Stephen Taysom

Stephen C. Taysom {[email protected]} is a professor of the history of religion at Cleveland State University. His published works include Shakers, Mormons and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) and an edited collection titled Dimensions of Faith: A Mormon Studies Reader (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011).

A Uniform and Common Recollection: Joseph Smith’s Legacy, Polygamy, and the Creation of Mormon Public Memory, 1852-2002

Articles/Essays – Volume 35, No. 3

Historians have long believed that history does not consist simply of recounting the past according to the Rankean ideal of telling it “as it really was.” The process of researching, selecting, and emplotting historical evidence within a narrative structure is often idiosyncratic, and may be employed to further a host of goals. Within communities, history represents a way of appropriating the past in order to serve the needs of the present. Maurice Halbwachs’s work emphasizes the role history plays as the “collective memory” of a community. Halbwachs argues that “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by the people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.” This process involves the retention of useful historical emplotment points coupled with the suppression of those “facts” which threaten to undermine a community’s structures.

Dissent Without Definition | John Sillito and Susan Staker, eds., Mormon Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters

Articles/Essays – Volume 36, No. 2

All good history is as much about the present as it is about the past. Sillito and Staker’s volume, which includes biographical sketches of dissenters ranging widely across the 180-year history of the LDS church,…

Twilight and Dawn: Turn-of-the-Century Mormonism | Lu Ann Faylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder, eds., Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899–1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff

Articles/Essays – Volume 43, No. 2

HBO’s popular Big Love series and David Ebershoff’s bestselling novel The 19th Wife (New York: Random House, 2008), stand as evidence that polygamy remains a perennial topic of interest for Mormons and non-Mormons alike. It…

Making Visible the Hand of Ritual | Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, eds., Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, 1842–1845: A Documentary History; Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, eds., The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845–1846: A Documentary History; and Devery S. Anderson, ed., The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 2

Although we may not know it, we live our lives immersed in ritual. Many of our daily exchanges with other human beings are ritualized. We often categorize and compare religions by referencing how highly structured, or not, their liturgical worlds are. I grew up being told that Mormons avoided ritual because it connoted empty practice and vulgar symbolism. The truth is, however, that Mormon temple worship is among the richest symbolic systems of worship in Christianity.

Abundant Events or Narrative Abundance: Robert Orsi and the Academic Study of Mormonism

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 4

This essay is an experiment of sorts. For some time, Mormon Studies has attempted to move beyond the narrow confines of its past, with its focus on institutional histories and biographies of important people (mostly white men), toward a more methodologically nuanced and interpretive multi-disciplinary approach. Part of that growth requires that the data of Mormon Studies be scrutinized through the theoretical approaches coming out of disciplines such as religious studies. This essay does two things. First, it describes Orsi’s method and situates it within the context of religious studies methodology. Second, it scrutinizes the historical narratives associated with Joseph Smith’s “golden plates” through the lenses provided by Robert Orsi’s theory of “abundant events” in order to test the suitability of Orsi’s method to the data of Mormon Studies.

Woodruff’s Private Mindset | Reid L. Neilson, ed., In the Whirlpool: The Pre-Manifesto Letters of President Wilford Woodruff to the William Atkin Family, 1885–1890

Articles/Essays – Volume 46, No. 2

When I first learned that Reid L. Neilson, the managing director of the LDS Church Historical Department and an old friend from BYU days, was planning to publish a few dozen letters from Wilford Woodruff…

The Last Memory: Joseph F. Smith and Lieux de Mémoire in Late Nineteenth-Century Mormonism

Articles/Essays – Volume 48, No. 3

On the day after Christmas in 1915, Joseph F. Smith (JFS), then president of the LDS Church and less than three years away from his own death, spoke to a group of people in the Eleventh Ward meetinghouse in Salt Lake City. The past was always important to JFS and as he got older he found himself, usually at the behest of other Latter-day Saints, giving voice to his memories with increasing frequency. JFS accepted the invitation to speak on this day because “[s]ome of the good folks present are anxious to hear something about my early experiences.”Although few things are more common than an old man telling stories about his youth, this event, and the dozens like it that JFS participated in during the last years of his life, was about far more than personal memory.