Joseph Spencer

JOSEPH M. SPENCER {[email protected]} has degrees from Brigham Young University, San Jose State University, and the University of New Mexico, and is currently a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of An Other Testament: On Typology, published by Salt Press in 2012, as well as For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope, forthcoming from Greg Kofford Books. He and Karen, his wife, live with their five children in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

René Girard and Mormon Scripture: A Response

Articles/Essays – Volume 43, No. 3

This short piece responds to Mack C. Stirling’s article, “Violence in the Scriptures: Mormonism and the Cultural Theory of René Girard,” 43, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 59–105. I offer a counter-interpretation of what I take to be (1) the thrust of Girard’s own work on scripture and (2) the implications of that thrust for Girardian interpretation of specifically Mormon scripture.

On Vital Questions | Robert L. Millet, ed., By What Authority? The Vital Question of Religious Authority in Christianity

Articles/Essays – Volume 44, No. 3

Opening his short contribution to this collection of essays, Roger Olson, professor of theology at Baylor University, writes: “One can hardly do justice to the subject of religious authority in a brief reflection essay” (180).…

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference | Mormons, Films, Scriptures

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 3

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.