Today the University of Virginia is announcing the intent to establish the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies, an endowed faculty position.

This is a landmark event for a number of reasons. One is the prominence of the department choosing to establish this chair. As the UVA Religious Studies website points out, it has an excellent reputation:

The department’s undergraduate program has been rated by the Gorman Report as the best in the nation, and the department’s graduate program is ranked by the National Research Council as the sixth best in the nation, and the best in a public institution.

The addition of Mormon Studies in such a well-respected department speaks to the emergence of Mormon Studies as an academic discipline, indicating that Mormonism is worthy of study at the highest academic levels.

In addition to advancing the field of Mormon Studies, the establishment of a senior academic chair brings other benefits to the LDS community, including:

•       Courses taught about Mormonism by a serious scholar expose non-Latter-day Saints to Mormonism under circumstances where it must be taken seriously.   These students are at a unique time in their lives when they are forming opinions that often last a lifetime.
•       Such courses can prepare young Latter-day Saints to cope with the questions about Mormonism that arise when it is discussed in the public sphere.
•       A professorship in a major university gives Mormonism a place at the table when significant religious, social, and cultural issues are under discussion.
•       Studying Mormonism in the context of other religions helps us to better understand what is distinctive and powerful about our religion.

As a very important element, the establishment also speaks positively about the state of Mormon philanthropy. The donors who have funded the endowment that established the chair clearly believe that an independent, academic appointment will benefit the Church’s broader mission. It also suggests that careers in Mormon Studies could become increasingly available.

Overall, a major step forward for Mormon Studies.

One fascinating tidbit that came out of between-sessions chatting at General Conference this weekend is that in Brazil there has been a marked improvement in convert retention since the chapels have added air conditioning and heating.

While feasting upon the word has always had a physical as well as metaphysical component, I can’t help but wonder what other moves might help retention. My vote would be to make the chapels more beautiful: almost no one is so struck by the magnificence of our meetinghouses that they want to learn more; that’s hardly news. But if climate control has a substantive impact, I would bet that a more inspiring physical presence would as well. Definitely worth the marginal extra cost.

Other suggestions for retention?

PS: This same Brazilian-centric source suggested that the repeated references to Pres Benson’s “14 points of following the prophet” was spot-on for the needs of the LDS community there.

New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson’s Among the Gentiles was published last year. It examines the relationship between Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity, focusing on the religious milieu into which Christianity emerged and eventually dominated. In this, Johnson takes an interesting approach, which he summarizes as follows:

My concentration, however, is not specifically on social organization, myths, doctrines, or even rituals, but on the ways in which actual human beings show themselves to be religious. … I use several interchangeable terms for the “ways of being religious,” speaking of religious sensibility, religiousness, religious perspective, and even religious temperament. I distinguish these ways of being religious in terms of their distinctive ways of perceiving divine power and its function.

He describes four types of religious activity, which he labels A through D, all of which have clear parallels in our own Mormon world: [Read more...]

[Note: In analyzing the passage describing Corianton’s sins, I do not seek to undermine in any way the Church’s emphasis on sexual purity. The benefits of chastity are marvelous and ineffable.]

I’d like to consider Alma 39:5:

Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost?

Traditionally, “these things” has been interpreted to mean sexual sin. See quotes from a number of General Conference talks, including apparently a statement by the First Presidency read in General Conference, Oct 1942.  I strongly support the inspired counsel and warnings these messages convey. That being said, a careful reading of Alma 39 indicates that Corianton’s major sin was leading others astray, not sexual immorality. Evidence for this is as follows:

[Read more...]

I’m pretty sure my understanding of the Fall is woefully incomplete. I’ve been still trying to square statements that pop up with frequency in the Bloggernacle and even in General Conference talks that say things like, “Mormons believe that Eve was courageous and wise” in her decision to partake of the forbidden fruit, when the scriptural texts suggest we don’t believe that. I thought it might be useful to explore just what the Book of Mormon says about Eve and the Fall.

I learned a few things.  [Read more...]

Substantial effort is expended to harmonize conflicting texts, such as the Harmony of the Gospels in our Bible Dictionary, Creation account harmonizations, investigations of whether Matthew or Luke got the ordering of the temptations “correct,” and so on. But what if the writers of scripture deliberately put in ambiguities? We have some evidence for this; Joseph Smith, in his revisions, seems to have left differing versions (e.g., Luke 3 versus Isaiah 40, creation accounts in Moses versus Abraham, incomplete harmonization of all events in the Gospels, and so on). Maybe some of these were just that he didn’t have time to finish, but there are passages that he seemed to be comfortable with explicit differing accounts.

It seems possible that these apparent contradictions and ambiguities might actually be there on purpose, and in fact may not even be meant to be resolved. If so, what might the message of such ambiguities be? 

Perhaps one message is that life is ambiguous, that in many cases there is not one definite answer, no one-size-fits-all explanation or even historically accurate account. But I’m not reveling in or embracing ambiguity per se; I’m not arguing directly for a Rashomon effect; but rather that the differences might be suggestions to us that we should be looking beyond the superficial. Certainly the differing Creation accounts each have rich symbolic interpretations that I benefit from and would not want to do without. Might Mormon culture, with its firm sense of certainty, be missing a key point of the scriptures?

This bounced into my in-box this morning… 

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The emails we have sent out to faculty across the country to date have all dealt with current issues in the academy. It has always been our intention, however, to provide occasional lessons about AAUP history, especially when the past is still with us.

This year is the tenth anniversary of one of the AAUP’s more remarkable cases–the 1998 censure of Brigham Young University. The full report is on our Web site. Let me give you a few highlights in the hope they will draw you there.

A young faculty member was up for tenure at BYU. Though there was some discomfort with her feminist interests, her department gave her a strong recommendation based on her teaching, research, and citizenship, and that view was endorsed by the college. At the next level up–the University Faculty Council–the tone changed. Objections were voiced that she had violated the tenets of the Mormon Church, most notably by publicly acknowledging that she prayed to “Heavenly Mother as well as Heavenly Father.” Hardly a confession that would earn you a newspaper headline in most American cities, but at BYU it led the Council to claim she had weakened the moral fiber of the university. They recommended against tenure and the BYU president concurred.

[Read more...]