Craig Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young University, needs little introduction. His award-winning previous books on European religious history include The Burdens of Sister Margaret, A Bishop’s Tale, and Miracles at the Jesus Oak.…
The appearance of Richard Turley and William Slaughter’s How We Got the Book of Mormon suggested that the volume’s intended audience might be investigators, new members and teens seeking to know more about the material…
In May 1857, a jilted husband finally found the man who had taken his wife. After tracking him to western Arkansas, he organized a posse to cut off his escape, followed him into a thicket of trees, pulled him from his horse, and stabbed him repeatedly near his heart. Hector McLean left to fetch a gun, returned, and fatally shot Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt in the neck.
Help thou mine unbelief and I
Will give away my sins or keep them close to know you;
Will seek you in the best and brokenest of books;
Will cling hard, let loose, bring forth flesh and fruit, if this will please;
Will more-than-tithe my time and talent, open windows;
Make room for oil and balsam, if you’ll pour;
Will labor, useless, to admit, but leave a spare under the mat,
Create diversions, throw down ropes;
Will pray and fast and follow and hope;
I asserted without argument a few years ago at the annual meeting of the Association of Mormon Scholars in the Humanities that the Mormon film movement of 2000–2005 witnessed the production of only one truly Mormon film, namely, Napoleon Dynamite (2004).The claim for which I did provide an argument was that the bulk of the movement launched by Richard Dutcher’s God’s Army (2000) and brought to its culmination with Dutcher’s (thank fully-later-re-titled) God’s Army 2 (2005) was principally a study in the possibility of introducing into Mormonism, for ostensibly pas toral reasons but with theologically fraught consequences, an arguably non-Mormon sense of religious transcendence. What I did not note then, but would like to reflect on now, is the curious role scripture played—and did not play—in this short-lived movement.
We tend to think of technology as a way of producing this or that. Simple technologies produce obvious results: a match produces fire. More complicated technologies, such as computers, also produce things, though sometimes it is less obvious what they produce. Our messages may get lost in the ether, but that metaphor recognizes that I produced something using my computer, whatever it was that got lost. There are good reasons to understand technology in terms of production.
In The American Religion, critic Harold Bloom begins his analysis of Mormonism with this well-known prophesy about the future of Mormon literature:
A major American poet, perhaps one called a Gentile by the Latter-day Saints, sometime in the future will write their early story as the epic it was. Nothing else in all of American history strikes me as materia poetica equal to the early Mormons. . . .
Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2013):138–177
In this paper, I argue that this preoccupation with structural collapse legitimizes a critical consideration of the way that language functions in the book, rendering the Book of Mormon particularly well-suited to a reading that employs the techniques of post-structural criticism.
The gold plates occupy an interesting place in Mormon culture. Although they are an essential part of the Mormon foundational narrative, the plates have a peripheral place in Mormons’ ordinary discourse. Take, for example, the 1989 Primary songbook.According to the index, there are sixteen songs about being reverent in church, and an additional three concerned with the need for quiet. In contrast, only two explicitly deal with the gold plates. And when one thinks about Mormon material culture, sacred garments and temple art come more readily to mind than the plates. Yet in this paper I argue that the gold plates are actually prime examples of Mormon material culture, and that, in fact, the practice of invoking the gold plates in the popular imagination shapes and reflects Mormon culture in significant ways.
When Joseph Smith’s unearthing of the “gold plates” with the mysteriously bound portion first stirred intense controversy in the regions of New York, notions of “sealed books” had already been causing upheavals in other parts of the globe. At the time tremors were still being felt in England from efforts to uncover the controversial “sealed prophecies” of the mystic and prophetess Joanna Southcott, Russell Huntley was establishing a sizeable trust fund for the publication of the forthcoming sealed portion of the Book of Mormon. Huntley’s confidence that the Reorganized LDS Church would soon have the remainder of the record in its possession seemed to have waned by the 1880s, at which point he requested the money be returned.Yet the desire for hidden records has not disappeared. A small group of Southcott followers survives today, with a once-active advertising campaign calling for the “sealed prophecies” to be restored, and splinter groups of the LDS Church have generated their own versions of the “sealed portion” of the Book of Mormon plates.