Patrick Mason has recently been named to the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont University. He was granted a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame; and his dissertation, “Sinners in the…
Sacred Borders represents a rigorous and compelling consideration of various traditions about the state of the biblical canon in American religion. For bookish Latter-day Saints, this volume will provide much-needed context for early Mormon beliefs about their open canon as well as a subtle and sympathetic view of both sides of the debate over the closed canon.
Greg: I’d like to start by talking about the Community of Christ (and its predecessor, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) in the early twentieth century. My recollection is that your faith tradition, like mine, went for a long time mostly holding onto traditions and not worrying too much about substantive change. Is that an adequate way of putting it? If you go back to 1860, you have basically a century where holding the line was primary?
Grant: I think that’s fair to say. For Community of Christ—or the other names that have been used for it, but we’ll just use that name as representative of the entire period of time—the formative identity of the movement was built around two principles. One was an opposition to the practice of polygamy, which was a key identity element of the LDS Church in the West for most of the nineteenth century; and the second principle was a support for lineal succession as the proper mode of succession for the Church. There were various other modes—seven or eight of them—that can be documented historically as being expressed at some point by Joseph Smith Jr. Of course, the Mormon Church in the West accepted the mode of succession through senior leaders in the Council of Twelve Apostles.
There are so many kinds of never. There’s the never that Jacob’s Mum uses when she says, “Never talk to strangers; it’s dangerous,” and there’s the never his Dad uses when he says, “Never play…
Lost stories stir up with the dust,
accented in Swedish: the voyage
and train rides bringing Grandmother west;
another linking Grandpa Lee’s drowning
I put down the phone and stare at nothing,
everything of my farm past settled into a moment
like colors pushed back through a prism
gone singular and clear:
Mathematicians say the universe is a leaking wonder
of heat and cold: immense pressures
sucking and exhaling, not elegant
as they’d imagined . . . “preposterous.”
In winters it soothed me,
the wind blistering peals
through naked willows in the dark
outside my bedroom window,
while warm and bound I marked
lost spirits sounding in the cold.
July 5, 2009. What an idea, a Sunday outdoor market in Paris featuring not antiques, imported fruit, or cast-off clothing, but birds. As good a way as any to worship, so we take a quick…
Let me start with an explanation of my title. It may seem odd that I would restrict my focus to “Mormonism in the West” in an era in which everything has gone global. The LDS Church is a worldwide phenomenon with a presence in more than 150 countries, and more members and more growth outside the United States than within it.