, the pessimistic Jeremiah’s question of lament, “Why will ye die?” might as well be “Why will ye live?” (205).

A similar range of mood is found in the prose works. In “Blood-Red Fruit” (cleverly typeset in double-column to give that nice, Bibley feel), Satan attracts the serpent to him through flattery: “You are beautiful–look at you in the sunlight. You’re like a living bruise” (15). In their new world, Satan struggles to help the serpent learn new words like joke, like, sore, want, sorry, and hope (14-22).

Linguistic obstacles are more humorously examined in “How Long Till Two Times,” wherein an angel tries to help Adam and Eve understand the concept of time and space (28-31). The shaping role of linguistic context is depicted in “Exra’s Inbox,” a series of emails between figures like Nehemiah (@governor.judah.prs), Ataxerxes (@shah.prs) and Ezra (@temple.judah.prs). Check out Haggai’s auto-signature, “Consider your ways!” (130-157).

“The Book of Job’s Wife” tells the familiar story from her own perspective. Her name, absent from the biblical text, is given here as “Hadasa” (the Targum calls her Dinah), and she takes care to record the names of her children “with my own hand…so they will not be forgotten” (163). Despite writing the lengthiest chapter in the Fob Bible (162-193), Hadasa fractures while thinking of her overwhelming trials: “There are some things that are greater than the words we have to describe them” (165).

None of the chapters present particularly LDS readings, but each chapter offers an opportunity for extended pondering on an oft-neglected portion of the LDS canon. If the Bible itself can be represented by a dot on a page, the Fob version is a bunch of lines running through its center, racing off in various directions. The editors hope these lines will be welcomed by “those of us left alone with the million inconsistencies of our mortal struggle” (i). Although I didn’t fall in love with every individual selection, there was enough humor, eroticism, tragedy, and creativity to justify my strong recommendation. This one’s for literature lovers.

Yes, I got a received a free review copy. Yes, I hope you’ll pick up a copy here. Formats range from the electronic to hardcover; prices range from $3.99-$27.99. According to the book’s epigraph, proceeds from the book are donated to LDS Humanitarian Services.

(By the way, is “Abraham’s Purgatory,” p. 45, the reason Bill Murray is listed in the Acknowledgments?)

________________________________________

Footnotes

1. The same thing can be seen in the Book of Mormon, incidentally. Grant Hardy’s recent Understanding the Book of Mormon takes a close look at the moods, assumptions and approaches of the BoM’s various narrators. Brant Gardner’s Second Witness series does too, but you can get a feeling for his analysis of Book of Mormon structure in his article “Mormon’s Editorial Method and Meta-Message.”

2. Michael Lieb, et. al., The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7.

3. The contributors include Eric W Jepson, Danny Nelson, Arwen Taylor, Samantha Larsen Hastings, B.G. Christensen, Sarah E. Jenkins, Ryan McIlvains, and William C. Bishop.

Review: Ken Jennings, "Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks"

2011-09-26T18:37:00.000-06:00

Title: Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
Author: Ken Jennings
Publisher: Scribner
Genre: Geography
Year: 2011
Pages: 276
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-1-4391-6717-5
Price: $25

"I think that the constant study of maps is apt to disturb men's reasoning powers," Lord Salisbury, p. 207.

You have to wonder if Ken Jennings's parents realized their son was a different sort of fellow when he chose to sleep with a World Atlas next to his pillow, rather than your average child's teddy bear. As far back as he can remember he's loved maps. While researching for his new book, Maphead, Jennings discovered he wasn't alone. "Cartophilia" is alive and well, and Jennings hopes to spread the love: "If you never open a map until you're lost," he insists, "you're missing out on all the fun" (120).

Jennings, a Mormon, achieved national fame during his record-setting winning streak on Jeopardy! in 2004. As you might expect, his trivia-saturated brain can't resist plugging a plethora of parenthetical factoids into every page. Americans can certainly use the refresher course. A 2002 National Geographic survey placed Americans next-to-last out of nine countries in place-name knowledge (42). Then there was this little debacle, perhaps more representative of our collective state of mapmind than we'd like to think (38). It's the sort of thing that led Alex Trebek himself to lament to Jennings: "It would be nice if Americans knew where a country was before we went to war with them" (126).

But this isn't really a book about simply being able to successfully point to places on a map (although he includes the charming story of little Lilly Gaskin, the twenty-one-month-old who could successfully point to about 130 countries on a map, p. 122). While I expected a trivia book—perhaps even a trivial book—Jennings manages to seamlessly weave fun factoids into compelling narratives about geography lovers.

Each chapter is built around a theme containing stories of a variety of mapheads. You'll meet John Hebert, the map division chief of the Library of Congress, curator of the largest collection of maps in the history of the human race (56). Hebert also chairs the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the group who tried to excise instances of "Nigger" from the map in 1967 by replacing it with "Negro" (though "it's not like 'Dead Negro Creek' is a huge improvement" Jennings notes, p. 67). You'll be introduced to the weird world of map collectors, including E. Forbes Smiley III, a fellow who employed an X-Acto knife at various libraries in order to accumulate close to $3 million in map profits before a librarian busted him (93-95). Then there's Isaac Stewart, the guy who creates maps for Brandon Sanderson's fantasy books. (Sanderson, a Utahan, was chosen to complete Robert Jordan's popular Wheel of Time series). Stewart found that eye-balling coastlines looked too fake, so he spills some water on paper and looks at the blotch. One time he discovered a great pattern on a folding chair in a church basement (117). Then there's Louise McGregor, an elderly member of the Travelers' Century Club. To belong, you have to have traveled to at least 100 different countries. She prefers the most frightening places imaginable, getting itineraries by checking the State Department list of dangerous places (150). "What are you doing writing a book about geography if you've only been to twenty-nine countries," the incredulous woman asks Jennings (151).

Jennings spends time with kids at the National Geography Bee (which is where Alex Trebek dissed all of us). He talks to road geeks who notice differing fonts on various interstate road signs ("Look for the curved tail on the lowercase 'l'!"). He talks about border disputes, gender, brain science, pop culture, politics, history, and religion. In the course of researching for the book he even became addicted to geocaching, a treasure hunting game played by GPS owners all over the world—a pastime which Jennings sees as a human attempt to re-infuse the world with treasure and mystery. (He even takes his son along, entertained at the sight of him waving a GPS "back and forth in front of him at arm's length, like it's Fisher-Price's My First Dowsing Rod," p. 193).

This rhetorical coupling of a dowsing rod with a GPS device neatly depicts Jennings's approach to our current map culture. A drastically shifting culture, he argues. For centuries maps were created much the same, but today, he notes, "we live in a strange, shifting time for maps" (213). Many of us carry maps on our phones. We can zoom in, scroll, customize, and view actual overhead and street-view photographs. Our maps can vocally tell us where to go. Near the conclusion of the book Jennings takes us on a back-stage tour of Google Earth, where they hope to eventually provide "a centimeter-per-pixel real-time world map," the "end of resolution" as we know it (219). Despite these developments, he hopes that paper maps never fully die (234). He also hopes to instill a little of his map love in his children, and into anyone who reads his highly-entertaining book. To the mapheads he says 'you're not alone,' and to those who aren't mapheads he says, 'come join us':

"Maybe it makes some of us a little smug, to be so obviously superior to the unwashed masses who couldn't tell Equatorial Guinea from Papua New Guinea if their lives depended on it. But in my experience, most of us just want to be helpful...We're not as important a public utility as we were in the days before Google and GPS, but we're not going to change now. Deep down, we naively believe that everyone could fall in love with maps the way we did. They just haven't given them a chance yet" (55).

I'm going to go buy an atlas. One made out of real paper.

Review: Gardner, “The Gift and the Power: Translating the Book of Mormon”

2011-09-14T07:35:00.000-06:00

Title: The Gift and the Power: Translating the Book of Mormon
Author: Brant A. Gardner
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Religion
Year: 2011
Pages: 379
Binding: Hardcover/Kindle
ISBN13: 9781589581319
Price: $34.95*

“A gust of wind shuffles the two manuscripts. The reader tries to reassemble them. A single novel results, stupendous, which the critics are unable to attribute."

—from If on a winter's night a traveler, a novel by Italo Calvino

Stop and think over that epigraph for a minute. Then think about this next one. For at least 30 full seconds:

"...between that ancient text
and our modern translation
sits Joseph Smith staring at a stone
in the crown of his hat."
—Brant A. Gardner, p. 260

Ready?

Brant A. Gardner's new book is a game changer—a paradigm-bending exercise combining rigorous methodology with creativity in a historical analysis of the Book of Mormon translation story. Gardner amasses evidence from the historical record, the actual Book of Mormon manuscripts, and its text in order to “discover the most economical explanation for all aspects of the Book of Mormon” (x).

Gardner is aware from the outset that controversy surrounds such analysis: whether the Book of Mormon is a translation, what kind of translation it is, and how the translation was done. He alerts the reader up front that his book operates under the assumption of historicity (stay with me here, folks). He believes "it requires that we understand that the Book of Mormon is a translation before any discussion of it as a translation becomes relevant" (x). He recognizes that the end of any such investigation is largely dictated by this initial assumption. So, I anticipated a lengthy justification directed at skeptics for his initial assumption. To such readers he offers only this consolation: “I begin as one of the faithful...[but] I have attempted to keep the investigation based on the same principles as might be applied to a secular text” (xi).¹ In a surprise move, Gardner shifts his opening apology toward the believers in Book of Mormon historicity:

“The prophets I believe in are human beings, their frail humanity blessed with a touch of the divine. I believe that God works through very natural means much more often than He displays transcendent power. Therefore, while I do believe in the text’s declared provenance, I will end up with a description that is predominantly naturalistic—with a touch of the divine” (xi).²

This warning will become especially relevant in part two of the three-part book, where he analyzes Royal Skousen’s translation theory. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Easy to do when reviewing such a complex book.

I.

In fact, part one, "History and the Translation Process," initially feels like a lengthy side-track. Here Gardner is laying the groundwork for the subsequent two parts by analyzing the cultural context of the Book of Mormon translation and the historical accounts which describe it.

Among other things, he discusses village seers and stones, money digging, and definitions of "religion" and "magic." While he builds on the earlier scholarship of others (John L. Brooke, Mark Ashurst-McGee, Richard Bushman, etc.) he isn't simply summing up former work. He's clearly not afraid to challenge a “friendly” source (e.g. Ronald W. Walker) or accept information from a supposed “foe” (D. Michael Quinn)³ and vice versa to forge his own interpretation of magic and religion, taking on the idea that these should be understood as mutually exclusive categories (22). Part one alone is worth the price of admission due to Gardner's diplomatic, scholarly additions to the sometimes-contentious discussion of the "magic worldview" and Mormonism.

Part one concludes with Gardner's fascinating observations about the creation of "sacred communal stories," contrasted with academic histories. He posits a surprising theory about the "sealed portion" of the plates, traces the descriptive shift from seer stones and interpreters to Urim and Thummim,⁴ and discusses how Native Americans become Lamanites and a hill becomes Cumorah in the collective imagination of Latter-day Saints. Especially key here is Gardner's belief that the scientific and religious understanding of Joseph Smith and his contemporaries—their perceptions—directly influenced the translation process itself, in addition to the stories they told about the process, which Gardner posits are not necessarily equivalent.

Though it seems a bit round-about, Gardner has to explain why the witnesses accounts of the translation conflict with the manuscript data. He gets a helping hand from folklore and memory studies (109, 113). This is especially necessary since Gardner isn't simply crafting a new narrative, picking and choosing the data which fits his arc and calling it good. Instead, he has largely set the stage for part two by analyzing the process of witnessing and remembering to account for discrepancies between witness accounts and manuscript evidence.

II.

“…listening to someone who is translating [aloud] from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is not there, that you cannot manage to touch." —from the novel "If on a winter's night a traveler" by Italo Calvino

Part 2 is where Gardner asks “What Kind of Translation is the Book of Mormon?” (135). We're 135 pages in and we're starting to get to the nitty-gritty. (Fortunately, Gardner crafted the book so that any part can be read first, each part consistently refers to the other two parts when further discussion or foundation is given.) Gardner first takes his bearings in a sophisticated analysis of what it means to translate, to take ideas from one language and clothe them in another. This is an issue that could fill volumes, translation is fraught with problems. He considers color, metaphor, numbers, cultural idioms, literary aesthetics—many of the considerations facing a translator of any text. The stakes seem even higher when dealing with what purports to be sacred scripture with theological implications.

And here is were Gardner reaches the crux of the translation issue as he sees it—his book’s absolute relevance for all discussions of BoM origins. He asserts that all discussion of textual clues regarding authorship or origins in the BoM are undergirded by assumptions—usually implicit—about the “relationship of the plate text to the translated text." He writes: "It is critical that we select our understanding of the relationship between the plate text and English text based on a firm analysis of data rather than simple assumptions” (145).

This is important enough that he restates it, so I will too:

“A correct understanding of the kind of translation we have in the English version of the Book of Mormon will underlie virtually all arguments that attempt to relate the English text to a historical time and place” (146).

In fact, he revisits this assertion at the end of the book, throwing down this gauntlet:

"I believe that some description of the translation method must become a declared foundation for any analysis of the Book of Mormon against a geographical and cultural background" (319).

Otherwise, Gardner believes, we are simply exhibiting evidence which conforms to our particular theory, disregarding the rest. Gardner demands a careful, complete analysis of the available data. He recognizes that the largest problem facing such a project is the lack of the original plate text. (This is where skeptics can easily declare 'game over.') He elects to examine features of the English text in order to construct deductive and inferential arguments which he believes converge “on a single concept that most often explains how the English text represents the plate text” (146).

With that in mind, Gardner brings readers up to date with the ongoing scholarly discussion of translation methods. He briefly outlines Royal Skousen’s “de facto typology” of BoM translation which posits a range of possible methods from “tight,” to “loose,” to any mixture of the two (152-155).⁵ Gardner argues that this typology is “not useful” because it refers to the transmission of the text from Joseph Smith to his scribes, not to the relation between the plate text and the English translation (155). Thus Gardner hopes to reorient the entire conversation. Rather than searching a spectrum from tight-to-loose (which others like Blake Ostler inadvertently fall under), he posits a “three-fold set of analytical translation types: literalist equivalence, functional equivalence, and conceptual equivalence” (155).

Remember it, folks. L.F.C. Whether or not you find Gardner's translation theory compelling, this is a crucial point to consider when discussing textual evidence of Book of Mormon origins. Here’s what makes his proposed schema different: “Each of these terms describes a relationship between the target and the source languages, with each indicating a greater distance between the two” (156).

“If a coded message were hidden in the succession of words or letters of the original, it would now be irretrievable…”

—from Italo Calvino's novel, "If on a winter's night a traveler"

In the next two chapters Gardner assesses the respective evidence for these three categories. Under the evidence for Literalist Equivalence he looks at things like BoM names, archaic vocabulary, inter-textual quotations, and Hebraisms. In regard to the latter, he concludes that the book does in fact contain Hebraisms. Then he adds a very large “but”:

Hebraisms may be present, but what does that data tell us? He sees at least two possibilities: (1) they represent “a faithful retention of the plate language or grammar, or (2) the influence of the King James translation” on Joseph Smith (175). Here Gardner is certain to ruffle feathers, especially feathers of folks who are persuaded largely by Hebraisms as evidence of ancient authenticity.⁶ Gardner sees other features in the BoM text which must be accounted for in addition to Hebraisms, which leads him to discuss evidence for Functional or Conceptual Equivalence of translation, thus diminishing the weight of Hebraisms as evidence of ancient origin. This evidence includes things like grammatical structure, vocabulary and cultural content (anachronisms), modern expressions, and clear King James influence. He usefully employs Joseph Smith's inspired translation of the Bible as a possible way to analyze the BoM translation and account for these anomalies.

III.

“Every evening I spend the first hours of darkness penning these pages, which I do not know if anyone will ever read… Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death,when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations…”

—Italo Calvino, "If on a winter's night a traveler," a novel.

Arguing against a strictly Literalist Equivalence (with exceptions based on BoM manuscript data) and giving evidence for Functional and Conceptual equivalences only takes Gardner part of the way. Part three, “Translating the Book of Mormon,” is where Gardner turns further from analysis toward hypothesis. The sub-sections are titled as questions through which Gardner anticipates critical responses and outlines his theory. (How Did Joseph Translate?", "Why Didn't Joseph Retranslate the Book of Lehi?", "Why Did Joseph Believe the Interpreters or Seer Stone Were Essential?", "How Did We Get the Isaiah Passages?", Why Couldn't Oliver [Cowdery] Translate?", etc.) Creatively analyzing research on the science of sight, human memory, brain science and language formation, Gardner seeks to synthesize witness accounts and textual evidence in order to answer these and other questions.

**Non-Spoiler Alert!**

If you want to know how Gardner believes looking into a stone in the crown of a hat could lead to an inspired scripture you'll need to pick up the book. I've described Gardner's basic preparatory material and methodology. You get to see how it all shakes out in the book.

Conclusion:

Gardner's book is (perhaps surprisingly) my personal favorite Mormon-themed book of 2011, and I've read a few. I particularly appreciate Gardner's ability to use a variety of sources, and to differ with many without acrimony. I like his careful description of methodology so readers know the precise reasoning behind his theories and conclusions. I enjoy the way he draws on a variety of fields for support—sociology, biology, history, etc. (his training in anthropology helps facilitate his use of eclectic source material). As a footnote fanatic I loved swimming in his sometimes oceanic footnotes, which often include plenty of back-story for readers unfamiliar with ongoing controversial points, and the differences between himself and the positions of others. I also admire his courageous tackling of large issues like magic versus religion. I was quite satisfied with his inclusion of a great deal of usually-overlooked sources from early Church history. This gave me confidence that Gardner hasn't simply selected quotes to fit a narrative without regard to contradictory data or overall context. Finally, I appreciated his epilogue in which he acknowledges several questions his work leaves unanswered. Since these further questions are directly related to his theory of translation, I leave you to discover them.

Go read this wonderful, provocative, creative book. You may disagree with his theory, but the conversation takes a big step forward in this book. I can't recommend The Gift and Power:Translating the Book of Mormon enough.

____________________________________________________________________ Footnotes:

1. He points readers to his multi-volume Second Witness: Analytical & Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon for the reasoning behind his historicity assumptions (x).

2. Moreover, Gardner likely anticipates that average members of the Church will encounter information here about divining rods, seer stones, seeming discrepancies in church history and so forth which they might find troublesome. He rhetorically softens his own theory of translation by deferring to former Church authorities who align more with his line of thought, perhaps hoping to persuade Mormons not to close the door on his ideas (see his reference to B.H. Roberts, for instance, p. 320). At the same time, he’s not averse to calling into question some of the recollections or understanding of Joseph Smith himself! (pp. 133, 282, 287). He appreciates the audacity. Calvino's excerpt from yesterday's post was largely prompted by Gardner's introduction.

3. I do not intend this framing as a personal judgment regarding those particular scholars, but to emphasize that any simplistic division between critics and apologists becomes irrelevant in Gardner's assessment of the relevant scholarship.

4. There are so many parts of this book which cry out for inclusion in a review. The labeling shift from seer stones to Urim and Thummim is just one of the many examples of how Gardner sees the early church quickly adjusting "rural" traditions to more "urban," and thus more socially acceptable, traditions, relying on biblical precedent for legitimacy. Rocks in hats are village seer stuff, Urim and Thummim are the stuff of prophets (127). Even here, though he differs from Ashurst-McGee's picture of Joseph Smith's lineal progression from seer to prophet. I'm resisting fascinating side-discussions like this all over the place. Please read this book.

5. LDS scholar Kevin Barney sums these categories up in "'A More Responsible Critique.' A review of "Does the Book of Mormon Reflect an Ancient Near Eastern Background?" Written by Thomas J. Finley, FARMS Review 15, no. 1 (2003): 97-146.

6. See an engaging exchange between Gardner and LDS scholar David Bokovoy, who believes Gardner has made a "worthy attempt," but finds the book "very problematic." Bokovoy, "Brant Gardner's New Book," Mormon Dialogue and Discussion Board, http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/55301-brant-gardners-new-book/. Hence my intense endorsement of the book: its potential to spur thought and spark dialogue on a fascinating aspect of Joseph Smith's roles of "seer" and "translator" (D&C 21:1). For another interesting and recent analysis of Smith as translator, see Samuel Brown, "The Translator and the Ghostwriter: Joseph Smith and W. W. Phelps," Journal of Mormon History, vol. 34, no. 1, Winter 2008, pp. 26–62. Brown's article bears more on Smith's later Egyptian work than the Book of Mormon. See also his "Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden," Church History, Volume 78, Issue 1, pp. 26-65.

*The Kindle version is broken into two parts at $9.95 each. This is to allow the author and publisher to actually make a little money, as Amazon's Kindle pricing would essentially end up taking the lion's share of profits otherwise. This information as per a Kofford Books employee.

Review: Turley and Slaughter, "How We Got the Book of Mormon"

2011-08-15T14:20:00.001-06:00

Title: How We Got the Book of Mormon

Authors: Richard E. Turley, Jr., William W. Slaughter

Publisher: Deseret Book
Genre: History
Year: 2011
Pages: 208
Binding: Cloth
ISBN13: 978-1-60908-062-4
Price: $34.99

This isn't the first time Deseret Book has published a book called How We Got the Book of Mormon,¹ but the new take by Richard Turley and William Slaughter is a visually-rich approach to an ever-contestable subject. Theories of the book's origin have multiplied since the beginning, from fraudulent pseudo-scripture, to plagiarized romance, to inspired fiction, to revelation from God. Turley (Assistant Church Historian and Recorder) and Slaughter (photograph historian and consultation archivist for the LDS Church History Department) give a general overview of the discovery, translation, and publication history of the book.

A short prologue traces the Book of Mormon's internal account of itself beginning when the golden plates were transmitted to Mormon and then Moroni. Turley and Slaughter avoid becoming wrapped up in debates about BoM geography by speaking broadly of the Book of Mormon peoples as being "people of the Americas" (xi), though they label an attractive older photograph of the hill where Smith located the plates as depicting the "Hill Cumorah" with no comment on disputes about that identification (xvi).² A chapter on "The Golden Plates" includes diagrams of the plates possible size and contents, drawing on first-hand witness accounts like that of Emma Smith (4). The chapter concludes by emphasizing Mormon's stated intent of inviting "all to seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written" (9). "No wonder," they note, "that more than a century and a half after Joseph received the golden plates...millions would accept the record as 'another testament of Jesus Christ,'" referring readers to Boyd K. Packer's 1982 conference address announcing the addition of the subtitle (10).

In the next chapter Turley and Slaughter describe the translation and transcription of the Book of Mormon. Their source selection and editing in this chapter highlights the pitfalls and possibilities of educating church members about highly-disputed historical events. In describing Smith's visions and discovery of the plates they largely follow the account published in the official History of the Church, but they supplement it with several primary sources. These include Lucy Mack Smith's Biographical Sketches³ and David Whitmer's An Address to All Believers in Christ. Because the book was written "for general readers" they improve the "ease of reading" by updating spelling and punctuation in such sources (vii). Thus, one possibility they take advantage of is introducing a wider number of Church members to the lesser-known account of Smith translating the Book of Mormon without looking directly at the plates: "Several people...said he looked into the interpreters or another seer stone, blocking out external light, such as by placing the interpreters in his hat and putting his face down into it" (13). To help ease the strangeness they compare the translation method to a revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants in which Joseph saw a "parchment" written by the apostle John (14). They don't direct readers to other scholarly works regarding the use of seer stones in 19th-century America, but I'm still happy to see a description of the stone-in-hat method in a book for general readership. In fact, the book does a fairly good job of directing readers to other scholarship, should this book whet their appetite: "Readers can verify the facts in our book by consulting the sources cited in the notes," they encourage, "which we have deliberately tucked in the back so as not to interrupt our narrative" (vii).⁴ This is especially significant encouragement given that the authors thank Elders Russell M. Nelson, Jeffery R. Holland, and Marlin K. Jensen who "generously offered their insights" to the book, though the end product is their own responsibility (viii). They also express gratitude for input from great historians including Matthew Grow, Royal Skousen, and Reid Neilson (viii).

The same chapter about the translation also highlights pitfalls of such a general overview written for a general audience. They tell the story of Martin Harris's visit with Professor Charles Anthon, but do not refer to his contradictory counter-narrative of their exchange (13). In their brevity they also leave out details about "widespread dissent in 1837" Kirtland (47), among other stories. Such events bore direct influence on Book of Mormon publishing, but the complexities are far afield from the purpose of this narrative. Perhaps the largest omission is their decision to focus solely on English editions. They quote Joseph Smith as being "glad to hear" about Brigham Young's efforts in printing the Book of Mormon in England, noting that Smith said he would "be pleased to hear that it was printed in all the different languages of the earth" (73). "Some 150 million copies of the Book of Mormon have been printed in more than 100 languages, reflecting the book's growing worldwide influence," they emphasize (vii).⁵ By failing to talk about other language editions they miss an opportunity to tell fascinating stories (like Parley P. Pratt's early desire to translate it into Spanish, or stylistic and cultural considerations regarding the Japanese editions).⁶ This is an area that seems ripe for inquiry.

Despite such lapses, the authors take ample opportunity to introduce members to certain details long known to critics of the Church. "Joseph Smith's 1839 history, penned by clerks, used the name 'Nephi' instead of 'Moroni,' a mistake that tracked into later publications before being corrected," for instance (131). And the old canard about Joseph Smith claiming to be the author of the book is clarified, diplomatically without reference to the countless critics who have cited it as reason to doubt the inspiration of the book: "Federal law granted copyrights to 'authors and proprietors,' and the term 'authors' included translators," thus Joseph was listed as such on the initial title page (27). Alongside this explanation is a document I've never seen before--the original copyright registration document of June 11, 1829 (28).

Next, Turley and Slaughter describe the initial publication. They include pictures of the manuscript and uncut printed sheets. A large image of the first time a portion of the Book of Mormon was published reminds readers that media piracy isn't a new phenomenon-- Abner Cole's pilfered selection from the First Book of Nephi was printed in the January 2, 1830 issue of The Reflector, much to the chagrin of Joseph and associates who demanded he cease.

The remainder of the book discusses the subsequent publications of 1837, 1840, 1841, 1920 and 1981. Printers, dates, and locations all receive due attention. They repeatedly remind readers that "emendations and grammatical changes" have been made to the Book of Mormon since its initial publication (58). The example they highlight is Joseph Smith's 1840 edition adjustment of "white" to "pure" in reference to the Lamanites. "This was consistent with a Bible passage declaring that 'man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart,'" they editorialize (58). Color photographs of pages from the 1830, 1837 and 1840 editions show the changes. They explain why "white" appeared in post-Nauvoo editions until it was corrected in the 1981 edition (78). In fact, they seem to heavily emphasize the history and legitimacy of making such adjustments to the Book of Mormon text, noting that leaders like Orson Pratt, James E. Talmage, and Bruce R. McConkie have had a hand in such updates (43, 99, 112, 138). Perhaps, though they don't say so, Royal Skousen's critical analysis of the Book of Mormon manuscripts will lead to a few future changes in the text, this book anticipating how such changes will be explained. Images depict the changing aesthetics of the book--the addition of verses, changes in typeface, updated footnotes, and columnization. Throughout the narrative they note interesting trivia, such as a failed plan to print the Book of Mormon New Testament together in Missouri (40-41, 47). Fun anecdotes are plenty, like Joseph F. Smith's approval of a 1903 BYU committee's pronunciation guide for Book of Mormon names ("provided you do not afterwards cut me off [from] the Church if I don't pronounce the words according to the rule adopted by the committee," he joked, p. 100).

In the final chapter they share the story of Hyrum reading from the Book of Mormon prior to he and Joseph's departure for Carthage, Illinois in June 1844 (121-122). Elder Jeffrey R. Holland shared this story in a recent General Conference address, and the authors here include a photo of the page Hyrum is said to have folded down, marking the spot where he read.⁷ They close by citing several verses from the Book of Mormon emphasizing its testimony of Jesus Christ. Efforts to publish the Book of Mormon online are not mentioned, though I would be interested in those developments as well.

This is a beautifully-designed book for general LDS readers. Its coffee-table-sprucing photographs, unusual dimensions and large font make for a good introduction, perhaps a nice supplement to an introductory Sunday School lesson on the Book of Mormon. Hopefully it will also spur readers on to deeper engagement with the currently-fruitful field of LDS scholarship. An excerpt of the book is available on Deseret Book's website.

Footnotes:

[1] E. Cecil McGavin's book by the same name was published in 1960. Incidentally, McGavin was also employed by the Church Historian's office.

[2] Brant A. Gardner, among others, has discussed problems behind this identification, see Gardner, The Gift and the Power: Translating the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Kofford Books, 2011), 129-131.

[3] They cite the original, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations (Liverpool: S.W. Richards, 1853. Readers should check out Lavina Fielding Anderson's Lucy's Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), available free online here.

[4] Sources include volumes from the Joseph Smith Papers project, the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, and heavy reference to Dennis Largey's Book of Mormon Reference Companion (Deseret Book, 2003). The crucial work of Royal Skousen, including his Earliest Text from Yale University Press, receive attention. Articles from the Ensign, BYU Studies, Journal of Mormon History, The Journal of Book of Mormon Studies are cited. Deseret Book references include Allen and Leonard's The Story of the Latter-day Saints, Leonard's Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise, Cannon and Cook's Far West Record: Minutes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Backman's The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio, Allen, Esplin and Whittaker's Men With a Mission, 1837-1841: The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the British Isles, Baugh's A Call To Arms: The 1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri, Jesse's The Papers of Joseph Smith and Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, Derr and Davidson's Eliza R. Snow: The Complete Poetry, and Arrington's Brigham Young: American Moses. Crawley's eminently useful Descriptive Bibliography and a piece by former RLDS archivist Ronald Romig also receive note, among many early newspapers and other sources. Should members follow their admonition, they will become familiar with some very good sources.

[5] Elsewhere they clarify this total: "This book has been published in full in 82 languages and partially in 25 more" (129). I've heard rumors that a new Russian edition is very close to completion, incidentally.

[6] See Terryl L. Givens and Matthew Grow, Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 306-307. On the Japanese editions see Van C. Gessel, "'Strange Characters and Expressions': Three Japanse Translations of the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies14/1 (2005), pp. 32-47 and Shinji Takagi, "Proclaiming the Way in Japanese: The 1909 Translation of the Book of Mormon," Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 18/2 (2009), pp. 18-37.

[7] A few critics of the Church immediately seized on the story, criticizing Elder Holland for supposedly lying about the book he held up in Conference. See my "A few comments on Elder Holland's conference address," lifeongoldplates.com, 5 October 2009.

Review: Givens and Grow, "Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism"

2011-08-05T16:34:00.004-06:00

Title: Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism
Authors: Terryl L. Givens, Matthew J. Grow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Biography/Religion
Year: 2011
Pages: 592
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-19537-573-2
Price: $34.95

As a young LDS missionary I was thrilled reading Parley P. Pratt's epic biography. I marveled at his tales of harrowing prison time and daring escapes, the Missouri persecutions, missionary travels, his view of the early Mormon Church and Joseph Smith. I wondered why such things didn't seem to happen today. Since then I've come to believe that autobiographies can often obscure as much as they reveal, and Pratt's book is no different (historian Benjamin Park has done excellent work on framing Pratt's autobiography as his way of maintaining relevance and connection to a LDS movement he sometimes felt adrift from; work which the biographers employ, though my index-less advanced copy of the book prevents my providing a page number for it!). A new biography of the Mormon apostle tempers Pratt's autobiographical enthusiasm, offsetting his memories with many mundane actualities to bring him back down to earth a bit—enough to make him appear simultaneously less amazing and all the more compelling.

Pratt is a hat-rack kind of fellow, and biographers Terryl Givens and Matthew Grow include the requisite lists—one written by Pratt ("farmer, a servant, a fisher, a digger, a beggar, a preacher, an author, an editor, a senator, a traveler, a merchant, an elder and an Apostle of Jesus Christ," p. 3), and one of their own devising ("a missionary, hymnist, explorer, politician, theologian, satirist, editor, and historian," p. 393). Each of these roles plays out in the course of Givens's and Grow's chronologically-based story of Pratt's life. But the role most important to Pratt, the biographers note, was that of apostle. Pratt's "affinity with [the Apostle] Paul was clear" (393).

They list three key reasons to justify the biography's subtitle ("The Apostle Paul of Mormonism"). First, they argue that Pratt's writings greatly aided in systematizing and popularizing the teachings of Joseph Smith, much like Paul's writings have done for the teachings of Jesus Christ (5-7). Second, Pratt's wide-reaching missionary travels did much to help disseminate Mormonism (7). Finally, Pratt encountered much persecution and, ultimately, became a martyr to his faith "in his own eyes and the beliefs of the Latter-day Saints" (8).

Speaking of the Latter-day Saints, the biography is clearly written for a broader audience. The authors take time to extrapolate from developments in Mormonism to the development of various religious movements generally (see, for example, 260). At the same time, I believe an academically-oriented biography such as this is a great medium through which current Mormons can become better familiar with the early development of their Church. Contextual details which are not commonly brought up in homiletic church history accounts permeate the narrative. The biographers situate Mormonism within 19th century millennial movements and seekerism (107, 115), trace the beginnings of Mormon apologetics (167), flesh out the political and personal factors which exacerbated the conflicts in Missouri (131-3, etc.), note similarities between the LDS temple and Masonry (208), and describe a handful of practices no longer employed in the Church, including rebaptisms and spiritual adoption (264, 272). A full chapter, in addition to excerpts throughout the book, is spent focusing specifically on Pratt's plural wives and the dynamics of plural marriage in early Mormonism. They also refer repeatedly to a sort of revelatory eclecticism, through which Joseph Smith is said to have been inspired as much by events in his environment as by heavenly manifestations (7, 208). Sometimes, they note, the records simply don't make it clear whether certain ideas were first expressed by Joseph Smith to his congregants, or to Joseph Smith by friends and fellow Church leaders like Pratt (172). Perhaps unbeknownst to many current Mormons, Pratt left a huge imprint on Mormon beliefs. They may be surprised to know that the Articles of Faith weren't composed by Joseph Smith for the famous Wentworth Letter, but were borrowed and slightly adjusted by him from earlier efforts by Parley and Orson Pratt, to take one of many examples (171).

Despite an overall tone of candor, the authors very occasionally overlook controversial points. For instance, they leave out the age of Fanny Alger, purported first plural wife of Joseph Smith (95). At the same time, they also avoid over-promoting some instances heralded as miraculous by contemporary Latter-day Saints, such as the storm which supposedly prevented mobs from attacking Zion's Camp members at Fishing River (69).

The publicity materials for the biography note that Pratt is a forefather of both Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman—which is of interest due to their current participation in the upcoming US presidential election— but the authors don't mention it. They also forego in-depth discussion of later editing of Pratt's writings, though they mention a few changes made by LDS Church leaders when later doctrinal developments made Pratt's work appear inaccurate.

Nevertheless, theologically-minded readers will doubtless enjoy exegesis of several of Pratt's most important publications, including his Voice of Warning, Key to the Science of Theology, and an array of theological essays and poems. In my opinion, the book really hits its stride when they start analyzing Pratt's A Voice of Warning, spending plenty of time throughout the rest of the book examining Pratt's doctrinal propositions and assertions (104, 114-127). It will be fun to see reactions to descriptions of Pratt's take on human identity, spirit matter, and "intelligences" (332). Even if readers disagree with the analysis of any particular theological point, the contention that Pratt wasn't much concerned to make Mormon teachings "pass muster" with broader Christianity is patently clear here (334).

History-minded folks will be pleased to read their account of the so-called succession crisis, which followed the death of Joseph Smith. Pratt, they argue, played a key role in maintaining allegiance to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles amongst outlying Mormon branches throughout the eastern United States and Great Britain (beginning at p. 222). Attention to such lesser-known non-Nauvoo Mormons is a welcome part of current Mormon studies. Analysis of Pratt's views of "Lamanites," American Indians, and other races depicts his interesting paradigm shift in the concept of Zion and Lehi's seed (70, 304).

As this biography is a collaboration, it would be interesting to know how the authors divvied things up. The narrative voice is pretty seamless, but every once in a while a nice Givens-esque turn of phrase glows like a firefly: "Like Pratt, [Thomas] Dick had been consumed by the spectacle of a scientific juggernaut that was already opening worlds immense and minute to human knowledge, and would leave in its wake any theology too timid to follow" (170-171).

The biography closes with the account of Pratt's death at the hands of Hector McLean, the enraged spouse of Pratt's last plural wife, Eleanor. Apparently, subsequent efforts by Pratt descendants to locate Pratt's grave and exhume the body in order to bury him in Utah were evidently not deemed relevant enough for inclusion. Thankfully, the authors did not build the book as a veiled history of the LDS Church and Joseph Smith (Smith's martyrdom, for instance, is described in one paragraph, 219). They also don't slavishly follow Pratt's autobiography; this book does not read as an extended essay on that popular work, nor does it make use of it uncritically. As for Pratt's claim that in his youth he exhibited "an originality of mind, seldom exhibited" by others, they can't resist ribbing him a little: "No bragging here, just the truth, he insisted" (16). They are not averse to mentioning Prat's questionable recollections and character flaws. They dissect the famous story Pratt tells of tricking a policeman's bulldog, discovering that while he claimed to be arrested on the basis of religious persecution, it most likely resulted more from some outstanding debts he incurred as an earlier resident of that town (43-44). Surprising to me, given the way Pratt's fiery writings were often peppered with wit, Pratt could be morose and was often somber and intense in person, as opposed to being jovial and overly humorous.

Givens and Grow have crafted a great biography. The included maps are very useful in keeping track of Pratt's journeys, the first appendix is very useful in keeping track of his voluminous publications and the second appendix his voluminous family. They follow him on missions, through deserts, over mountains, away from policemen, and ultimately toward his vision of the Kingdom of God.

Review: James Rollins, "The Devil Colony: A Sigma Force Novel"

2011-06-27T19:03:00.004-06:00

Title: The Devil Colony: A Sigma Force Novel

Author: James Rollins

Publisher: William Morrow (HarperCollins)

Genre: Thriller

Year: 2011

Pages: 480

ISBN13: 978-0-06-178478-1

Binding: Hardcover

Price: $27.99

Deep in the sub-basement of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. a top-secret military organization called SIGMA Force plans covert operations for the protection of the United States. SIGMA Force, led by Painter Crowe, consists of scientist/soldier/spies who counter technological and conspiratorial threats to the US. Author James Rollins conceived of the super-secret team for his SIGMA Force novel series.

The Devil Colony is the seventh book of the series, a mix between the television series 24 and the National Treasure movies. Rollins tells the story of a conspiracy dating back to the founding of the United States when American Indian groups and Thomas Jefferson are said to have anticipated the inclusion of a fourteenth colony in the union. The plan was disrupted, maps and codes were hidden in the seal of the United States, buffalo skulls, and mysterious metallic plates were buried in the earth. The colony itself was lost, which was fortunate since it houses an ancient technology which can threaten the existence of the entire planet. Yes, literally the entire planet, should its fuse be accidentally lit. Current advances in nanotechnology aren't so current after all.

A good portion of the book takes place in Utah, where a hidden cave contains the bodies of an ancient people who committed mass suicide to bury knowledge of a deadly technology. These light-skinned victims with their Hebrew-esque records catch the attention of Hank Kanosh, a BYU anthropologist and American Indian Mormon who teams up with SIGMA Force to solve the mystery of this cave. The further the team explores the less far-fetched Hank's thoughts about Israelites in ancient America appear. (Although, Hank mistakenly refers to the translator of the Book of Mormon as "John Smith," p. 298. See also pp. 58 and 476 where "Joseph" and "John" are used interchangeably. If you want more spoilers on how Mormonism is employed, let me know. I can give some more details in the comments of this post). In the after-the-story "Truth or Fiction" section included in the book, Rollins humorously apologizes for blowing a hole in the Underground Physics Research Laboratory of the Eyring Science Center at BYU (479).

Like in most spy novels, all the women are sexy, all the men are brilliant—even the bulky enforcer types. Rollins combines science, history, and religion throughout his fast-paced, though pretty far-fetched story, which jumps from Washington D.C. to Japan, Iceland, Kentucky, Utah and back to colonial America on the Lewis and Clark trail. There are plenty of gun fights, an orca whale attack, volcanic eruptions, buried golden plates, a Fort Knox caper, helicopter hijacking, grave robbing, melting islands, hot lava, and elderly dementia. If you're into early American and Mormon History without being meticulously picky or averse to fictionalization, and you like a gripping spy novel and don't mind a few cheesy one-liners, occasional melodramatics, a couple of f-bombs, and exploding skulls and brain matter, The Devil Colony will make great summer reading. CAUTION: At least two fictional Mormons are maimed in the narrative of this novel!

Check out the description and author interview at Amazon for more.

Review: Lieb, Mason, Roberts, eds., "The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible"

2011-06-20T10:22:00.001-06:00

Title: The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible
Editors: Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts
Consultant Editor: Christopher Rowland
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Religion/History/Literature
Year: 2011
Pages: 752 pages
ISBN13: 978-0-19-920454-0
Binding: Hardcover (9.7 x 6.7)
Price: $150.00

To paraphrase the Gospel of John: "And there are many ways which Christians have understood the Bible, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." Instead of filling the entire world with new books, Oxford's new Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible has a more limited scope. Co-editor Jonathan Roberts describes the scholarly enterprise of "reception history" as "selecting and collating shards of that infinite wealth of reception material in accordance with the particular interests of the historian concerned, and giving them a narrative frame" (1). The main questions are these:

-Whose responses to the Bible are deemed to be of importance?
-What biblical texts receive special attention in their particular readings?
-How do they justify their selection?
-To what ends are their readings marshaled?

Perhaps the foremost question this book asks is: "What does it mean to be a reader?" Before describing the rest of the book, here's a brief snapshot of how Jonathan Roberts addresses what it means to be a reader in the Handbook's introduction:

The empirical Enlightenment understanding of reading disregards the reader's subjectivity. In other words, a text is treated as an object 'out there,' an object which anyone can approach and, given enough time, understand in much the same way. This differs from a "Romantic" approach to reading, which prizes the individual subjective experience of reading. A reader can basically craft the meaning of the text apart from considering things like the original author's intent, or the way the text has traditionally been understood.

Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) advocated for an approach to reading which differed from these two models. He drew attention to the "situated nature of all interpretive acts" (1). He hoped for a "dialogical relationship" between the reader, the text, and the past (2). Rather than being overly suspicious of traditional readings, Gadamer wants to promote a trusting, questioning relationship to tradition in order to understand what a text has meant to people over time, and for what reasons. But this kind of reading comes with a hefty price. It "demands the relinquishment of a foundationalist dream that the meaning of biblical (or indeed any) texts can be settled once and for all" (3).

Or, to put it more bluntly: The editors and contributors to this volume believe that "no individual, school, or group does or can own biblical reception" (7). They help us explore the mystery of reading by describing various ways the Bible has been understood—the ways it has impacted millions, perhaps billions of lives, be they Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Gnostic, agnostic, feminist, pacifist, and a number of other backgrounds. "All of us," Roberts writes, "live in a changing world in which engagements with the Bible are themselves ever changing. It is a world in which there are always new engagements between readers and the Bible (or 'Bibles', as that text shifts according to manuscript translation and tradition), and those engagements will never stabilize)" (8). The Handbook traces that instability in two parts, forty-four chapters, each written by a scholar of biblical or literary studies.

Each of the twelve chapters in Part I focuses on a specific book in the Bible. These chapters survey the outline, form, and content of seven Old Testament books and five New Testament books deemed "influential in the history of interpretation" (6). I was particularly impressed with John F. A. Sawyer's chapter on Job. Not only does he usefully describe "historical-critical problems" (28), evidence people have interpreted to suggest that the book of Job has changed over time, but he goes on to explore the "theological and philosophical issues" raised in the book (31), including the problem of evil, suffering, and God. John J. Collins's chapter on Daniel sets the stage for later chapters which discuss millennialism and the construction of timetables by various apocalyptic groups into the 20th century.

Part II contains in-depth analysis of how social and historical contexts have helped to shape interpretations of biblical passages and themes. Not only do these chapters provide outlines of how the Bible has been understood by different people at different times, they often enact that very difference. Albert C. Labriola's magisterial chapter on the Bible and iconography explores medieval manuscripts which display striking interpretations of the doctrine of the Trinity. David J. Clark's personal involvement with translations of the Bible for communities in Thailand and Russia directly informs his chapter regarding linguistic and cultural influences on Bible translations. In "The Origins, Scope, and Spread of the Millenarian Idea," Peter Clarke follows eschatology from origins in Zoroastrianism through more recent unfamiliar territory: the Tonghak/Ch'ondogyo movement, Won Buddhism, and the Unification Church (the so-called Moonies) in Korea, in addition to Rastafarianism, Mahdism (an Islamic manifestation), and the secular millennial visions of early Marxism. Richard Harries pits retaliationism against pacifism by looking at key texts various war movements historically employed to justify their positions. Ann Loades tells the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's overall discontent with scripture's affects on women in her chapter on "The Women's Bible." (Incidentally, this is the only chapter in which Mormonism is mentioned. "One of Stanton's most powerful lectures," Loades notes, "was on the state of married women, including that of polygamous Mormon women—polygamy being nowhere condemned in the Bible, as its readers could discover," p. 314).

Other chapters explore homosexuality, black liberation theology, Latin American views of exodus, and pop-cultural biblical manifestations in Dan Brown novels and Bob Dylan records. (For a full account of the Handbook's diversity, see the Table of Contents at the end of this review.) Valentine Cunnigham's concluding essay, "Bible Reading And/After Theory," is a labyrinthine, post-modernish disorientation which could have used an explanation of itself! Absent a chapter summarizing the whole book, the collection's ending with Cunningham left this reader a little off-kilter.

The size, construction, and price of the book all seem to imply it is directed largely at universities and libraries. All but one chapter concludes with useful "Works Cited" and "Further Reading" sections (the one exception being "Augustine and Pelagius on the Epistle to the Romans"). It also contains useful subject and scripture citation indexes. The hardcover price seems steep, but if it follows the publication path of other books in the Handbook series, you can expect to pay around $55 for a future paperback edition.

Above all, this collection expertly explodes single-minded exegesis of the Bible by raising questions from a diverse spectrum of culture and history. How do various Jews approach the story of Job in a post-holocaust world? How have "fundamentalist" Christians competed with Darwinism through the creation narrative of Genesis? Why did Gandhi regard the Sermon on the Mount as being second only to his beloved Bhagavad Gita? What scriptures have African American preachers used to craft homiletic sermons in the 21st century? What can we learn about the interplay of imagination and inspiration by examining William Blake's biblical illustrations? How have Bob Dylan, U2, and Handel approached the biblical text for inspiration?

These questions are especially apt for inspiring excitement, as well as humility, on the part of biblical readers. Throughout the centuries, "individuals and groups have activated [the Bible's] passages, personalities, images, and events to meet the conditions they confronted," writes Scott M. Langston in his chapter on twentieth-century American views of the Exodus. His description wonderfully captures the overall purpose and spirit of the Handbook: The Bible doesn't sit passively, waiting to be obediently molded by readers. It also actively "stimulates readers' thoughts and actions" to influence personal spirituality, politics, culture, art, music, and life in general. "This influence...highlights the need to better understand the reception history...not merely as a scholarly endeavour, but as one that enlightens diverse human experiences. Much work remains to be done" (445).

The Handbook is an informative, entertaining, and diverse invitation to further engage in the work of reception history.

***

Table of Contents

Introduction , Jonathan Roberts

Part One

Old Testament
1. Genesis, Rachel Havrelock
2. Job, John F. A. Sawyer
3. Psalms, Katherine Dell
4. Isaiah, John F. A. Sawyer
5. Ezekiel, Paul Joyce
6. Daniel, John J. Collins
7. Judges, David M. Gunn

New Testament
8. Gospel of John, Catrin H. Williams
9. Romans, Guy J. Williams
10. Corinthians, Judith Kovacs
11. Galatians, John Riches
12. Revelation, Christopher Rowland

Part Two

Hermeneutical and Historical Issues
13. The Bible and Iconography, Albert C. Labriola
14. Linguistic and Cultural Influences on Interpretation in Translations of the Bible, David J. Clark
15. Memory, Imagination, and the Interpretation of Scripture in the Middle Ages, Mary Carruthers
16. Bible and Millenarianism, Peter Clarke
17. Non Retaliation and Military Force, Richard Harries
18. The Bible and Anti-Semitism, Tobias Nicklas
19. Dante and the Bible, Piero Boitani
20. George Friedric Handel and the Messiah, John Butt
21. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Women's Bible, Ann Loades
22. Uchimura and the Bible in Japan, Atsuhiro Asano
23. One Bible, Two Preachers: Patchwork Sermons and Sacred Art in the American South, Carol Crown
24. Bob Dylan's Bible, Michael J. Gilmour
25. From John's Gospel to Dan Brown: The Magdalene Code, Robin Griffith-Jones

Hebrew Bible
26. Gnostic Interpretations of Genesis, Ismo Dunderberg
27. Samuel Wilberforce, Thomas Huxley, and Genesis, John Hedley Brooke
28. Sodomy and Gendered Love: Reading Genesis 19 in the Anglican Communion, Jay Emerson Johnson
29. Exodus in Early Twentieth Century America: Charles Reynolds Brown and Lawrence Langner, Scott Langston
30. The Use of Exodus by the Africaanas and Liberation Theologians, Paulo Nogueira
31. Elihu's Spiritual Sensation: William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, Emma Mason
32. Ezekiel 1 and the Nation of Islam, Michael Lieb
33. Post-Holocaust Jewish Interpretations of Job, Isabel Wollaston
34. Seventh Day Adventists, Daniel, and Revelation, Kenneth G. C. Newport
35. Esther and Hitler: A Second Triumphant Purim, Jo Carruthers

New Testament
36. Kierkegaard on the Lilies and the Birds: Matthew 6, George Pattison
37. Ghandi's Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, Jeremy Holtom
38. Preaching, Politics, and Paul in Contemporary African American Christianity, Brad Braxton
39. Ruskin, the Bible, and the Death of Rose La Touche, Zoe Bennett
40. Karl Barth on Romans, Tim Gorringe
41. Augustine and Pelagius on the Epistle to the Romans, Mark Edwards
42. Luther on Galatians, Peter Matheson
43. Joanna Southcott: Enacting the Woman Clothed with the Sun, Gordon Allan
44. Bible Reading and/after Theory, Valentine Cunningham

Review: Reeve and Van Wagenen, "Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore"

2011-06-13T08:57:00.002-06:00

Title: Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore
Editors: W. Paul Reeve, Michael Scott Van Wagenen
Publisher: Utah State University Press
Genre: Religion, Folklore
Year: 2011
Pages: 243
Binding: Softcover
ISBN13: 978-0-87421-838-1
Price: $24.95

Have you heard that today's youth of the Mormon Church were once Generals in the War in Heaven, and that in the afterlife other spirits will bow the knee in reverence upon learning that these chosen ones lived during the church presidency of Gordon B. Hinckley? I've heard it to. And I still occasionally hear it, despite an official disclaimer from Boyd K. Packer and the LDS Church that the claim is not church doctrine (7). Why the longevity of such Mormon myths?

In the introduction to their new book Between Pulpit and Pew, historians W. Paul Reeve and Michael Scott Van Wagenen point to the statement's grounding in church theology. They find similar elements in quotes from General Authorities on the preexistence of spirits, war in heaven, and the singularity of today's youth. But they locate the quote's unique combination of these themes in a book by popular Mormon author Brad Wilcox. They describe the interesting cultural work such a quote does for recipients. The attribution of the quote to a higher Mormon authority, combined with its general Mormon themes, has led people to forward the quote through emails and share it in various seminary classes and church meetings. Receivers and transmitters of the quote become authors themselves, "shaping and molding the quote" to their liking (11). This "legend process" (10) undergirds the themes explored in these essays. "The expansive worldview of Mormonism," they write, "has created a vast negotiable space between pulpit and pew for Latter-day Saints to order their universe and define their place within it" (11).

Between Pulpit and Pew is a collection of seven essays on Mormon history and folklore. Bigfoot and Cain, heavenly signs and UFO's, the Bear Lake Monster, a Dream Mine for end times, walking on water, raising the dead, and Gadianton ghosts—these are the types of stories you might bump into at Scout camp or Girls camp, on a summer pioneer trek, or a late Sunday night chat. The various essay authors describe how and why such stories circulate and operate in an oral culture (viii).

"Folklore" as an academic category includes stories consisting of a "traditional center," around which the exact setting and characters can shift as "dynamic variables," depending on who is telling the tale (ix). Within Mormonism, story materials are provided in official pronouncements from Church leaders, publications, scriptures, etc. (i.e., Pulpit) and then grasped by church members (Pews) to be interpreted, embellished, and adapted. Exploring folklore can uncover some of the anxieties and hopes of regular members of the church.

In the first of Matthew Bowman's two essays he outlines the morphing legend of Cain and Bigfoot. Tracing the historical sources of this lingering Mormon story allows Bowman to highlight changes in emphasis, as the original story focused on the nature of evil while later re-tellings merged the story with newer Bigfoot myths. His second essay outlines intersections of rational Enlightenment Christianity versus popular Christian "enthusiasm" in stories of Mormons raising the dead. W. Paul Reeve's essay on the Gadianton Robbers and early Utah Mormons explains how folklore can serve anxiety-relieving functions when things don't work out as expected. Michael Scott Van Wagenen's sympathetic chapter on UFOs highlights how early Mormons read signs in the heavens as clues about the impending millennial return of Christ, whereas some Mormons later merged such accounts with the phenomenon of UFO witnessing, thus emphasizing possibilities of life on other planets rather than millennialism. Kevin Cantera's fascinating chapter on the so-called "Dream Mine" presents the most contemporary example of living folklore in the collection. He describes a diverse group of Mormons—fundamentalists, lapsed, fervent believers—all of whom remain stockholders in a mine which is supposed to become chock-full of gold prior to the second coming of Christ. Alan Morrell's "Bear Lake Monster" chapter explains why belief in such a seemingly wacky zoological phenomenon was far from unusual in the 19th century. Finally, Stanley J. Thayne exhaustively documents stories of Joseph Smith's mythic attempt to walk on water, pointing out funny discrepancies and tying the stories to earlier, widespread folklore created to debunk 19th-century prophetic figures.

The chapters are somewhat limited in scope, so they aren't without small problems. For example, Morrell's interesting Bear Lake Monster chapter felt stunted. In Van Wagenen's UFO chapter he claims a lack of reference to extraterrestrial life by church leaders since the mid-1980s, overlooking more recent ruminations on the remarkable cosmos by Neal A. Maxwell, who occasionally discussed life on other planets. (On the plus side, Van Wagenen includes plenty of perhaps-forgotten references like N. Eldon Tanner's 1972 conference address, "Warnings From Outer Space," and a 1981 feature in the Friend magazine on making a paper plate flying saucer! See p. 115). Bowman's analysis of Enlightenment thinking seemed more fully informed than Stanley Thayne's, reflecting a problem perhaps common to such essay collections.

These are minor quibbles. Overall, the collection successfully highlights what historian Grant Underwood described as the "kaleidoscopic pattern of Mormonisms," expressions of faith which are not typically explored in Mormon literature but which may seem familiar to many Mormons nonetheless (5). Mormon cosmology has inspired, and will continue to inspire supernatural folk beliefs "that center upon occurrences beyond the realm of empirical knowledge about the natural world" (5). This collection is a brisk jaunt through several under-explored Mormon folklore lands. Such stories, which otherwise might have been lost to the air, are entertainingly analyzed in this fun little collection—altogether quirky, engaging, sympathetic, and academic. (Killer cover art, too!)

Mormon Shout-Outs in Books I'm Reading

2011-06-09T10:34:00.000-06:00

(Initiated on 12/16/10)

It seems like Mormons pop up ever so briefly in many of the religious-themed books I read, and sometimes in the fiction. I wish I'd been keeping track to this point, but I'll start from now and add future mentions to this post, however inconsequential, when I remember.

My criteria for inclusion is subjective. Basically, if I didn't expect Mormonism to crop up I'll probably mention it here, especially when the author is not a member of the LDS Church. As I discover more references I might start to classify them. (Geographical/Utah references, which usually leads to some comment on Mormons, References to beliefs or practices, like polygamy, etc.).

Feel free to add your own.

Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christians Writings (2 ed.), (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Mormons get two shout-outs in Ehrman's good little intro to NT studies for undergrads. In a list of characteristics Americans might expect religion to include (Hierarchy, doctrinal statements, ethical commitments, sacred writings) Ehrman adds: "7. Exclusive commitments (e.g., a member of a Baptist church cannot also be a Hare Krishna, just as a practicing Jew cannot be a Mormon)" (21).

In Box 26.2, "The Spread of Christianity," Ehrman states that the early church "grew quite slowly in its early years. At the end of the first century, far fewer than 1 percent of the Empire's population of 60 million was Christian. But the growth was steady...With a steady growth rate of 40 percent every decade (the approximate rate of growth for the Mormon church today, as it turns out), the small band of Jesus' followers could become something like 5 percent of the Empire by the end of the third century" (398).

Donald Barthelme, "CONSTRUCTION," from Forty Stories, (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).

Barthelme is a quirky writer of fiction, his short stories often have no start or finish in the traditional sense, his prose can be disjointed, creative, roaming. In the middle of a story about some sort of businessman who frequently flies to Los Angeles we read:

"I noticed very little about the place, the shrubs or trees, saw a bit of the ocean from my hotel room window, saw an old woman in a green bathrobe on the balcony of the building opposite, at the same level, the eleventh floor, and wondered if she was a guest or if she was one of these persons who clean the place; if she was one of those persons who clean the place it seemed unlikely that she would come to work in a green bathrobe and I am sure that she wore a green bathrobe, but she did not resemble a guest or tenant, she had a bent broken stooped losing-the-game look of the kind that defines the person who is not winning the game. Seldom am I wrong about such things, the eidetic memory as we say, saw a figure of some kind possibly female atop the Mormon temple, the figure seemed to be leading the people somewhere, onward, presumably, saw several unpainted pictures on the street, from the windows of my limousine in which I was moved from place to place, Pietas, mostly, one creature holding another creature in its arms, at bus stops, mostly. Los Angeles" (213-214).

Review: Mark D. Bennion, "Psalm & Selah: A Poetic Journey Through The Book of Mormon"

2011-06-07T11:35:00.003-06:00

"Selah,

a musical term with uncertain meaning.

It may mean either a pause or a command

to start the music again" (103).

Title: Psalm and Selah: A Poetic Journey Through the Book of Mormon
Author: Mark D. Bennion
Publisher: Parables
Genre: Poetry
Year: 2009
Pages: 109
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 978-1-61539-804-1
Price: $6.99

I love finding new ways to discover the Book of Mormon. Depending on the approach, authors often uncover previously unnoticed aspects of the text. Hugh Nibley, Brant Gardner, John Sorenson, Richard Bushman, Grant and Heather Hardy, Richard Rust, Terryl Givens, Royal Skousen—each of these Mormon writers have brought their unique backgrounds to bear on the text. They take the Book of Mormon seriously by asking questions of culture, politics, authorship, theology, etc.

But there is much more to our religion than these questions can cover. Mark D. Bennion uses poetry to explore the Book of Mormon in Psalm & Selah: a poetic journey through The Book of Mormon.

Psalm & Selah is an "attempt at imagining the inner lives of fascinating people, places, and events that appear for a few verses in the Book of Mormon and then drift into the shadows of the past" (xi). In forty-seven lyrically rich selections, Bennion casts light into shadows of the Book of Mormon narrative. To give you a feeling for what Bennion offers us, I reluctantly take a pair of scissors to his work in the rest of this review, recognizing that only a full reading can begin to capture what Bennion has done.

His opening poem, "Tribute," hints at potential insights one might glean from pondering less-prominent Book of Mormon characters. This seems to be the only poem in the book from the narrative perspective of Bennion himself:

However much I admire Nephi
I know it is with Sam
I hold the greater kinship. [...]

I just kneel down to knowing
A story has more than a rebellious
Brother

And a future prophet. There are those braced
Against a holy staff, adjusting their shoes,
Unnoticed (5-6).

As this selection suggests, poetry allows Bennion a voice through which he can flesh out the underrepresented figures, scenes, and emotions in the Book of Mormon. In this regard, some of his most affecting pieces are written about women, as in Sariah's "Sorrow and Song":

That morning you came to me
I saw the lamp arising in your beard,
a flash of iron and fire
wisping in your robes and hair,

dreams full in your mouth like jamid*
and your gait uneven on the hardest soil.
I thought I knew what you were about to say,
how sweat and sand would become our clothing,

[...]

...Forgive me, Lehi,
for my complaint and hardness. I thought I saw the end
as you believed in our beginning.

Praise me, Lehi, for my denial
and acceptance, for my quiet confidence
in a goat-haired tent (25-26).

*Bennion, who has studied a bit of Hebrew, occasionally includes Arabic and Hebrew words. At the back of the book the author includes a "Notes & Nods" section, defining unusual terms or calling attention to sources which inspired him. "Jamid," he notes, is "a hard round food containing goat's or camel's cheese, grass, and various herbs" (103). Parenthetically, A version of "Sorrow and Song" appeared previously in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Others have appeared in publications including BYU Studies, Irreantum, caesura, LDS Life, Natural Bridge, Perspective, and the Steinbeck Review.

Later in the book, Bennion seizes an opportunity to add another woman to our cast of characters in a poem based on Alma 23:14—"And the Amalekites were not converted, save only one." The poem, "Tree of Life," describes this "one" as a woman awakening at dawn beneath a dying tree, turning to search for a living one:

She's heard of the high spots up ahead
hiding muskrats in the bushes
and just beyond, fruit dangles from a cluster
of branches while the light succors a lone,

solitary tree. It gleams like a coastline emerging
or the first rapture of rumored snow...(48)

I'm not a poetry expert, but I have a few tricks to try and experience a poem. I try to read the sentences aloud, following the cadence of the lines while also paying close attention to punctuation to keep the sentences together. Note the stanza break between "lone," and "solitary tree," above. The sentence is connected, but the pause allows for the emphasis to fall on that tree so that it emerges suddenly in the poem as the focus of her searching. The author depicts a holy sensuality in a way that the Book of Mormon narrative simply can't, as she arrives at the tree:

[...] and reaches for the fruit
in its summons and flesh. This beginning
far flung, yet encouraging,
as she basks in color and size, inhales

the juice and aroma between crispness
and candor, the Holy of Holies in scent
and yield, how she sings, like the morning wind,
her mouth, a sapphire, with this fiery, luscious bite (49).

(Notice the break at "inhales?" Gotta breathe in, before moving to the next word.) Thus, Bennion introduces a fresh character, a searching, confident woman, by pondering on a verse which left so much unsaid: "save only one" (Alma 23:14).

In "Dear Father, Love, Abish," Bennion writes from the perspective of the Lamanitish girl who believed in the Messiah, but had to keep it to herself because of prevailing Lamanite culture (Alma 19): "How did we keep / that frightening joy inside?" she asks, "Somehow we said nothing / and still believed, remained silent / as the desert before rain" (53). "Nothing" and "silent" break the enthusiasm, cut it short like Abish felt cut short. Soon she would be able to shout, as the poem ultimately shows.

In addition to such well-drawn characters, the poems brim with pleasing scenery and emotion, all clothed in elegant lyrics. Refreshing. Sometimes the aesthetics of a poem are enhanced by typography. "Rameumptom" gives me the feeling of a high, but shaky tower, as a rambling voice sings:

Stand covered with suave velvet, utterances

thin as velvum, assemblies

canned

with redundant preachers.

Though they started, rife with grand intentions,

like the apprenticed weaver

beginning

with devoted strands of labor

stitching around the fragile cloth of truth,

but then after only a few

years

he hangs the wrong side,

[...]

jangling with empty imaginations

and endless genealogies, no room for unrehearsed

prayer or the seedbed of clear

revelation,

just fine goods counted or procured,

such multiple words gilded with pretentious lace. (57-58).

The juxtaposition of initial intentions versus actual usage presents a new reading for an old tale. Bennion uses objects from the Book of Mormon as launchpads for higher contemplation ("launchpads"? how unpoetic!) Another example of such insight comes from "Compass," in which the author sings of the Liahona (without ever calling it Liahona). Here's a stunning observation:

Its magnetism awakens as famine

starts to thrum—the straight-line

boredom, weariness, rule. And

before long, you see it in every stone-

face, in each yellow evening, it cools

on the horizon: Remember smallness," (14).

Bennion's work is clearly borne of deep contemplation, thus inspiring further contemplation on the part of the reader. A few more examples should suffice.

The lament of a fallen people: "Would that we could remove / the scab of robber and antichrist. / We shout for the formerly baptized / to wear again the water of your shores" (72).

The recollection of Lehi: "I recall the dust / of my gold staircase and hear / a sandal lift from Jerusalem stone" (9).

The Nephite pride cycle: "Might you risk again the shades / of afternoon, the swinging / of our prosperity and repentance?" (72). "This is my mite and cumin—to not ignite / the torch when tares are overgrown" (82).

Excitement and renewal at the Waters of Mormon: "Amid the tingle of forest and shadows, / you ford through the water / to the sway of its purl and girth, / a surge of billow where air arrives / in speckles of light. The only / distance is the reach of your hand / and the life after petition and promise" (40).

In Psalm & Selah, Bennion locates instances of uncertain meaning in the Book of Mormon and turns them into opportunities to pause, or as commands to start the music again. Selah!

***

My apologies to Mark Bennion, author of this book which I'm finally reviewing after a year and a half. I enjoyed it back then, now I read it again.

I think I just wasn't ready yet.

Review: Patrick Q. Mason, "The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South"

2011-05-27T07:51:00.001-06:00

Title: The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South
Author: Patrick Q. Mason
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: American History
Year: 2011
Pages: 252
ISBN13: 978-0-19-974002-4
Binding: Hardcover
Price: $29.95

In 1857, Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt died with two stab wounds to the chest and a bullet in the neck, delivered by a disgruntled husband of one of Pratt's plural wives, in Arkansas (4). Elder Joseph Standing was murdered in 1879 by a Georgia mob, his body riddled with multiple gunshot wounds, "frightfully mutilated" by knife and gun (26). During the 1884 Cane Creek Massacre Elders John Gibbs and William Berry, along with Mormons Martin Conder and J.R. Hutson, were shot dead in a home where Sunday worship services were being held (40). These deaths, in addition to threats, beatings, abductions, destruction of property, and other violent intimidations, made the Southern States mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints notorious to, and oddly faith-promoting for, the burgeoning nineteenth-century Mormon movement. In The Mormon Menace, historian Patrick Mason uses these stories of violence from the post-Civil War south to analyze "the attitudes and actions of southerners as they perceived and then responded to Mormon proselytizing in their region" (11). For this review I decided a brief overview of the chapter contents would be sufficient to demonstrate the quality and relevance of Mason's work.

Masons first chapter is the introduction to the book. In clear and straight-forward prose he sets the stage for the rest of the book. While narrating and dissecting southern violence toward Mormons, Mason will touch on "some of the most important cultural and political discussions of the age, including debates over modern American notions of the nature of religion and its role in society, the limits of religious freedom, the construction and application of gender norms, state regulation of domestic affairs such as marriage, and the contest between popular sovereignty and the rule of law" (17).

Chapters two and three are narrative case studies of the murder of Joseph Standing and the Cane Creek, Tennessee Massacre, respectively. Mason uses these stories to introduce the ideas that he examines in the remainder of the book, including southern gender roles, the problem of Mormon polygamy, religious competition, and the prevalence of extra-legal and largely understood vigilante action.

Mason makes a strong case that the violent reactions to Mormons were largely motivated by perceptions of polygamy. In chapter four he outlines arguments used against Mormons—arguments which stand in stunning contrast to present arguments made by Mormons themselves in the public arena. As one anti-Mormon tract warned: "Mormonism is an organized, systematic attack on the permanence and purity of the Christian home....The law must guard the Christian home as the main pillar of the state" (62). So Mormon missionaries were seen as "home wreckers" on the prowl to seduce young women away to their harems in mysterious Utah. Mason draws interesting and carefully qualified comparisons between these southern views of Mormon missionaries and views of recently-liberated blacks, who were also seen as a threat to southern white male possession of women (67-8). Opposition to Mormon polygamy also proved a nice gathering point for differing religious sects in the south; it was an interdenominational effort (76).

The fifth chapter continues his analysis of reactions to polygamy by shifting his attention into the political and legal sphere. Latter-day Saints viewed their peculiar practice as being protected by the First Amendment. Their mantra was "no retreat, no surrender," and they defied laws to the contrary which they deemed unconstitutional (80). Southerners, who argued heavily in favor of state's rights, found themselves in a strange position when they felt aligned with Republicans on the other "relic of barbarism," polygamy, the twin of the defeated slavery. North and south found a common cause here. Mason then analyzes the three main structural approaches southerners used to purge polygamy: Christian missions, legislation, and vigilantism.

Mormon theocracy loomed large in public fears of the Mormon kingdom rising in the west, and Mason explores these theocratic accusations in chapter six. By painting Mormons as anti-Christian and specifically anti-American, southerners could justify violence and coercive legislation, despite their Christian beliefs and their desire for state's rights. Rumors of a Mormon "political conquest" took on a conspiratorial tone, as one writer warned that the "settled policy of the Mormons is to control Utah and the adjacent Territories, and from there to conquer the United States, and, subsequently, the whole world" (113). I chuckled a little at this section, recalling similar claims still being made today, with Mitt Romney and now John Huntsman throwing their hats in the presidential ring. Alongside the problem of theocracy, which threatened the body politic, was Mormon theology, which threatened the very soul. Mason explores some of the early Mormon claims which captured the nation's imagination in the worst of ways. The "to a point" tolerance of nineteenth-century America allowed for much diversity, but had to draw lines nevertheless (126).

Mason turns particularly numerical in the crucial seventh chapter by quantifying and describing more than three hundred documented episodes of southern anti-Mormon violence. It is particularly fascinating to see how the geographical and historical setting of the opposition to Mormonism helps account for its violent nature and the motives behind it. Latter-day Saints, of course, viewed the violence as pure religious bigotry, but Mason finds this view "ultimately insufficient in explaining the extent and nature of southern anti-Mormon violence" (127). The Mormon case is a particularly interesting anomaly to other repeated violent opposition, for instance towards blacks, because "the geographical divide [Upper South versus Deep South, which demonstrates a clear difference in treatment of freed blacks] holds little or no explanatory power for understanding anti-Mormonism" (128). He documents and charts the time, place, and forms of opposition and deeply contextualizes this within southern vigilantism. Indeed, the opposition was actually quite "democratic," but revealed "one of the fundamental flaws of democracy, namely that the people prey on the people in the name of the people" (148).

Chapter eight discusses the ways violent opposition contributed to the way Latter-day Saints understood their own identity. Mason condenses the "persecution narrative" which still echoes in Mormonism today:

They were God's chosen people, and God's chosen people had always suffered persecution and even martyrdom at the hands of evildoers. Latter-day Saints were key players in a cosmic battle between the forces of light and darkness. Casualties would come along the way, but ultimately God would exact vengeance on the wicked and vindicate the faithful remnant (149).

He supports this view of personal identity by including revelations from Joseph Smith, sermons by high-ranking Mormon leaders, and accounts from lay missionaries, all of whom faced real and physical opposition in the history of Mormonism. At times Mormons had responded in kind, at times they played a large role in precipitating the violence they encountered, but Mason also analyzes the Mormon pacifism manifested by leaders like George Q. Cannon, who quoted Joseph Smith's revelation that the Mormons must "renounce war and proclaim peace" (161). Mormons found solace in the idea that God would "bare His almighty and powerful arm" to defend them if need be, that "the wicked and ungodly will feel the avenging hand of God" (161). Ultimately, their "collective defensive mentality" steeled the faithful's resolve and helped keep the new movement together. Being "other" has a few benefits too (170).

"Most studies of conflict in the postbellum South focus exclusively, and justifiably, on racial and political violence against African Americans and to some extent their political allies," Mason notes in his final chapter. Mormons, as his book shows, deserve some attention as well, but they were not "the only religious minorities in the post-bellum South, nor the only victims of violence" (171). Thus, his book fills a gap in the current historiography regarding southern violence and religion, but he broadens his scope here to briefly compare the Mormon experience to that of Catholics and Jews, who paid closer attention than Mormons to accommodation with American culture by privatizing their religion. Attention is especially due to the case of Catholics, more of whom were lynched in the late nineteenth century South "than any other religious group (excepting black Christians), more than Mormons and Jews combined" (180). Why not a book on that? As Mason shows, however, this violence was "comprised largely of Irish and Italian Catholics" themselves, and they didn't name religion as a motivation (181). Racial, economic, political, cultural, and other factors trumped religion here, which demonstrates "how religion can be subsumed in ethnic and racial identities" (181).

Times change, and understanding the history behind religious and political movements can uncover strange surprises. The Mormon trajectory from margin to relative mainstream is placed in context of morphing views of what America is supposed to be. The "runaway logic of liberalism [in the classic sense] allowed all kinds of groups excluded in the Founders' original formulation—women, blacks, the propertyless—and groups whose claims as political communities they could not have envisioned—Mormons, homosexuals—to demand full inclusion and insist on constitutional protections to express fully their cultural identities within the American polity" (193). The feared "tyranny of the majority" still casts a shadow over the country; extra-legal violence still occurs. Despite remaining difficulties, "the boundaries of American tolerance have enlarged considerably but unevenly in the century since the end of the nation's anti-Mormon crusade, shaped as much by the paths that have foreclosed as those that have opened (194).

Mason's conclusion demonstrates, whether his analysis is accepted or rejected, the amazing relevance such classic questions still hold for the American people: the nature and limits of the freedom of religion, the majority versus minority, the contests between the will of the people and the rule of law, and how our worldviews powerfully impact how we approach these matters in the public and political spheres. Mason's The Mormon Menace exemplifies the new historical analysis at its best—careful consideration of cultural contexts, both past and present, thus making our history not only understandable, but extremely relevant.

***

Patrick Q. Mason was recently selected to replace Richard Bushman for the Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Mason discussed this book, some of his other projects, and his selection to the Hunter Chair here: "Patrick Mason answers your questions," juvenileinstructor.org, 24 March 2011.

Review: Veda Tebbs Hale, "Swell Suffering: A Biography of Maurine Whipple"

2011-05-25T13:58:00.001-06:00

Title: "Swell Suffering": A Biography of Maurine Whipple
Author: Veda Tebbs Hale
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Biography
Year: 2011
Pages: 456
ISBN13: 9781589581241
Binding: Paperback
Price: $31.95

One of the most significant conversations in the life of Mormon author Maurine Whipple took place between herself and a Bishop. It wasn't a Mormon bishop, though, it was John Peale Bishop, a nationally-recognized poet and talent scout. During the 1937 Rocky Mountain Writers' Conference the two found themselves talking about life and literature on the steps of a Boulder, Colorado frat house. Maurine poured her heart out. "She had lost at least two jobs, created and lost two more, been married, divorced, suffered rape and an abortion, and plunged into six romantic relationships" (97). This, in addition to other difficulties including resentment towards her father borne of a difficult childhood in St. George, Utah, led Bishop to exclaim: "My God! What swell suffering! Great literature is born from suffering like that!" (p. 1).

And so it was. Bishop brought Maurine to the attention of a national publisher, Houghton Mifflin, ultimately leading to the publication of her acclaimed novel, The Giant Joshua. Maurine would spend the rest of her life failing to live up to this remarkable monument. Her triumph and tragedies are explored in the new book, "Swell Suffering": A Biography of Maurine Whipple.

Maurine's 1941 Joshua has been touted as "The Greatest But Not 'The Great' Mormon Novel," and still holds a place in the hearts of many Mormon readers. Biographer Veda Tebbs Hale follows Maurine's crafting of Joshua through the correspondence between Maurine and Ferris Greenslet, literary editor and vice president of Houghton Mifflin. Maurine found the work slow going until Greenslet took advantage of her somewhat desperate need for cash—a need that would hardly subside for the rest of her life—by promising $50 per finished chapter, taken from her eventual contracted earnings: "There is another $50.00 here raring to go as soon as we get that chapter seven" (160). By following this carrot-and-stick process, Hale cleverly interweaves brief chapter synopses from Joshua, which tells the life story of Clory, a plural wife trying to survive physically and emotionally in the 19th-century Mormon settlement of St. George. Readers beware, the biography is full of spoilers, so it may be best to get through the novel before reading the biography.

Just as interesting as Maurine's production of the book, her writing process and influences, are the reactions she received after it was published. Joshua was written for a national audience and Maurine hoped to help people understand why early Mormons endured what they endured. She referred to their underlying motivation as "the Grand Idea." According to Maurine, the Mormons were a group of believers "who wanted to see if the Sermon on the Mount would work," and despite their "bigotry and intolerance" which were "part of the times," they also had "one essential idea of brotherly love, and it was very beautiful" (184).

Years prior to writing Joshua, Maurine received this piece of criticism which college professor at the University of Utah wrote on one of Maurine's earlier works: "Bringing in [that extra element] helps a story; but it clouds the problem. Make clear-cut solutions of your problems" (39). Maurine didn't follow that advice in
Joshua, which helps explain why the book still resonates strongly with readers today. Her triumph is her captivating ability to explore the power and reality of faith without forgetting or downplaying faith's tragedies, fears, and doubts. "Clear-cut solutions" don't appear in Joshua because they didn't appear in Maurine's own life.

Her willingness to explore the disappointment, privation, and woes of polygamous women at a time when that somewhat-embarrassing aspect of Mormon history was finally starting to recede from public consciousness brought on criticism. Some locals in St. George were scandalized by some of the detail Maurine included, but criticism wasn't confined to neighbors in St. George. Apostle John A. Widtsoe's negative review of the book in the February 1941 issue of the Improvement Era made her feel rejected by the Church (he didn't like its "lurid" aspects), and she also related alternate versions of an encounter with a Church authority (sometimes Heber J. Grant, or Widtsoe), who told her "we want nothing to do with you or those of your ilk" (214).

At the same time, other Church members and leaders praised her grand accomplishment. Levi Edgar Young, a professor of western history at the University of Utah and member of the First Council of the Seventy, promised to back a later book proposal she made to Knopf by writing a letter of recommendation. He told her Joshua was "a splendid work and will take its place high up in Western literature" (245). A resurgence of interest in the novel occurred in the 70s when BYU professors Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert, along with others, sought to publicize the book in symposia, university classes, and an anthology (387-390). Hale describes the continued interest in the novel up to the present, including several starts and stops on a Joshua movie project (404).

Above all, most of Maurine's admirers encouraged her to complete the originally-planned trilogy. Hale spends the rest of the book telling the tale of why the trilogy, later scaled down to a projected sequel, never reached completion. Perhaps above all, Maurine felt she needed financial and emotional security and sought a husband to provide it. She tried her hand at magazine writing and romantic relationships, sometimes mixing the two with disastrous results. Time after time Hale describes Maurine's unhealthy attempts to forge relationships with men who ultimately proved disinterested.

As various side-projects fizzled, it seems Maurine became increasingly paranoid (although Hale includes earlier traces of this characteristic, like Maurine's hiring a private investigator to look into the whereabouts of a former lover). Her troubles with traffic accidents, supposedly greedy publishers and editors, city government officials, and the LDS Church had her mind racing about conspiracies and her pen busy composing complaints rather than working on sequels. An extended effort to research and publish information on a clearly-failing scientific theory about overcoming alcoholism, now thoroughly discredited, drained time and money (351).

Throughout these experiences Maurine interacts with a colorful cast of characters. There's Lillian, a friend who is in the process of reevaluating her relationship to Mormonism and who encourages Maurine to have some flings with various men; Joseph Walker, a "cultural Mormon" who provides her with positive feedback and encouragement; Dean Brimhall and Fawn Brodie, who don't become very close with her based largely on some religious differences, Sam Weller, a book seller who she eventually trusts with the copyright to Joshua; Juanita Brooks, a St. George neighbor who provided important personal comfort to Maurine at times, but who also doubted her knowledge about elements of Mormon history like the Mountain Meadows Massacre (247, 347); Dale Morgan, a western historian who, despite his support, had a spat with Maurine over some plagiarism (255); and Carol Jensen, a plural wife in Southern Utah whose husband had died. Carol became Maurine's legal guardian in 1982 until Maurine's death, and was a friend and helper to Hale through the biographical process. In spite of these friends, acquaintances and family members, Maurine believed her work was spurred by and resulted in solitude: "Every writer's curse is loneliness," she wrote "because his work, itself, is the loneliest, cruelest job in the world" (204).

One of the most interestingly coy characters in the biography is Veda Tebbs Hale, the biographer herself. Hale spent time during the last years of Maurine's life interviewing her for the biography. Evidently, she also sometimes filled the role of friend, confidant, and even occasional artistic collaborator; there's an ambiguous reference in a footnote to her helping Maurine revise a short story (223). Hale is not a trained historian and she enters the narrative quite personally at times, offering her "personal feeling," her defense, or her criticism of Maurine (80,95, 197, several chapter conclusions). This unique biographer's perspective and access sans academic discipline contains potential for disaster, but Hale turns it into a crucial strength for this biography.

Hale is familiar enough with Maurine, for instance, to recognize her repertoire of anecdotes, allowing her to notice differences in how Maurine related them to various people (192-193, 213, 305). She tries to assist the reader in understanding some of the more embarrassingly desperate and dramatic personal letters Maurine wrote to various suitors, providing some preemptive catharsis by describing their agonized and uncomfortable nature (95, 197, 335). It's somewhat unusual to see a biographer discuss her own emotions in the biography itself: "I felt embarrassed for Maurine, irritated by her tone, and exhausted by reading" letters stored in the BYU Special Collections, some of which Maurine begged to have removed, but which remain today (105; see 91). Some of Hales's personal sources are a bit tenuous, as when she cites "an unnamed temple worker in St. George" (189), reminiscent of the same small-town gossip Maurine herself was often the subject of. But she was able to interview a good number of Maurine's personal acquaintances as well. She was even with her shortly before she passed away at a St. George nursing home where she'd spent the last few years of her life, and Hale describes the touching death (421).

Despite such intimacy, Hale remained distanced enough to include unflattering information, along with a little hand-wringing about privacy. She is able to ask Maurine for clarification about old letters or stories, although Maurine doesn't always have a satisfactory answer and sometimes becomes quite angry at the asking (91). Hale makes this an opportunity to explore the murky boundaries between the past as others saw it and the past as we compose it in our own memories. For example, a relationship with a lover named Tom Spies ends in tragedy when he dies of cancer according to Maurine, but he actually lived 19 years beyond their parting (194; see also 46, 48, 53, 305 on memory). Details of Maurine's failures in various teaching positions, a rape and abortion, thoughts of suicide, an unexpected hysterectomy, attempted relationships with married men, embarrassing love letters and angry rants, failed relationship after failed relationship—Hale deftly handles many difficult situations without turning gossipy or tabloid. Perhaps this is why she does not approach these difficulties as a novel narrative might by building up suspense. More often, she prefaces the circumstances with their ultimate conclusions (56, 65, 84, etc.).

A particular example of Hale's ability to tell the story without lurid gazing is her analysis of Maurine's attempts at several non-traditional relationships with men. Hale detects a certain old St. Georgian perspective, a "combination of rigid sexual morality combined with under-the-surface acceptance of unorthodox relationships," i.e. plural marriage. Hale depicts Maurine's familiarity with plural marriage as partly accounting for how she justified pursuing a few married men (77, 81), and how she all-but-proposed a polygamy-like relationship to a successful doctor/bachelor which would have involved herself and a few of his clinic workers (204, 210). It never happened.

Nor did the much-anticipated follow-up to The Giant Joshua. She had hoped to trace three generations of Mormons in St. George. Perhaps the "Grand Idea" would really shine through in the sequel (113), but she continued to find excuses not to complete the manuscripts despite being under contract at various points in the process. Belated income on a movie rights deal (which seems to have fallen by the wayside) helped Maurine survive, but it didn't provide the impetus to completing her project; she had become too old, it was too late (404). Hale and others discovered pieces of manuscript, character outlines and bits of narrative, which Maurine had worked on off and on for decades. She allows a glimpse at these materials, at what could have been ("The Failed Sequel," 272-292).

The biography ends with a postscript in which Hale completely shifts from the voice of biographer to the voice of personal narrator and participant. She describes a beautiful outing late in Maurine's life when together they witnessed a remarkable rainstorm causing a sudden waterfall to crash over the red rocks of a ridge in St. George. Hale thought of Maurine's life and her work: "Can your work and mine—can this biography somehow help that Grand Idea of love and brotherhood...I knew we both wanted it to be so" (429). Her unique biographical voice helps bring Maurine's story—a story of triumph, heart-ache, and crawling courage—to life. This is a wonderful, if emotionally taxing, biography of a fascinating Mormon author.

Review: Stephen C. Taysom, "Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries"

2011-05-13T11:11:00.006-06:00

Title: Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries
Author: Stephen C. Taysom
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Genre: Religious History/Comparative Studies
Year: 2011
Pages: 280, + forward, bibiography, index
ISBN13: 978-0-253-35540-9
Binding: Cloth
Price: $34.95 (ebook, $22.95)

Stephen Taysom’s new book sets out to explode superficial views of what sociologists have called "high-tension religious groups," or religious groups who seem to define themselves over and against "the religious, political, economic, and social elements of the larger culture of which they are a part" (3). Two nineteenth-century religious groups, the Mormons and the Shakers, provide his case studies. Taysom combines meticulous historical research with more recent sociological theories and models to examine the distinct ways such "high-tension" groups negotiate their identities among themselves and with the larger society (ix). Being outsiders had advantages.

Shakers and Mormons provide excellent templates for this goal. Ann Lee and Joseph Smith inspired the creation of distinct communities of believers who would help create and maintain their “peculiar and particular visions of divinely sanctioned life” (1). A casual glance at Shakers and Mormons raises similarities: both groups sought to build their own geographical communities and both had counter-cultural ideas about marriage (celibacy or polygamy, respectively). But Taysom transcends such superficiality to reveal significant differences in the way these groups responded to their host cultures. He’s looking at how the odd ducks fit in or fit out of their larger communities. Both groups follow a similar pattern of development in that they are born in the “social and cultural margins amid feverish charismatic frenzy,” but within time begin to harden and struggle to move from margin to mainstream (2). This trajectory is helped along by outsiders, whose opposition can be beneficial to help define marginal groups to begin with.

In the first chapter Taysom argues that the underlying beliefs and values of a community can be traced in the physical structures they create. The village embodies the faith. Believers experience a tension, however, between the “culturally postulated world” and the “experienced world” (4). Taysom’s familiarity with the origins and development of the Shaker faith are most evident in the sources he uses and the scholars with whom he interacts. He skillfully weaves the religion’s history into his account of their beliefs built into villages, perhaps the most prominent physical symbol of Shakers to the outside perspective of 19th century Americans. Shakers early sought a unity and connection and used a communal village model as a bulwark against the sinful world, the “culturally postulated world” of the “natural, generative order” (7). They sought a Garden of Eden-like state which existed prior to the messiness of procreation and selfishness ushered in by the fall of Adam and Eve, interpreted primarily as a sexual act (8, 106-107). The natural world=bad, the spiritual higher life=good.

But a chasm opens up between this rhetoric and practice, which is is evident in the way Shakers had to conduct business and interact with people outside of their community in order to survive in the world as constituted, in what Taysom calls the “experienced world” (9). But it wasn’t only their needs which fueled these interactions; in the wake of the Irish potato famine of 1847 Shakers sent donations overseas, even though overseas was part of that sinful, natural order from which they fled (10-11). Thus they preached about an evil world from which they remained separate, but which in reality they still had to participate in, however marginally.

Taysom’s book is especially notable in the correctives it offers to previous scholarship. On the nature of separation and the Shakers, for instance, he offers an alternative to Sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s view that that Shakers created strict geographical and self-contained boundaries and thus lived like recluses (12). Taysom shows a “penumbra rather than a wall” built by the Shakers separating them from “the world,”, a penetrable boundary which relied on internal behavioral standards while allowing for exchange with outsiders. Using sources like hymns, contracts, and personal letters Taysom shows how Shakers maintained their distance while peripherally participating in the larger, in their view sinful, world.

Visitors were allowed to some of their gatherings—they even encouraged a bit of tourism—but conversion required a trial period and strict adherence to rigorous rules of living (30). A particular problem was orphaned or runaway youths who might seek shelter in Shaker villages until they came of age and realized that celibacy wasn’t for them (32-33). Taysom concludes this chapter by showing how the immediate circumstances affected the Shaker’s ability to fulfill their religious vision. Shaker villages in the eastern United States were much easier to maintain compared to satellite villages they began creating in the west as they expanded. Shakers in new communities lacked the requisite numbers to maintain the leadership and organizations structure central to Shaker identity (49).

II.

In chapter two Taysom identifies “four general phases of Mormon physical boundary creation in the nineteenth century” (53). Like the Shakers, Mormons sought to come out of the wicked world and create a holy place for a holy people. Joseph Smith’s early revelations noted that “the world is ripening in iniquity” and “the saints” were to separate (51). These revelations directed followers to move to divinely sanctioned communities, cities of refuge. The first period, 1831-1833, included plans for a city of Zion. A liminal phase between 1834-39 left the Mormons without a sure foothold until the next phase between 1840-1844 when Zion rhetoric focused more intensely on a city at Nauvoo. Taysom shows how earlier revelations designating particular places were re-imagined by the community in order to account for failed expectations. In the final phase, 1844 to the twentieth century, boundary markers were increasingly emphasized through the ideas of the Temple and the personal body.

Taysom deftly argues that, even as the Mormons prepared for their exodus they received means of boundary maintenance through sacred temple rituals: “When the Mormons left Nauvoo, they literally wore a physical boundary marker on their bodies, a sacred shell that tied them to the first scene of creation and insulated them from the world in which they had to live, and it increased in importance as the memory of their sacred cities grew more distant” (95). This is not Taysom’s own imposition of perspective, he cites Mormons who made the same observations sans the sociological jargon.

Undoubtedly, historians will have opportunities for quibbling throughout all of this, although Taysom recognizes the somewhat artificial nature of phasing the development of Mormon boundaries. (For instance, temples had been discussed in earlier phases, like at Kirtland, and dreams about a physical refuge remained potent for many even when external causes prevented their realization). But he provides interesting correctives to past historical narratives of Mormonism throughout. One of the most interesting sections in this chapter for Mormon readers is Taysom’s analysis of how Mormons reconciled revelations calling them to build Zion in specified locations to their ultimate decision to abandon those very places and journey to the west. Nauvoo, he notes, only retrospectively was seen as a brief stopping point on the Mormon trail, a place of testing for the nation, where the faithful would eventually be required to pack up and go once again. Taysom argues that Mormon “leaders had to reinforce a collective memory that was literally false but was fashioned into a remembered, functional truth” (85).

Taysom justifies this argument in a most striking and meticulous revisionary section. He analyzes the historical evidence to demonstrate, or rather to demolish the idea that Joseph Smith himself foresaw the saints’ relocation to “the Rocky Mountains” of the Utah territory (87-89). “There is evidence,” Taysom acknowledges, “to suggest that Smith was looking for possible places for the Mormons to settle over a wide swath of territory,” but the specific and exclusive location could not be determined until after his death (88-89). As far as the historical documents demonstrate, the retrospective accounts which describe Smith specifically prophesying of the ultimate settling place for the Church do not find any contemporary corroboration.

Here Taysom is trying to demonstrate the power of collective thought in the creation, maintenance, and reformulation of physical boundaries. Mormons needed a version of the past which would motivate current projects (86). Thus, sacred boundary markers shifted according to revelation and historical circumstances from city to temple to self. From one specific centerplace community of Zion to satellite stakes of Zion throughout the world with multiple temples: “Earthly temples were now gates to heavenly Zions” (93).

III.

Mormons and Shakers were probably most known in the 19th century for their respective peculiar marriage practices: polygamy and celibacy. Clearly these were very different ways of living differently than the prevailing culture, but Taysom seeks to uncover the common ground between these practices. He finds it in the “structures motivating those behaviors” which were “nearly identical” (100). Relying on the accounts of Mormons and Shakers themselves he explains:

“The master motive, or the ultimate goal, for the Mormons and the Shakers was to behave in ways that imitated God…The Mormons taught that God was married…The Shakers, by contrast, held a view of an androgynous God that transcended all physicality” (101).

He spends the balance of the chapter describing the internal functions of these practices and the opposing reactions from outsiders, which for Mormons were often more extreme and legally-based as the Church grew, but which for the Shakers declined as their community dwindled by lack of reproduction and inability to swiftly convert and retain outsiders. The legal pressures brought to bear on Mormons were largely absent for Shakers, but in both cases these marital/sexual practices set the groups apart from the broader cultural sensibilities. Taysom also notes how these two marital/sexual approaches resonate today—for the Mormons who retain a semblance of plural marriage practice: “Mormon policy allows men who have been sealed for eternity to be sealed again for eternity once their wife has died, as long as the second wife has not been sealed to another man previously” (150). For the Shakers, the resonance is more of a faint echo, as only three living Shakers remain. Celibacy was a “remarkably stable boundary marker” but failed at adjusting “in the face of diminishing returns” (150).

IV.

I was personally most interested in the fourth chapter. Taysom has been making the case that Mormons and Shakers defined themselves partially based upon the opposition they encountered from outsiders. When such opposition was disrupted or somewhat alleviated, a period of crisis arose because the communities had relied on opposition. He intriguingly posits that the so-called “Mormon Reformation” of the late 1850s was largely self-generated within the community, while the Shaker “Era of Manifestations” responded to an actual internal crisis faced by the community (152).

In the late 1830s various “communities of negation” inside the Shaker communities seemed to disrupt their order (154). In other words, some members weren’t playing by all the rules. A variety of Shaker youths began experiencing visions calling for a separation of wheat from chaff. Taysom’s model, which points to internal conflict and the need to maintain a separate identity from the outside world, accounts for the sudden burgeoning of revelation which spread to various Shaker communities. Taysom makes use of Shaker hymns, written revelations, group manifestations, angelic visits, and other Shaker artifacts in exploring this turbulent period. The methods Shakers employed to counter the influence of disruptive insiders lead Taysom to explore the Mormons approach to similar problems.

As for the late 1850s Mormon Reformation, Taysom describes the oppositional identity which the Mormons embraced as a sign of their divine chosenness. Persecution of believers became a marker of their identity, and when that immediate pressure was somewhat alleviated after the saints moved to the west a time of tranquility alarmed Mormon leaders who needed a crisis in order to keep things together. I still wondered about this argument on the grounds that developing a new state out of scratch in the face of desert and famine may have been crisis enough for the Mormons.

Nevertheless, Taysom’s argument is a provocative and new approach to what led to the fiery rhetoric, brimstone sermons, mass rebaptisms, the suspension of the Mormon sacrament, and even indirectly the Mountain Meadows Massacre which comprised the Mormon Reformation (although he tantalizingly brackets the implications of so-called “blood atonement” doctrines!, p. 189). In order to shore up church members and reassert their need for divinely guided hierarchy, Mormon leaders stirred their community up to a reassertion of group solidarity by use of “home missionaries” and public performances in group confessions and rebaptisms. Catechisms outlined proper worship habits and personal standards. Without providing an in-depth analysis of the chapter in this review, I believe Taysom’s sociological approach offers important new possibilities for understanding the Mormon Reformation.

The book concludes by looking at ultimate fates. Mormonism, which made changes and adjustments to its boundary markers, has grown into a global faith with several million members. Shakerism maintained very stable boundary markers in celibacy and has petered out to three members residing at Sabbathday Lake, Maine (197). More pressing to Taysom than pointing to a religion’s success based on boundary creation and maintenance is the continuing relevance of broader society’s interaction with marginal religious groups today. Various news media and law enforcement individuals have demonstrated a certain “inability to grapple with the complexities of and differences among high-tension religious groups” (198). The People’s Temple at Jonestown, Guyana and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas are potent examples of how misunderstandings on the part of outsiders can exacerbate disaster for members of marginal high-tension religious groups. Taysom believes that by examining nineteenth-century Shakers and Mormons who also embraced their own "outsider" status, readers will better be able to identify patters within, and differences between, current marginal groups. Taysom argues that different groups can be approached using different models which help outsiders understand and thus work with such groups.

The Mormons demonstrated an “episodic crisis-driven tension model” (199). Their boundary markers brought on highly charged reactions from official, legal, and vigilante outside forces. At the final moment of conflict before an ultimate tragedy, Mormons were able to reduce the tension through accommodation. 19th century Mormonism is characterized from Taysom's view as a series of mounting tensions “followed by capitulation and the reformulation of boundaries,” i.e., the cessation of polygamy, the Mormon reformation, etc. (199). The Shakers demonstrated a “stable high-intensity moderate-risk tension model” (200). Their selected boundary markers were of “moderate risk,” meaning they did not result in the sort of legal responses Mormonism received, but did result in occasional violence and much societal pressure. They were of “high intensity” because they demanded much from insiders, living in Shaker communities with other strict rules such as the prohibition of sexual relations. They were of moderate risk “in terms of the level of response” they received from the larger culture (200).

***

To put Taysom’s overall conclusion more succinctly: there is usually more than meets the eye with marginal religious communities (usually defined today as “cults”). Comparing any particular group with other marginal groups might disclose some superficial, even some important similarities, but ultimately they also ought to be addressed on their own terms as far as possible. By employing theories from thinkers like Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Michael Foucalt, and Catherine Albanese, Taysom seeks to avoid superficial reductions of marginal religious groups. At the same time, he offers a fresh historical reading of Shaker and Mormon religiosity, from revelations to recapitulations.

Certainly this approach is not without its flaws—new reductions can result from such a studied attempt to avoid reductionism. Also, because Taysom’s lens is more sociological than traditionally historical he overlooks some interesting possible questions. One example: oddly enough, he never notes that these two marginal groups actually encountered each other, and that a revelation regarding the Shakers remains even today in the Mormon canon of scripture. It is unclear here whether the Shakers recorded anything of this interaction. The story behind this interaction would be an interesting examination under the model approach Taysom employs.

Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries is part of Indiana University Press’s “Religion in North America” series, and its prose is highly technical and analytical as opposed to simple chronology or comparison of distinct historical narratives. Rather than recommending this book to the average reader I suggest it to people with a more sustained interest in religious boundary creation and maintenance. For that audience the book is both enlightening and challenging, even a must. Taysom teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Cleveland State University. His book demonstrates the intriguing possibilities his field offers to those who employ an interdisciplinary approach to examine religion.

Review: "The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, a novel written by Christopher Higgs"

2011-05-10T13:07:00.023-06:00

Title: The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, a novel written by Christopher Higgs
Author (Editor?): Christopher Higgs
Publisher: Sator Press
Genre: Experimental Fiction
Year: 2010
Pages: 352
ISBN13: 978-0-615-33999-3
Binding: Paperback (or .pdf. Or audiobook?)
Price: $13.99 or name your price (for now).
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,629,010
Weather: Stormy, raining, flood warnings in Utah
Shirt: Black and red flannel

"Certainly this is more than just a long jumbled course of calamities."
—(Marvin K. Mooney, p. 262)

This is the first sentence of this review of a book, which is long and scattered. If you enjoy this review you'd probably enjoy the book it reviews. I could be wrong about that. Either way, I'll personally be reading this book, or at least excerpts from it, again. I'm the sort of person who likes thinking about footnotes, brackets, editorial insertions, and there is plenty of that stuff here. Plus, this book also got me in the mood to write fiction. Something I'd been wanting to start doing for a while.

Most of the books I read and nearly all of the books I review are non-fiction. As a reader/reviewer I've developed a variety of attitudes, call them postures, toward the various books themselves. I approach a book differently if I know I'll be writing a review of it, for instance. I look for the architectonics of the book, the main themes, unspoken assumptions, stated goals, and their successful or unsuccessful completion. I heavily annotate and have a weird two-color highlighting system (green and yellow) complete with symbols, brackets and other techniques I've developed over time. I'm almost always happy to read a book without the specter of a review hanging over my head, which is one reason I took a friend's advice and bought a copy of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. But once I finished it, this review just sort of spilled out, and if it seems a bit disjointed I blame Mooney. After all, he practically demanded a review from me, really:

If someone asks you:
"Hey, what's that you're reading?"
You could answer a number of things, one of them being: "It is a new work of creative non-fiction by Marvin K. Mooney."
In follow-up, you may be asked:
"What's it about?"
To which you can simply reply: "It is a text about itself. It is pretentious, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, and hardly worth my time; but for some reason I continue to read it - perhaps because I am being forced to at gunpoint, perhaps I am slightly enjoying it" (320-321).

That's a fairly good description of the book, actually. After Marvin K. Mooney (whose parents named him after a Dr. Seuss character and whose Social Security number ends with the digits "43") disappeared several years ago it evidently fell to novelist Christopher Higgs to collect and compile Mooney's disparate papers into one volume (as per Mooney's own instructions, 82-83). The difficulty of this task is multiplied because Mooney's works are often rambling or disjointed and they hop genres. Throughout his controversial career, Mooney tried to find his narrative voice in different modes ranging from poetry, to short story, to academic paper, screenplay, and other genres. You'll find each of these literary approaches here. Included also are his attempts at historical writing. One extended chapter traces something of a tragi-comic history of the circus complete with real names and sketchy details, providing that Google can be trusted (198-210). A personal memoir compares the chambers of Mooney's heart to the people who mean most to him as he suffers heart failure, literal or metaphorical I'm not quite sure ("Hang Up Words For Ardor," 261-277). An encore to the Collected Works tells the historical narrative of the "Invention of America," but physical participation on the part of the reader (in addition to the actual act of turning pages) is required if you want to finish the book (332, 335-351). Chapter Five, "The Discursive History of a Familiar Integer" gives a brilliant and funny overview of the number five (but it isn't five pages long, 114-120). Chapter Seven, "The Eight Word Essay," appears to be Mooney's brief commentary about/personal enactment of environmental destruction: "This essay is about the destruction of nature" (136-143). Each word gets its own page. This point was lost on me when I first read it on my Kindle version. It wasn't until I had the paperback that it was called to my attention. I talk a lot about the various bits that make up this book, but at 352 pages you're bound to find plenty I don't mention. Well, I've probably said too much. [Is this supposed to be a retroactive spoiler alert? please advise —ed.]

Higgs has also done us the favor of including other Mooney papers which evidently were not written for inclusion, like Mooney's "Letter To The Person Who Keeps Putting Pornographic Magazine Cutouts In My Faculty Mailbox," which led to his dismissal from an unnamed university (219-220), and a "Confession written by Marvin K. Mooney [date omitted] found on the back lid of a shoe box" (291-?). Non-Mooney-penned material also appears throughout the text. In addition to quoted excerpts from Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, Nietzsche, and Derrida, we find reviews of the book printed prior to the start of the first chapter: "Only the most dedicated masochists would subject themselves to this travesty of tangents Mooney calls a novel," says Rory O'Flanagan, Guggenheim Fellow (32). Independent Scholar Twyla Faye Robinson disagrees: "I believe it is a triumph. I predict it will one day be considered a defining text for the generation that followed postmodernism," (34). Several critics mention that this is all so much pretentious nonsense.

Later in the book we read heart-warming, sometimes disturbing memories related in interviews Higgs conducted with old neighbors of Mooney: "I took writing classes with Marvin K. Mooney...He loved telling us to marinate on things...During that period of my life I did a lot of marinating" reports Ernie Sheffield (281). Ernie's mother called Mooney a godsend: "All because of Mr. Mooney, our son is a published writer on his way to a master's degree" (281). "I thought he was pretty mean. He screamed a lot. He was really angry" recalls Zed Hurlbert (284). [This may be the best point in the review to mention that Mooney's writings include some explicit language and a few adult themes scattered throughout. Consider adding "scare quotes" and censored s***. ]

This might have been better to mention more clearly at this review's outset, but the novel can be thought of as "experimental fiction." Supposedly this is a somewhat contestable genre according to what I've gathered from reading Higgs's own blog posts on the subject. Most works of fiction, he says, are directed toward a "closed reading" despite the fact that readers can interpret them differently.¹ Authors lead readers to particular conclusions using devices like setting, character, plot, point of view, conflict, epiphany. Higgs (and Mooney) evidently dislike Aristotle, as they blame his Poetics for helping spread these perniciously common devices (213).² They opt instead for "open readings" through which the reader must work towards, not receive, information. Readers are asked, even required, to co-create throughout this book—most times implicitly but sometimes explicitly. It can be confusing. I'm not convinced I would have given this book a chance had a friend not recommended it and given me an idea of what to expect. (Granted, his warning—in and of itself—gave my reading of Mooney a different hue altogether to begin with. So thanks and no thanks.) This book is a collection of work by an imaginary writer who has disappeared.

As I said earlier, I read a lot of books which require a critical eye, whereas this book demanded attention of an entirely different sort. This is probably why I enjoyed it so much. It called my attention to the strange negotiations we make as readers and writers. After directing a series of rhetorical questions to the reader, Mooney quotes Gertrude Stein: "Writing is not conversation." He continues:

Why are you reading this? Why don't you give up? Quit reading. I had a professor once who told me never to bully the reader...The New Critics want to do away with the author. I am not to be done away with. I am a transmission....What about you? Like me, do you ever [END TRANSMISSION] (65-66).

Higgs and Mooney seem to think of reading as being a "phenomenological experience" in which we, the readers, must engage, which is why Mooney "challenges the reader to participate." One of the block quotes elsewhere in the book comes from Charles Bernstein's "Writing and Method" essay: "The text calls upon the reader to be actively involved in the process of constituting its meaning... The text formally involves the process of response/interpretation and in so doing makes the reader aware of herself or himself as producer as well as consumer of meaning" (222). Higgs or Mooney refer to the text's "opacity," a lack of solidity which some readers will have a low tolerance for. This explains why "the wayside fills with shipjumpers, readers who haven't the patients [sic] for shenanigans, exercises, games" (121).

I stayed aboard the ship, but I can understand why some readers wouldn't. You might not like this book. You might agree with Dr. Wilson Parnell, Professor Emeritus (who, incidentally, coined the phrase "takes one to know one"), who said "No sane person would waste time reading Mooney's rubbish....It's a royal shame that some fringe academia literati find it necessary to vindicate such tripe" (31). But maybe you shouldn't rely on my review of the book anyway. As Mooney is said to have said, "In order to dissect something, you must kill it first" (82). Granted, Mooney and Higgs sometimes interrupt the opacity of the text, they sometimes provide the surgical instruments required for dissection. This occurs when they include excerpts from actual conference papers on the topic of experimental literature, for instance (213-217). But they are only providing me with the tool, or the weapon, so I may be committing murder here in this review, bibliocide. But it seems to me that by thinking about the book even now, as I did when I was reading, I'm really bringing the book to life in my own experience, from my own perspective, with my own imagination, for myself, which is precisely what any reader can do—though we will potentially reach radically different conclusions. Like this one:

Interestingly enough, as the book calls plot itself into question it actually helps reaffirm the utility of plot; it recognizes and somewhat fulfills our drive for plot, though it requires our assistance. As soon as you start getting a feel for the arc of the book they pull the rug out from under you. (This is a phenomenon I recognized even prior to page 99 where Mooney writes "You see? Right when you think you might know where you're headed you get the rug pulled, you end elsewhere. This is new. You got comfortable and that is the kiss of death.") At times the rug-pull doesn't matter anyway because when gravity and center are lacking altogether you don't notice as much. Like when Mooney (or Higgs) is simply stringing interesting words together.

Count footsteps front door carefully. Do it twice if you must be the number code to keypad opens the grey latch the blue barn the Montana forest. Busted sits electrical inside guitars strewn living room (129).

At one point I discovered I could read a paragraph top to bottom in one-word columns rather than left to right and it nearly made as much sense, but I looked for clues in vain. These instances of "documenting patters of consciousness" (46) provide interesting contrast. They help lead into and out of the more organized prose. Imagine spinning around and around in one place, then stopping. The world feels like it's still turning, it's hard to walk straight for a moment. It feels floaty and dreamlike. This is the precise effect I felt at moments of this book, it was amazing really. At one point it literally felt to me as though I was in a dream myself, which was quite honestly bizarre, unique, and invigorating. Like a simulated dream without the use of sleep or drugs or a knock on the head:

Afterwards you will be on your front porch, drinking a cold beer, and out of nowhere you will hear the ghost cough. This is your signal. You will know it is the ghost coughing because the cough will be loud and there won't be any people around. Finish your beer in a timely manner; throw the bottle into the recycling bin; go down to the basement and light the fire you have prepared under the stairs. The flame should burn green. If the flame is not green, if it is blue or orange or any other color than green you are in a world of trouble: you will need to immediately put the fire out and call 911—with any luck the ambulance will arrive in time to resuscitate you. That is the worst case scenario. What is more likely to happen is that the flame will be green, which is the color it needs to be in order to initiate the second phase (91).³

A subplot (if it's fair to call it one) to the collection of Mooney's writings is the mystery of Mooney's disappearance. As editor, Higgs occasionally provides information about Mooney's disappearance. I should point out that the excerpt above ("Why are you reading this? Why don't you give up? Quit reading...") is taken from Mooney's last-known written words. This final piece of writing (included by Higgs early in the book, perhaps reflecting the ambiguity of calling this the "Complete Works") was "saved under the title 'Grand Unified Theory'" on June 26, 2002, "three days before he went missing" (63). There is a sense of pathos at the loss. But it seems to me Mooney wanted to disappear, he had been wrestling with his identity for years:

At this moment you could be anywhere on the globe and you have no idea where I am, which is how I am invisible. You don't know me. You've never met me. If you are my wife, my mother, my sister, I am sorry to break it to you like this but you don't know me. You only know a version of me I have given to you over the years, a side of the real me I have decided to show you, not the whole me (302).

The very question of authorship is quite puzzling throughout this book, as the voice switches from Mooney to Higgs to characters to thoughts to dialogue to fiction to history to rambling. Sometimes they all get to arguing: "Editor's Note...this is the biography of an imaginary character. I am real but he is not. How could it be? I am not a creation. He is. Wait...who is 'he'? Him or me? Which one is this typing here? Is Chris Higgs involved? Who is Chris Higgs?" (221). Whoever it was, Mooney is said to be missing. "'It's raining.' —the last known words spoken by Marvin K. Mooney before his disappearance" (144). So he's gone now, though we have the literary leavings of his life dutifully compiled by Higgs for our consideration. Throughout the book Higgs himself formulates several hypotheses concerning Mooney's disappearance:

There are many good reasons to want to disappear from society,
just as there are many bad reasons. There are also many good ways to
disappear from society and there are many bad ways, too (287).

To conclude this review I have created a simple but helpful chart to assist future readers who are formulating their own theories about Mooney's disappearance. The various ways and reasons may be mapped accordingly (click to enlarge):

"I have." is a good sentence because it is very
brief and tells us very little. Remember: clarity
is not always the name of the game; it is just
one choice, one decision.
—(Marvin K. Mooney, p. 97)

***

I almost forgot to tie this review into Mormonism or religion, which people might have expected given that this blog regularly focuses on those things. There are certainly some interesting connections to be made, but I wanted simply to review the book aside from that framework. Fortunately for me, a relevant reference to these themes is found in one of Mooney's more self-absorbed ramblings, titled "Lonely So Very Much Was I." I trust my including it will help justify my reviewing this book to those who might think it strange of me:

Apologize, the postman sees underwear everywhere strewn on the couch. Invite him inside to drink and chip taste. Watch a little telly? Talk about the weather? How every morning I pray for proselytizing Mormons at the door. Or Jehovah's Witnesses (123-124).

FOOTNOTES:

1. See Christopher Higgs, "What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 1}," HTMLGIANT, 18 November 2010.

2. Higgs, "What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 2}," HTMLGIANT, 15 December 2010. Higgs quotes Brian Evanson, a contributor to a collection of LDS short fiction edited by Angela Hallstrom, Dispensation: Latter-Day Fiction (Provo: Zarahemla Books, 2010).

3. In one of Higgs's blog post comments he mentioned a book called The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. I picked up a copy and this morning was struck by this observation: "To read poetry is essentially to daydream" (17). I think Higgs somehow channeled that into his prose here, found a way to make this type of reading more obvious, at least to my own experience. Pretty cool.

Post Script: Hi, Mr. Mooney, if you happen to be reading this!

Review: Terry Eagleton, "On Evil"

2011-05-09T12:43:00.007-06:00

Title: On Evil
Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
Genre: Philosophy/Literature
Year: 2011
Pages: 176
ISBN13: 978-0-300-17125-9
Binding: Paperback
Price: $16.00 (also available in cloth for $35.00)

Terry Eagleton believes the term "evil" is either misused or disregarded by most people today. By misdiagnosing or disregarding evil we run the risk of not being able to properly deal with real evil when we encounter it. To prevent such a catastrophe, Eagleton has put together an extended meditation on the existence and nature of evil.

Eagleton apparently hopes to give readers the option of forgetting about the religious implications of evil. He cites a recent poll showing that Denmark has the lowest amount of believers in sin is cited. Eagleton notes that such people nevertheless believe in the reality of things like "child pornography, police violence, and the barefaced lies of pharmaceutical companies." But to call such things "sin" would imply an "offence against God rather than an offense against other people. It is not a distinction that the New Testament has much time for" (15). In other words, whether the reader places sin in a context of God or man, they can still take part in the discussion. There are several arguments based on the nature of God and eternity, however, which tend to break out of the bracket he initially set up. (It's somewhat beside the point of this review, but I have some substantial disagreements with Eagleton's conception of God.)

This excerpt highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses of Eagleton's prose. It can be witty and song-like, but it can also be snarky and self-assured. I liked his comment about the New Testament, but it obviously cries out for explanation which Eagleton never gives, not a single biblical reference is given supporting that claim. This is why I call the book a "meditation" as opposed to a philosophical explication or analysis. He picks and chooses his sources, doesn't set up a conceptual framework, and mashes different Western thinkers together throughout the work. As for the snarky and self-assured, his jab at pharmaceutical companies likewise receives no further comment, it's a given, as is his repeated use of works by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. Eagleton is a Christian himself, so his reliance on these thinkers will likely surprise readers. Continued critiques of capitalism are to be expected from the man who also wrote a book called Why Marx Was Right.

Eagleton is quite adept at taking a unique approach to a common idea, which can really induce the reader to think and keep the reader on her toes. For instance, he sees the modern age as having largely shifted attention from the "soul to the psyche" or from "theology to psychoanalysis" (17). This shift helps account for all the fuzzy, feel-good self-help, prosperity gospel stuff which he despises. Freud and Jesus, he says, are both presenting "narratives of human desire," describing a "science of human discontent" (17). He seems to delight in overturning conventional phrases, too. "Idle hands are the devil's playground" sounds nice, but often times the "trouble with the wicked" is that "they are far too busy, rather than not busy enough" (13). Elsewhere he challenges Sartre's claim that "Hell is other people" while analyzing William Golding's book Pincher Martin. Without the requisite spoiler alert notification he shows how Golding's book argues that hell is "exactly the opposite" of other people. "It is being stuck for all eternity with the most dreary, unspeakably monotonous company of all: oneself" (22).

Eagleton's evil is intensely connected to his understanding of personal identity, responsibility, cause and effect, and the proper understanding of justice. He refers to the brutal torturing and murder of a child by two ten-year-old boys in England in 1993. A police spokesman chalked it up to their being pure evil. This, argues Eagleton, seemed a way of forfeiting understanding. "Evil" in this view is unintelligible, so we attribute it to bad blood and genes, insanity, demon possession, etc. If we believe punishment should apply to people who commit evil acts of their own free will then chalking their actions up to "evil" seems to call into question the sort of punishments we mete out, prison sentences and even the death penalty. On the other hand, if we try to understand the circumstances which led to the tragedy we might have room for change or mercy. This leads to one of the most interesting parts of Eagleton's book: his discussion of "original sin." The Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which holds that Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin, is absurd, Eagleton holds:

"It regards original sin as a kind of genetic stain which you might be fortunate enough to be born without, rather as you might be unfortunate enough to be born without a liver. Original sin, however, is not about being born either saintly or wicked. It is about the fact of being born in the first place...[because] we enter into a preexistent web of needs, interests, and desires--an inextricable tangle to which the mere brute fact of our existence will contribute, and which will shape our identity to the core" (35).

Thus we may be born innocent, in the sense that a tortoise is innocent, incapable of doing better or worse, but we are not born without incurring the stains of the blood and sins of this generation, in Mormon parlance. He argues against Rousseau and others who view radical individual liberty as the foundation of freedom and responsibility (36). Rather, we enter an already-existing game, and we implicitly start playing it as we grow up. "Who can say for sure, in the great skein of human action and reaction, who really has ownership of a particular deed?" (37). He argues in behalf of a "radical materialism" which does not see evil or wicked acts as existing independent of the social structures in which they occur, or apart from their material contexts (15). Evil=you+me+society+action depending on how we affect the whole. This isn't an entirely new conception, of course. I was reminded of C.S. Lewis's argument about sin in Mere Christianity where he criticizes the idea that we can sin so long as it only affects ourselves. He compares humanity to a fleet of ships, and individual ships who go off course, so to speak, can indeed have dire consequences even if they are unintended based on the very nature of our world.

The trouble with seeing bad acts as being either evil or explicable is that these views tend to stop conversation, tend to stop personal reflection, too (8). Conservatives who might blame evil on the individual and liberals who emphasize only the societal causes are both missing it, and in something of a Hegelian synthesis he sees better potential in looking at individual and societal contributions to evil acts in the world. In order to make the world better should we change the person or their surroundings? Both, he argues (148).

This is different than a grim view of the fallen nature of man requiring a retributive punishment approach, as well as a mealy-mouthed or overconfident faith in progressivism--that the world just keeps getting better. (This is, incidentally, is main beef with the so-called "New Atheist" movement.) He recognizes that some will simply not agree with his approach to evil:

"For some commentators, trying to grasp what motivates Islamic suicide bombers by, say, pointing to the despair and devastation of the Gaza Strip, is to absolve them of their guilt. But you can condemn those who blow up little children in the name of Allah without assuming that there is no explanation for their outrageous behaviour--that they pulverise people simply for kicks. You do not have to believe that the explanation in question is sufficient reason to justify what they do" (7).

Clearly Eagleton is not only talking in the abstract about evil. It becomes more and more apparent that he is speaking to actual world events, not archaic religious distinctions of behavior. This is why Eagleton is almost sure to bother every reader about something they believe in, whether it be his criticism of capitalism or US foreign policy--criticisms which he usually states without fully explaining or justifying. (For this reason, it almost feels like his audience is supposed to be those who want to believe in evil and progressivism simultaneously but don’t know how to reconcile the two competing things.) At the same time, he is right to point out that the stakes are high, especially considering global terrorism and ongoing war. If you're uncomfortable with what looks like his defense of Islamic extremists above, his conclusion might help balance things out. There he points to Islam again in order to decry a certain strain of overconfident triumphalism. He sees the "No Apologies!" approach as a dangerous participant in, rather than solution to, our current problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. If we could seek to understand what they are doing we might better be able to bring a resolution. However:

"This is not to claim that Islamic fundamentalism is eminently rational. On the contrary, it is ridden with the most virulent strains of prejudice and bigotry, as its torn and butchered victims have good reason to know. But those lethal fantasies are mixed in with some specific political grievances, however illusory or unjustified its enemies may consider them to be" (158).

Disregarding extremists out of hand "is an irrational prejudice to rival their own, and one which can only make the situation worse" by meeting violence with violence, leading to more terror, more violence, and so forth (158-159). This, I believe, is Eagleton's most pressed point of the book. But there are plenty of additional side-roads which readers might enjoy on subjects like egotism, death and despair. It has plenty of darkness, but somehow these ideas are explored in an upbeat manner. As one example of such a side-road, consider Eagleton's comments about "Debunkery." This is the tendency some have to correct incorrect or false ideas about history or whatever else. In a sense, Eagleton himself is acting the debunker in much of this book. Debunkery, he says, can be a "positive kind of foolery" because it can puncture "the pompous delusions of the self-deceived. But it can also sail perilously close to the nihilism of those like [Shakespeare's] Iago, who can win a vicarious kind of identity for themselves only by deriding and destroying...The problem, then, is that a healthy iconoclasm can sail very close to a pathological cynicism" (87). This sounded familiar enough for me.

Eagleton's prose can be a bit pedantic, he uses limited footnotes but cites a pretty large variety of western thinkers. Literary analysis of interesting fiction on the topic of evil shows his strengths as a professor of literature, a profession which at the same time helps account for some of his weaknesses in philosophy or theology. The feel of the prose was very similar to his book Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which originated as a series of lectures. Evidently his conversational style is not only found in his lecturing. His extended discussion on Freud and the "death drive" seemed a bit lengthy and peripheral to me. At the same time, his description and rejection of several theodicies on the grounds that they help excuse God at the expense of encouraging us to alleviate suffering in the now was quite fruitful, I think.

Ultimately, Eagleton leaves the reader hanging regarding the fundamental nature of evil, if there is such a nature, and offers no concrete suggestions to help alleviate its effects in the world. He distinguishes between wicked acts and outright evil, the former being acts which are explicable the latter being less explicable? In fact, the latter being pointless. But isn't that sort of judgment in the eye of the beholder? If he intended to answer more questions than he raised then I'd say he was not very successful. He isn't giving answers as much as provoking questions, it seems to me. This is another reason I refer to the book as being a meditation rather than an explication or treatise. (The lack of a jargon-laced subtitle gives this impression as well. He went straight for the simple: "On Evil.") The hope, then, is that it can spur further reflection and discussion on the part of its readers. It is on these grounds especially that I recommend On Evil.

***

Other interesting reviews/responses to On Evil:

-Humanist philosopher A.C. Grayling

-Richard Coles, vicar of St Paul's Church, Kensington

Review: Claudia L. Bushman, ed., "Pansy's History: The Autobiography of Margaret E. P. Gordon, 1866-1966"

2011-05-04T09:52:00.017-06:00

Title: Pansy's History: The Autobiography of Margaret E. P. Gordon, 1866-1966
Editor: Claudia L. Bushman
Publisher: Utah State University Press
Genre: Autobiography
Year: 2011
Pages: 326, Genealogy, Chronology, Appendix, Index
ISBN13: 978-0-87421-784-1
Binding: Hardcover
Price: $34.95

"These are only memories & high lights

& not a history with continuity, just pictures

of the long ago, as they come to mind" (159).

True to Mormonism's foundational book, the Book of Mormon, Claudia Lauper Bushman is a strong proponent of record keeping. Bushman's maternal grandmother, Margaret Gordon, used to visit and share stories of her exciting youth which the family urged her to write down. "[S]he said she regretted that she could not record [the stories] until she had a leather book...I felt sorry then that poor Grandmother never got the leather book she required" (xi). In 2002 Bushman was searching for a short life "Sketch" in Margaret's papers which had been donated to the library at Brigham Young University. Again, true to Mormonism's founding book, she relates her stunning discovery of lost writings:

But another item that I did find took my breath away, for there was Grandmother Gordon's autobiography, her "Family History." What is more—and very touching to me—a caramel-colored leather book held the manuscript, with the title "Family History" and her name, Margaret E.P. Gordon, stamped on it in gold (the E.P. stood for Elizabeth Pansy, her nickname)...I thumbed through the book, read some pages, and knew that I had discovered a treasure (xii).

Bushman and other family members went to work transcribing, proof-reading, collecting photographs and preparing the book for inclusion in Utah State University Press's "Life Writings of Frontier Women" series. Pansy began writing her "Family History" in 1928 at the age of sixty-two, and wrote intermittently for thirty-six years. She wrote about her hundred years of life, from her early childhood in Bingley, Yorkshire, England to her late life travels doing genealogy work in and around Southern California. In between these bookends she lived in colonizing villages in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada, growing Mormon settlements in Meadowville and Raymond, Utah, as well as Alberta.

With the care of a descendant and the precision of a trained historian, Bushman includes letters, diary excerpts, and other explanatory footnotes throughout her transcript of Pansy's history. These additional materials help contextualize the decisions of inclusion and exclusion Pansy made as she crafted a narrative to give her life meaning and encourage her descendants. (At times Bushman also relies on sources like Wikipedia or the Deseret News Almanac). The fact that Pansy had so many interesting experiences and was a talented writer also doesn't hurt. Her wedding and honeymoon account is quite wonderful, and it's a good representation of Pansy's often-romantic prose:

By 8 AM we [her and fiancé Jim Gordon] were in the Temple, & in those days it took much longer to go through—so it was late afternoon when we emerged from those beautiful and sacred Portals Man & Wife—having thoroughly enjoyed the whole ceremony. We went to our hotel, had a good dinner, then started for home—Leisurely driving [in a wagon] out of town into the beautiful canyon through which flowed the rushing little river. By dusk we came to some beautiful natural Meadows—down by the river—Jim had planned we would camp there but had not told me—So he turned off the road & said here's where we would spend the night. He soon had a fine fire blazing, & our supper cooked. Then the horses taken care of, he made down our bed in the Wagon, having brought all necessary bedding—Then after a never to be forgotten visit till the stars came ~~down~~ ^out^, in a most beautiful spot imaginable, far from any other human beings, we spent our first night...A more romantic beautiful setting for a few hours Honeymoon it would be hard to find. Alone in a Mountain Meadow, sitting by a big camp fire—watching the summer stars come out—No sound for a background to our whispering, but the music of the rushing brook, the gentle soughing of the night wind through the trees & an occasional bird call—...Different, yes quite, from the usual—but we were different, Life [was] cast in a different mold for me from then on. Its compensations have outweighed its difficulties (116).

As this excerpt makes apparent, Pansy was keen to record vivid details—the sensuousness of life in sounds, sights, smells, tastes—something Bushman called my attention to in the book's preface (xiii). She remembers phosphorescence on a Canadian lake, canoeing by night, she recalls the morning frost on the blankets waking up in a wagon during a long journey, still tastes the berries picked in the woods with her parents as a child.

One of the most interesting elements of the narrative is Pansy's efforts to write over or through her tragedies and frustration while still including some of their details, sometimes inadvertently. Financial loss, stress and frustration, sorrow, mental instability and death all make appearances. "Big risks," Bushman notes in one of the several section introductions, "did not always pay off," (137) and Pansy's family was often plagued by financial difficulty as her husband struggled to make a living doing farm work and later surveying land. She managed to not mention particulars about how her own desire to be attractive and fashionable, as well as up-to-date with technologies like the telephone and electricity, added to the family's debt and financial stress (172). Bushman includes diary excerpts and family letters which give insight to these matters. Pansy's sorrows increased as some of her children left the Church. Her firstborn son Kenny disappointed her by marrying a non-Mormon but seemed to be reengaging with the church when he died in a tragic work accident, falling from "a high building in To[o]ele" (224). Throughout her recollections, perhaps as the result of not being contemporaneously recorded, Pansy paid much more attention to family matters while big world history events like World War I or II seldom receive much attention—only in connection with family, as when one of her sons joined the military (91, 183). There is plenty of humor too, like the story of the "China man cook" at a house where she boarded for school who would sneak her deliciously forbidden foods when her caretaker/teacher was away. "You no tell Miss Dodson" Pansy remembers him saying (53).

On a more personal note, I was surprised to find information in the book about a man named Joseph Venables Vernon. He was Pansy's grandfather. Back in 2007 I was still working on the original project which this blog was created for, long since abandoned. I was reading the Journal of Discourses and writing somewhat homiletic commentary on the text. I spent a day or two trying to discover information about a man named brother Vernon, whom Brigham Young praised because he had "lived his religion, kept the commandments of God, and minded his own business" (Journal of Discourses 3:255. Incidentally, a fair chunk of this discourse was included in the 1997 "Teachings of Presidents of the Church" lesson manual on Brigham Young). I tracked down a woman named Virginia Andrus, who provided me with a photograph of Vernon. Imagine my surprise when I saw that same picture staring back at me in this book! I quickly leafed back through the acknowledgements, and sure enough, Virginia Andrus is there. I was sad to discover the tragic circumstances of his conversion and later departure from the Church in Utah, which Bushman details in the notes (21-26).

Pansy herself was a convert to the Church, which she initially viewed with great disgust until visiting her Mormon relatives in Utah. Bushman pays very careful attention to Pansy's account of her conversion, noting a few discrepancies and demonstrating from other sources how Pansy re-remembered elements of her conversion, conflating the timing and the impressions received by her and her mother who converted about the same time. Bushman skillfully shows the power of time and reflection on memory (82-84).

Given Pansy's time frame it is interesting how little polygamy is mentioned, though Bushman provides information about the practice's decline under legal sanctions in Utah and beyond in the early 1900s. Pansy recalls her initial feelings abut Mormonism were tainted because "Brigham Young, who I was taught to think of as a wicked immoral man—& polygamy—kept coming to my mind." But she had such an impression to "Find out about Mormonism" that she asked her cousin Fewson to mail her some reading materials. Her and her mother were especially impressed by Orson Spencer's now forgotten Letters Exhibiting the Most Prominent Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Reply to the Rev. William Cromwell, A.M. Having overcome her initial objections to Mormonism she evidently carried a certain distaste for polygamy thereafter, as a Bushman footnote points to family lore about her rejection of a plural marriage proposal, to which she is supposed to have admonished the asker to "go to hell" (105).

Pansy's experiences before joining the Church gave her a rather expansive view of the gospel, and she never hesitated to perform Temple ordinances on behalf of people she admired and knew, but whom never joined the Church in life. She also notes instances where women gave each other blessings akin to what contemporary Mormons refer to as priesthood blessings. Zina Card, a daughter of earlier Church President Brigham Young, gave her a blessing in which she encouraged Pansy to have another child (148). A wonderful blessing of comfort "not in the authority of the Priesthood but in the simple faith of a good true Woman Saint" was given her by Mary Pickering (205). She told her the Lord loved her deeply and that God had "a great mission for me to perform, greater than anything I had ever done" (205-6).

This blessing evidently helped instigate Pansy's move to California where she would interweave moments of interaction with Church hierarchy, when a woman's proper role (her proper role) was discussed. Her great work involved learning and then teaching others about proper genealogical research and Temple work. She was asked by Alonzo Hinckley to head up genealogical efforts in California as an official church calling. She was especially impressed by the blessing and setting apart she received from Hinckley:

I bless you with full authority & Power to go into every District & Branch of this great Mission & organize & teach Genealogy & Temple Work (239).

She was especially impressed that Hinckley, who was presiding over the California mission when he called Pansy, was now an apostle. This decision to put her in charge wasn't uncontroversial. Hinckley had received permission from apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, who wrote to him: "All things being equal we would have preferred a man, but as that seems impossible we give Sister Gordon our unequivocal approval" (239). Smith later gave her a personal blessing when she returned to Utah for a time to receive training at the Church's research department library, p. 233). Even still, others weren't so sure about this woman. One Brother Jones "told me he could not understand why the Church would put a woman in a Position of authority like that. It just wasn't in order" (240). Others expressed similar feelings until Hinckley stood before a congregation, paused in his remarks and walked over to stand beside Pansy who was seated on the stand. He "put his hand on my shoulder & said, 'This woman has been called—and given full Power & Authority to go into every branch of this Mission—to organize & teach Genealogy & Temple Work." She recalls that "the effect was electrifying...That was one of the most wonderful moments of ^my^ life" (241). Other "electrifying" moments are recorded after receiving or witnessing healing priesthood blessings, the miracles she dutifully recorded for future posterity (203, 245).

Obviously, Pansy's womanhood is apparent in instances other than discussions of Church authority. She was attuned to good fashion despite the financial hardships. A particularly funny recollection regards the old "night gowns of white cambric trimmed with embroidery. Such relics of antiquity my girls could not imagine And they were just the worst fitting most uncomfortable things, long sleeves & high necks. Just too bad for words, how ever I had to wear them—& they never seemed to wear out. I had some calico house dresses made up which were a little better, & petticoats, etc. Oh, I stocked myself up well" (113). Her insecurities shine through in letters Bushman added. "'Will he love me when I'm old' is the question I am now asking myself as I gaze in the glass at my rapidly increasing proportions & let out my dresses" she wrote to her husband in 1914 as he was away for work for long periods (178). She scolds him for being too glum, or for bad fashion, but tempers it with a self-deprecating sign-off, "Your no account wife, Pansy" (192-3). This same feistiness also shows through in some of the inter-Saint squabbling she recalls taking part in as she worked in various church genealogical libraries. Then-Stake President Legrand Richards promised her if she would "go on quietly, trying to overcome the ill will now existing...you will be blest & in time be given great responsibility in the Church" (237).

Vignettes like this pervade Pansy's entire narrative. At the center of it all is Pansy's nagging memory of a marriage proposal she passed up just before becoming engaged to Jim. Joseph Sharp of Salt Lake poured his heart out to her (Bushman includes the very personal letter in the footnotes, p. 106) but Jim was of "good sturdy Scotch blood" and she couldn't bring herself to break away from the rest of her family, then residing in Meadowville, to go get married in Salt Lake. She negotiated the struggle between desire and reality by understanding her life as the product of God's guidance:

[Joseph Sharp] would have been a good match for me—he had sheep & property—& a position in the city & I could have had a pleasant life. But I know for a certainty my Father over ruled my life, & I chose the path I was meant to tread—not a path of ease or even much material pleasure but my path, which was to lead me the way I was meant to go—So that chance to walk along a smoother way was passed up & I walked out onto the way destined for me, & I have no doubt. And so I passed up a fork in the road & stepped right on (107).

Admiring but not uncritical, Bushman's editing is both scholarly and elegant, adding even more life to Pansy's quite remarkable hundred years (1866-1966). This book takes us to Indian villages on sleigh rides and canoe trips, and to villages of Christian evangelizing, with the translation of hymns into indigenous languages and the problems of colonization. We experience early Utah schoolrooms, musical performances, fragrant meadows, and modes of travel from horseback to car rides on highways. "While as a child," Bushman concludes, "I didn't always appreciate my bossy grandmother, I have come to admire her indomitable zest and her brave artistry in turning her life into a triumph" (276).

Her admiration can be extended through us in Pansy's History, which parenthetically, is also physically well-crafted, bound, and designed. Bushman's useful appendix adds letters Pansy's father wrote to the Missionary society under which he was employed when the family first moved from England to British Columbia. A personal life sketch written by Pansy's husband Jim adds a few interesting details, and also echoes some of the things Pansy had noted, like his enjoyment serving as the Stirling ward choir leader, Pansy as choir organist (309, see Pansy's account on 140). The appendix closes with records Pansy kept of her travels doing genealogical research and training, which mention meetings she attended, places she went, and overviews of talks she gave.

There is something quite intimate about reading a personal account like this, it differs so significantly from a history book, but or course, is its own history book. I've left plenty of holes in this review which I hope you will be eager to fill in by checking out her story for yourself. I'm quite glad this lost book has come back to speak to us from the dust.

Review: Bernard Schweizer, "Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism"

2011-05-01T02:03:00.011-06:00

Title: Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism
Author: Bernard Schweizer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Religion
Year: 2010
Pages: 246
ISBN13: 978-0-19-975138-9
Binding: Hardcover
Price: $29.95

In the face of inexplicable and extreme personal suffering, the biblical Job refuses to turn on the God who gave him life: "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord" (Job 1:21). His property and children are destroyed, his body is inflicted with sores. Job's wife appears and insists that Job ought to "curse God and die" (Job 2:9). She isn't given a name and she's never mentioned in the Bible again, but she's the prototypical adherent of what author and associate professor of English Bernard Schweizer calls "misotheism." She is "ready to curse God in open defiance and willing to be damned rather than acquiesce in divine caprice" (29). She believes in God yet denounces him. In his new book, Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism, Schweizer faces the double task of outlining the heretofore foggy category exemplified by Job's wife, and justifying its relevance to current views of God and faith. By demonstrating that misotheism exists (my spell-checker still says no), that it has an interesting history and typology, and that it is morally (rather than epistemologically or ontologically) grounded, Schweizer hopes to facilitate "an increased tolerance toward those believers who cannot bring themselves to worship God in the prescribed way" (23).

"Misotheism," in contrast with atheism, is not the rejection of the existence of God, it is the reaction of a believer to the problem of evil—directed toward God—on behalf of suffering humans. Miso (hate) + theos (God) = misotheism, which is manifest in anger and disappointment toward a deity who seems either incompetent, impotent, or encouraging toward evil. Simply put, it's difficult to reconcile the suffering people witness in the world with a God who is considered to be the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving creator. Theologians have developed various answers to the problem of evil, but such attempts fall short for misotheists. As Schweizer explains:

"They are concerned with the conditions of human happiness and with the ultimate causes of suffering, and they cannot square their empirical knowledge about these matters with what they were taught to believe about God" (23).

"The misotheist is interested in the human ramifications of the problem of evil, and he puts priority on the human response to the seeming randomness of cruelty and pain in God's universe" (220).

Schweizer is careful to note that the misotheists he discusses aren't static in their beliefs and attitudes toward God, nor are they so easily grouped together (224). Any time we take to putting people in boxes they tend to pop out when we aren't looking. Still, he divides them into two broad categories: the "Agonistic" and the "Absolute." Following a broad overview of the "history of Misotheism," Schweizer zooms in to explore these categories in six "case studies" of writers who couched their misotheism in literature—often but not always obscuring their personal animosity by putting it in the mouth of fictional characters. Algernon Swinburne, Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca West, Elie Wiesel, Peter Shaffer, and Philip Pullman (who, much more than the others, might be surprised to be listed among misotheists as opposed to atheists or agnostics) each represent different manifestations of misotheism within Schweizer's overall framework.

"Agonistic Misotheism" includes people who "are struggling with the understanding that God is not entirely competent and good, while resenting the need to praise and worship him" (17). Elie Wiesel was a pious Jew raised in a Hasidic community in Romania before a horrific eleven-months' stay in multiple concentration camps during World War II. A decade after emerging from hell Wiesel penned Night, a memoir:

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night...Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever" (154).

Rather than rejecting God's existence, he wanted answers from Him: "Although I know I will never defeat God, I still fight Him" (155). The paradox of a prayer of attack is difficult to account for, but Schweizer contextualizes it within a wider trend of Jewish protest theology (169-170).

Less comprehensible but just as interesting are the "Absolute Misotheists" who seem to "exult in the demise of deity" (18). Rather than lamenting, they happily slam the judges gavel without hope that God might pull things off for the better in the end. Algernon Swinburne's "Hymn of Man" treats God as a criminal on trial being judged and condemned by a jury of men:

By the dread wherewith life was astounded and shamed out of
   sense of its trust,
By the scourges of doubt and repentance that fell on the soul
   at thy nod,
Thou art judged, O judge, and the sentence is gone forth
   against thee, O God.
Thy slave that slept is awake; thy slave but slept for a span;
Yea, man thy slave shall unmake thee, who made thee lord
   over man (99).

Swinburne's innovative adaptation of biblical motifs is uncovered in Schweizer's careful literary analysis, for instance he notes Swinburne's skillful parody of Matthew 7:1 ("For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you," 99). It is particularly difficult to classify such writing as "misotheist," even most of Swinburne's contemporaries saw him as atheistic at best. But Schweizer points to one perceptive review which said "the strangest and most melancholy fact in these strange and melancholy poems is, not the absence of faith, but the presence of a faith which mocks at itself" (100). In Mormon parlance you might say these are people who "leave God, but can't leave God alone" (see p. 66).

The difficulty of placing any given believer in a particular misotheistic category is apparent as Schweizer compares various believers in sometimes dizzying ways. Discerning the difference between a person who really believes in but hates God and a person who wrestles with ideas about God without actually believing in him seems near-impossible. (One perceptive atheist who reviewed Schweizer's book believes the division actually isn't relevant anyway. Citing the so-called "Paradox of Fiction" he notes that people can have emotional responses to characters they know aren't real.)

While people will squabble about where (or whether) to draw the line, Schweizer finds a common thread tying the strugglers together: by operating within a religious framework, drawing on religious motifs, scriptures, and icons, misotheist writers have managed to testify of their belief even while protesting the substance of it. Because his analysis is so literature-centric, however, it misses out on non-print manifestations of misotheism. Think Woody Allen's quip, "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever." Parenthetically, I was much more interested in Schweizer's literary analysis than his psychoanalysis, as when he employs a healthy dose of Freud to explain why certain misotheists' broken relationships with their fathers most likely led to their conflicted approach to God (105, for instance). He doesn't take any time justifying this psychoanalytic approach, but he spends a good deal of time justifying his biographication of the writers' fictional literature (see 104, 114-115, 124, 208, 223, 225).

A few theological blunders or overstatements can be detected here and therein Schweizer's discussion. Two examples should suffice. First, he asserts that believers ought to know better than to try and make a bargain with God. Following Augustine's view of Providence, and certain Protestant views about predestination he concludes that "each individual's fate has already been decided prior to his birth" (183). This essentially labels all Christians as 5-point Calvinists with a heavy emphasis on "unconditional election." Second: Tony Watkins critiques Pullman's Dark Material series by noting that Christians don't claim a monopoly on morality and values but that they believe "morality only functions because it has an objective basis in the character of God, whether or not anybody believes in him" (204). Schweizer objects to Watkins on the grounds that Watkins presents a contradiction: Watkins can't consistently claim that morality can exist apart from religious belief and at the same time link morality explicitly to God, the object of religious belief. Regardless of whether I agree with Watkins's claim, Schweizer has overlooked the distinction that can be made between ontological and epistemic considerations. In other words, gasoline can make my car run regardless of whether I understand the actual process of fuel combustion, or whatever it's called (see?).

Schweizer's lengthy introduction (1-25) differentiates misotheism from multiple other approaches to God, including atheism, antitheism, gnosticism, agnosticism, and deicide, but he still misses a few possibilities. Think of the feeling expressed in novelist Julian Barnes's lament: “I don’t believe in God but I miss him,” for example. Of course, one book can only do so much, and Schweizer spends plenty of time contrasting misotheism with other manifestations of troubled relations between humans and their God. Speaking of which, why did Schweizer spend plenty of his time on this?

It's inevitable with a book like this that readers will question the author's perspective, which he, oddly enough, doesn't directly address in the book. This is ironic considering how much time he spends talking about writers who masked their own misotheism. It might even be seen as a tantalizing invitation to investigate the author himself, but I'm not sure it was deliberate. Is he a misotheist? Elsewhere he says no (in the third person!): "Hating God is not written by a misotheist and it is not advocating misotheism" (Bernard Schweizer, "Hating God: The Untold Story," religiondispatches.org, 6 February 2011.) But by his own lights this is entirely contestable: "Thus, once again we can observe a degree of concealment and distancing when it comes to publicly avowing misotheism" (223). Again, is he?

The strongest indication in the book that he might be a misotheist, or at least identify with them strongly, is found when he turns apologist for Robert Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy of children's books (see especially 205-207). The rhetorical advantage is clearly leveraged for Pullman, and to misotheists generally. It is clear that Schweizer is not out to reclaim or reform misotheists, but rather to make space for them, to offer a category as an alternative to the dichotomy of faithful believer or god-hating atheist. The underground nature of misotheistic output has led to little interaction and explication of the phenomenon. With an outline like Schweizer's we need not "reinvent the wheel every time this idea comes up." Misotheism will become more publicly relevant (Schweizer estimates there are six million American misotheists based on a recent sociological publication, see "Six Million God-Hating Americans Can't Be Wrong," religiondispatches.org, 18 February 2011). More pragmatically, it can "begin to spawn new ideas and lead to different spiritual and philosophical arguments that will contribute to making misotheism an evolving system of ideas rather than a static, reiterative position" (80). "Process, development, critique, and invention" will follow in due order.

Is this a feasible hope? "Schweizer’s insistence that his work is groundbreaking gets tiring," notes one reviewer for the Washington Post. Who might respond more positively to Schweizer’s insistence? Atheists might reject misotheists as fools who should just give up the act. Or they might give misotheists a warm welcome, happy to have more evidence against God's existence: even those who try to follow Him can't ultimately be satisfied with Him. If anything, atheists and doubters will welcome Schweizer's repeated point that those who doubt, struggle, or disbelieve are not by necessity evil or sinful; some of them base their feelings firmly on moral grounds (see p. 14). "In fact," he notes, "for many misotheists, love is precisely the centerpiece of their moral philosophy" (220). Based on the "master story-tellers, great thinkers, and dedicated humanitarians" Schweizer profiles in his book, "it would be reductive and unfair to condemn God's opponents as unworthy and in league with the devil" (217). At the same time, many of these readers who don't retain a feeling of desire for or allegiance to God might be confused or upset with Schweizer's assertion that atheists and agnostics, like misotheists, can also be just as "religious" as true believers (a topic for another whole essay, see pp. 206-207, 209, 211, etc.).

On the other hand, misotheiets like Elie Wiesel would likely claim believers will almost certainly have a more difficult time with the book: "The tragedy of the believer is much greater than the tragedy of the non-believer," Wiesel noted (168). Ultimately, they might simply be turned off by the misotheistic critiques of God which range from the uncomfortable to the blasphemous, leaving misotheists without a welcome home among their ranks. If they believe in God they wouldn't feel that way, it might be suggested. I think there are deeper reasons why the book might be difficult for the faithful to read. First, it deprives the pious from easily dismissing those who struggle with their faith as simply being doubters, haters, or sinners. Schweizer's narrative includes deeply religious people facing real problems and seeking to maintain faith, even if that faith is antagonistic. Second, in the complexity that makes up our own religious life experiences it would be strange not to experience similar frustration with God at some point. Such feelings can be replaced through prayer, scripture study, or seeking solace in worship, but bringing the undercurrent of frustration to the surface seems awfully dangerous, though for some it may feel therapeutic.

By grounding his discussion from the position of rationality and liberalism ('here, good reader, are proofs that misotheists can be good people, too, that they can be believers, and thus we see they need a spot at the table') Schweizer has shown his cards (217). Fundamentalists, it is expected, are not likely to embrace this kind of off-the-beaten-path religiosity. Nevertheless, the book might be most useful in providing a category for those who experience such feelings of frustration, it may give them a more constructive way to conceive of doubt, anger, or sorrow directed toward God without chalking their feelings up to religious apostasy or the loss of faith.

To argue for the necessity of such a place, Schweizer points to Julia Duin's book Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It (2008). She notes that many people surveyed for the book "were disappointed and perplexed in some way with God" (216). Such people may not be satisfied by some of the common responses to their perplexity, like "things happen for a reason" (218). Misotheism provides a fruitful, and paradoxically faithful, avenue for people to struggle through, perhaps opening their eyes to help lift the burdens other people bear, to "mourn with those that mourn and comfort those who stand in need of comfort." Misotheism, Schweizer argues, "will continue to play a role in fiction and memoir as long as there are people who feel they have been harmed by God, either as individuals or as a community...[T]hose hostile to God—supposedly the fountainhead of all goodness—will continue to labor under the burden of making their paradoxical stance meaningful" (226).

Of course, some Mormons might object that Mormonism offers a different view of God which can help circumvent some of the problems facing those who accept a God who created everything ex nihilo. I could only think of a few examples of Mormon misotheism (in Levi Peterson's novel The Backslider and Richard Dutcher's film Falling; more to come on these examples later), but I sensed a Mormon-esque possibility in a complaint from non-Mormon British journalist and novelist Rebecca West, one of Schweizer's featured agonistic misotheists:

"Indeed we should pray 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive thee thine.' For it seemed to us that there might be a divine plan that would excuse divinity. The agonies of this world might be the birthpangs of a dispensation that should be like the dawn after the dark night of this life. It might be that we were horses dragging the chariot uphill from the dark bog of disorder to the hilltop where there would be a temple full of worshipful and comprehensible gods and all things should be clear and happy. We were part of the plan. But a plan may be too cruel" (134, full quote from Bernard Schweizer, "God’s Cruel Plan: Where New Atheism Falls Short," religiondispatches.org, 10 February 2011).

Misotheism is a fruitful field of inquiry in religious studies because different manifestations are emerging depending largely on the social, religious, personal, and political circumstances of various believers (211, 217). Schweizer pays due attention to the modes of thought which influence misotheists, including feminism, Epicureanism, Greek mythology, anarchism, liberalism, humanism, Judaism, Christianity, and many more. In Hating God Schweizer's malleable typology of misotheism keeps the ball rolling, but also gives it some much-needed direction.

***

Schweizer has been pretty active at promoting the book online: guest-blogging for CNN and Religious Dispatches, posting updates on his own website. In addition to his book and the informative wiki article (the talk page is quite amazing!), these links might be of interest:

Guest-blogging at CNN

A multi-part column at Religious Dispatches

Personal blog updates

Podcast interview with "Culture Shocks"

Review: Jonathan Wright: "Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church"

2011-04-27T09:22:00.497-06:00

Title: Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church
Author: Jonathan Wright
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Genre: Christian History
Year: 2011
Pages: 352
ISBN13: 9780151013876
Binding: Hardcover
Price: $28.00

Jonathan Wright believes the majority of modern folks in the western world are less likely than ever to believe "religious heresy" exists as something worthy of pursuing. Belief in heresy, he says, is today's heresy; a theological no-no in a pluralistic society. Without lamenting the lack of literal witch hunts, Wright fears we might forget "the creative role that heresy has played" in the history of Christianity. "Oddly, heresy was one of the best things that ever happened to orthodox Christianity" (8). To keep the (metaphorical) flame of heresy alive, Wright "utilize[s] the history of heresy as an extraordinary prism. It shows us what happens when a fledgling, persecuted faith turns into a politically sanctioned, world-girdling religion; it takes us deep inside the engine rooms of Christian power; and, above all else, it reveals just how fascinating, supple, and boisterous Christianity has been" (12).

Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church is a "primer" on the subject of religious-dynamism-through-heresy. Wright has a doctorate in history from Oxford University but wrote this book for a popular audience. Here he forgoes meticulous source-grinding in favor of an entertaining, sweeping narrative containing stories of various heretics and their followers from the time of the early Christian Church up until (approximately) Vatican II in the 1960s.

At the same time Wright hopes to dispatch some popular (though historically useful) myths. Above all he counters those who "construct a narrative of heresy populated by heroes and villains: the nasty, ingenuity-smiting church versus the plucky, freethinking heretics" (9). A closer look at the records, he says, cautions us against this simple vision of brave freethinkers who stood courageously against tyrannical ecclesiastical authorities. It prevents us from passing "Olympian judgments" on the past (296). By showing the historical situatedness of various heresies we might be more cautious with our own accusations.

Beginning with the growth of Gnosticism in the early Church the book follows various individuals and movements deemed heretical by the emerging consensus of Christian authority.

Early Heretics:

Wright bypasses the eminently contestable origins of the Christian movement and begins his tale of heresy in the time of Ignatius, who was martyred about 107 C.E. Ignatius's letters to the disparate Christian communities shortly before his martyrdom consistently call for unity amongst believers, "that you may be perfectly joined together in the same mind, and in the same judgment, and may all speak the same concerning the same thing...Use Christian nourishment only, and abstain from herbage of a different ind: I mean heresy" (15). But the idea that one unified Christianity arose with a single, self-evident Xtian message is a distortion. "The period of the early Church was actually one of the most befuddled and contested in Christianity's history" (17). Two "heretical" groups, the Gnostics and Marcionites, call into question the smooth unity.

Marcion posited an evil creator god who created the fallen world and a good god who sought to save it (23). This was similar to the varying views of so-called Gnostics, a group which Wright qualifies as non-distinct (29). The views they promulgated and the responses they received demonstrate the power of imagination and syncretism in constructing or defining heresy. Wright sees heresy in this context as more a convenient construct since believers were still working through beliefs.

As is common throughout the book, Wright follows these and other stories with a historiological meta-discussion of sorts, discussing how various historians have viewed these developments. Different views emerged, from the "imposition" of orthodoxy by the emerging Church, to the view that a "nascent orthodoxy" emerged as truth kept winning out over error over time (45).

Church and State:

This story became more complicated once Christianity merged with Rome under Constantine and heresy took on a whole new potency: it became a political as well as religious crime (49). Laws were being constructed, such as the Theodosian Code, whereby heretics might be beaten, fined, or judged insane (56). Unsolved mysteries, like the identity of Christ (human or divine?) were hashed out in councils where compromises were reached and outliers were labeled as heretics. A "political mechanism for responding to heresy, for imposing religious conformity" was developed, and this was "bad news for heresy" (67).

Several questions emerge which Wright hears echoing down the years of Christian history.

First, was it right to coerce faith? In the wake of complaints by Donatists who did not appreciate the church/state merger and objected to the use of force to compel orthodoxy, Augustine responded that the rules and enforcement were proper because "The rules which seemed to be opposed to them are in reality their truest friends" (75). Wright fails to hone in on the debate between proper belief and proper action (doxy/praxis) but he points to the question that bothered many of the faithful: What of the good heretic? "God intentionally allowed such men to lapse into heresy in order to test the resolve of the faithful" (79).

The second recurring theme is the way believers hedged about the blind spots: beware the weaknesses of human understanding versus the incomprehensible majesty of God. Pride would be the sin of the heretic.

The third thorny issue became even more vital when it was tied to state power and social cohesion: what beliefs make one a Christian? (5) "There were those who sought to limit the number of essential Christian doctrines and practices," and Wright even reminds us of the handy term for this move: adiaphora (10).

Throughout these tumultuous times Wright sees heretics as crucial to Christianity. Heretics "proposed alternative ideas about the nature of God, Christ, mankind, and the church. The articulation of such alternatives was what made heresy seem so dangerous" but it "compelled the leaders of the earliest Christianity to clarify and enforce their vision...Christianity needed its heretics every bit as much as it needed its saints and martyrs" (80). He also reminds readers that oftentimes the ecclesiastical establishment would rather reclaim the heretic than lose them: "From the perspective of the ecclesiastical establishment, to kill a heretic was to fail" (2).

The Balance:

Wright follows this pattern through the rest of the book, introducing readers to colorful heretics from medieval times through the emergence of Protestantism, to Enlightenment philosophy and the emergence of the idea that humans have an individual right to believe what they believe (which he sees as the result of long-standing pragmatism as opposed to emerging as a virtue in and of itself). Oftentimes the heretics would turn the same charges on others just as happily (as is the case with Luther and Calvin). He also underscores the idea that being labeled orthodox or heterodox sometimes depended on the historical circumstances and chance, as when Francis of Assisi received ecclesiastical approval for ideas very similar to his near-contemporary Peter Waldo, consigned to the category of heretic (294).

Wright also points out the constructive, if inaccurate, use believers have made of history, especially during the so-called Reformation when Protestant thinkers pointed to heretics of bygone ages as the keepers of the true Christian flame, their birthright as opposed to the fallen official Church. In the face of such self-supporting histories along comes Wright, who invokes that hated opponent of ideological history warriors: nuance. That same tool is used in discussing our great Pilgrim forefathers who sought, not universal religious freedom, but their own freedom of religion even to exclude heretics. John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Jefferson, Madison, Quakers, and Baptists, Mormons and Catholics, Emerson and Thomas Parker, Catholic modernists and Vatican II all play a part in the concluding narrative of "American Heresy" and "The Polite Centuries" in Wright's concluding chapters. In these latter years heresy still exists, but now it warrants "harsh words, the arched eyebrow aimed at a theological adversary, perhaps the loss of academic tenure" (289). Largely gone in many parts of the world are the mass book-burnings and capital punishments. Eventually, what Wright calls "ecumenicism of everyday relations," helped prompt more rigorous philosophical defenses of toleration (225).

Modern Times:
Today we're more ready to remember the "cruelties and crusades" depicting the worst excesses of religion in the face of heresy Wright notes, but we ought not forget the "cathedrals and cantatas" produced by heresy as well (294). While other better narratives on individual heretics may be available compared to his book, Wright indicates the motive behind his construction: "The history of Christian heresy should make us think long and hard about how human beings construct their belief systems and how they react to those with whom they disagree. It should make us interrogate our ways of analyzing that process. It should be a battlefield and no one should emerge unscathed, and that includes me" (295, emphasis Wright's). The excess, he notes, is not the whole story. "Confronting the past on its own terms is much more difficult, but a little humility goes a long way" (296).

Thus, because heresy is dynamic and can ultimately be constructive, Wright concludes the book with a call to embrace its existence: "We should have a few heretics and purveyors of orthodoxy in our lives, and we should relish the possibility of being a heretical or orthodox thorn in someone else's side...in the places that really matter" (302). "So yes, please, send in the heretics. Don't bother. They're here" (302). In this brave call I think Wright overlooks some of the real heartache felt by some of today's perceived heretics, as when a family breaks apart or a friend is lost. He also overlooks still-existent extremism that results in real violence in the world (although his story demonstrates how heresy and social/political considerations often go hand in hand—a welcome but unexplicated corrective to those who don't understand why a derogatory cartoon can spark violence). Wright calls for further comparative studies looking at Islam, Judaism, and an even deeper look at various Christianities (293). I would add that another study could explore how "heresy" has shifted to the university, workplace, and even the political sphere. His limited use of Mormonism—to juxtapose the American ideals of religious liberty with the reality of on-the-ground persecutions—shows the sometimes-problematic nature of such a sweeping, popular overview. After describing the Missouri extermination order he ends on an unfootnoted ominous phrase: "more tragic still, the Mormons themselves proved more than capable of inflicting violent outrages on their opponents" (275).

Above all, Wright's book of poignant tales, rafts of caveats, and confusing and difficult theological disagreements is a polemic against quiet conformity and authoritarian squashing. "What we should avoid [in thinking of heresy] is any concept of an ethically nourishing, millennia-long moral conflict in which individual freedom was pitted against authoritarian repression. The terms of such a narrative (and the outrage it provokes) are our own. If we adopt it, we run the risk of promoting an unhelpfully triumphalist perspective in which our moral assumptions (every bit as contingent and historically determined as those of our forebears) are mistaken for superior inevitabilities: stupid old them, we might say, and wonderfully evolved new us. This really won't do" (11-12).

If you're looking for an easy story of heroes and villains or good versus evil, you won't find it in Wright's book. You might find a little bit of both in yourself as you read, though. That's what really makes this book worth reading.

Review: Robert L. Millet, "Modern Mormonism: Myths and Realities"

2011-04-25T11:07:00.003-06:00

Title: Modern Mormonism: Myths and Realities
Author: Robert L. Millet
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Christian Apologetics
Year: 2011
Pages: 124 + appendix, bibliography, subject index, scripture index
ISBN13: 978–1–58958–127–2
Binding: Softcover
Price: $14.95

"Life is much, much too short to spend our days either attacking those who are different or exhausting our strength and resources defending our own point of view...I have come to know, through both painful and sweet experiences, that building friendships and nurturing relationships is vital in coming to settle doctrinal differences" (99).

So writes Robert L. Millet, who has spent the past decade conversing and writing specifically, though unofficially, with Evangelical Christians about the beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While "readily admit[ting] that there are doctrinal differences between Latter-day Saints and more 'traditional' Christians," Millet is troubled by those who claim Mormons are not Christian and hopes for a more "broad and inclusive vision" of Christianity" (xv). In his new book Modern Mormonism: Myths and Realities Millet hopes to model a respectful "Bible based discussion" by approaching eleven "key issues" he has frequently encountered as objections to the LDS faith (xvii).

Millet begins each chapter with a paragraph outlining a "key issue," objections or perceptions from Christians regarding LDS teachings. He then offers various scriptures, quotes, and personal stories in order to clear up misconceptions while scoping common ground for dialog:

"In this short work, I have not dealt with all of the doctrinal differences between traditional Christians and Latter-day Saint Christians but have chosen instead to focus on the critical matters that I feel get at the heart of what it means to be Christian. Virtually anyone can highlight differences and construct walls between faith traditions, but it takes an unusual effort and a heart open to truth to be able to talk calmly and intelligently and respectfully about those differences and even seek to discover areas of agreement" (100).

Millet's emphasis of the centrality of Jesus Christ in the LDS Church is apparent from the two epigraphs preceding the Table of Contents: Joseph Smith's assertion that the "fundamental principles" of the LDS Church concern the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Christ, and current Church President Thomas S. Monson's testimony regarding Christ's suffering in Gethsemane and death on the cross. Perhaps to stem the frequent assertion that Mormons are "'changing' their doctrinal views regarding Jesus Christ so as to move more smoothly into mainstream Christianity" (xv) Millet concludes the book with an appendix of "The Testimony of Latter-day Saint Leaders on Jesus Christ," which contains a testimony of Jesus Christ from all sixteen LDS prophets from Smith to Monson.

Based on the chapter issues the book appears to be directed largely towards an Evangelical Christian audience rather than towards Latter-day Saints: 1. A Finite God, 2. Not Christian, 3. Contradicting the Bible, 4. Feelings, Not Facts, 5. Disdain for Other Churches, 6. Denying the Fall, 7. Ignoring the Cross, 8. Works Righteousness, 9. Universal Salvation, 10. Usurping the Divine Throne, 11. No Eternal Security.

Throughout each chapter he employs LDS scripture and General Authorities to emphasize the Christian elements of Mormonism according to what Evangelicals might look for. (I would quibble with a few of his source descriptions, as when he repeatedly prefaces Lectures on Faith quotes with "Joseph Smith taught," see pp. 13-14, 62, 85, 96, etc.) He often makes use of various other Christian thinkers and groups (C.S. Lewis, Lee M. McDonald, the Fuller Theological Seminary, Craig Blomberg, Max Lucado, etc.) to implicitly argue that differences amongst other Christians signal the appropriateness of including Mormons under the Christian umbrella, and to seek common ground with other Christians.

Translation between these similar-but-distinct worldviews can be a precarious business. Millet employs some vocabulary that will likely fly under the radar for Mormons but stick out prominently for Evangelicals: "It is God's sovereign right to speak beyond what He has spoken already," Millet writes regarding the expanded LDS scripture canon; the word "sovereign" is theologically loaded (22). At times, such language seems to "Evangelize" LDS belief: "Redemption and reconciliation come through the finished work of Jesus the Christ," emphasis on the "finished," which bears directly on various atonement theories (52).

While much of the book speaks to Evangelicals he also directs comments to fellow Latter-day Saints, including a few one-liners responding to frequently-heard LDS proverbs: "What does it mean, therefore, to 'work out [your] own salvation' (Phil. 2:12)? Certainly not to attempt to do it by ourselves...No, it means to pray and trust in the Lord God as though everything depended upon Him, and also to work and labor as though everything depended upon Him!" (71). He also cautions Latter-day Saints about being overconfident, glib, or flip about the faith of other Christians (39-40).

Millet speaks rather representatively regarding Mormon thought as he attempts to outline "to the best of my ability what I believe–and more important, what I believe Latter-day Saints believe–on certain key issues" (xvii). Thus he has a tendency to overlook internal development or diversity amongst Mormons. For example, while discussing the atonement n the section "Ignoring the Cross," Millet seems to allow for different interpretations of the atonement aside from the penal substitutionary theory, though that seems to be his preferred lens. He does this by noting that "like the rest of the Christian world, [Mormons] cannot rationally comprehend the work of a God...The Atonement, the greatest act of mercy and love in all eternity, though real, is, for now, incomprehensible and unfathomable" (59). He does not explain that many Mormons might understand or describe Mormonism differently than he does. He seems to favor a sort of "common sense" Mormonism which adheres closely to his selected scriptures and General Authority quotes. Quotes from the past from say, Brigham Young or Joseph Smith are used if they support a current view of LDS doctrine, but Millet doesn't spend time going over Mormon developments or alternatives. This might be one reason some Evangelicals have suspected Millet of dissembling.

Perhaps above all, Millet hopes to encourage believers to dialog with charity and respect. He cites the biblical injunction that believers should "be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have," but he adds the less-cited remainder of that injunction: "But do this with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15, NIV, emphasis Millet's, p. 99). Millet believes personal relationships built on more than questioning will infuse conversations with more love and concern. He doesn't always succeed (as when he says Mormons "do not worship the Bible," implying that some other religionists do, p. 21) but he makes a very good effort. Especially considering the fact that he faces criticisms from multiple directions; from Evangelicals who see him as covertly Evangelicalizing LDS doctrine to Mormons who see him capitulating to Evangelical categories. He seeks participatory, constructive dialog more than reactive or aggressive response. Whether one agrees with his theology or interpretations, one can still appreciate his cultivation of atmosphere.

In one of his most interesting sections, "Disdain for Other Churches," Millet confronts the common view that Mormons and their leaders teach that "all Christian churches, teachings, pastors, or theologians are false and corrupt" (33). Rather than accounting for the LDS apostasy narrative or acknowledging some of the more aggressive quotes from past leaders, Millet offers conciliatory quotes from assorted General Authorities emphasizing the goodness of other religions. He then makes an argument for the inspiration of non-LDS voices, most prominently that of Billy Graham, whom Millet found to be "a good man, a God-fearing man, a person who had felt called to take the message of Christ to the ends of the earth...I was struggling to control my emotions, sensing profoundly that God had worked wonders through this simple but submissive North Carolina preacher" (35).

This is more than a simple call to be nice to each other. Millet marshals a few LDS leaders to back him up, including Orson F. Whitney, who wrote: "God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of His great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, to [sic] arduous for one people" (35-36). Millet believes more is at stake when fellow Christians argue than loss of good feeling: "Far too often we allow doctrinal differences to deter us from fruitful conversation, enlightening discussion, and joint participation in moral causes. This must not be" (36).

This is a theme to which he returns in the conclusion of the book. Millet believes Christians who wrangle about doctrinal minutia risk missing out on common causes to relieve suffering in the world (a theme I'd be interested to see Millet approach more fully):

"If various religious faiths allow doctrinal differences to separate them and if they are thereby unable to marshal their forces against vexing problems in our society–moral and spiritual evils about which there is unquestioned agreement–then Lucifer, the father of lies, will have won a victory. And we will find ourselves grieving over why we allowed prejudices and littleness of soul to prevent us from adorning ourselves in the "whole armor of God" and contending manfully against "principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world" (Eph. 6:11-12)" (100).

Like Millet's other publications, this book is much more devotional than academic. Millet avoids rigorous distinctions and terminological nitpicking. While I believe such things have their place, Millet seems to be trying to improve relations as much–if not moreso–than promoting theological specificity. Mormons might object to his selective use of scripture and General Authority quotations while Evangelicals might take issue with his use of C.S. Lewis or the Early Christian Fathers. But Millet's clear and approachable prose and sensitivity to the possible entanglements of inter-religious dialog are most useful in directing Mormons and Evangelicals towards more reasoned and charitable discussions about their faith.

Citing a poetic/prophetic prayer written by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Millet hopes to encourage humility in the faith of believers who ought to recognize the magnificence of God compared to their own limited visions:

Jesus,
help us not to hide in our churchy words;
when we worship, let us know and feel that there is
   always something new,
something fresh to see of you.
Do not let us forget that you will always have
   more to give us,
more than we could ever guess.
   Amen (101).