I just finished reading Inferno, Dan Brown’s latest book. I’m no expert on Brown, though I have also read The Da Vinci Code. He is justly derided as a bad writer, but he is a good storyteller and sets his attractive characters in compelling locations. I think that Brown’s popularity also comes from his ability to touch on big cultural issues and questions—sometimes overtly and sometimes more indirectly—in familiar, reassuring ways. He touches on them, but doesn’t resolve them for... Read more
Over the course of the 20th century, LDS narratives about early Christianity shifted dramatically in one respect. While earlier accounts explained that the Great Apostasy occurred due to the failure of church leaders, by the 1980’s retellings of the Great Apostasy narrative blamed the general membership for going astray. LDS narratives about early Christianity, like most other Christians, have a great deal to do with constructing a meaningful identity. In this way, these narratives have a different goal than those... Read more
The past decade has witnessed a remarkable surge of interest in the Book of Mormon—or at least of interest in making the text of the Book of Mormon available and accessible. Beginning, in many ways, with the 2003 publication of Grant Hardy’s Reader’s Edition of the Book of Mormon (published by the University of Illinois Press and based on the 1920 edition), what might almost be called a kind of movement has taken shape: Penguin published a handsome reprint of... Read more
“My mom is watching me,” my son’s six year-old friend Jared confided. Jared and my son had spent the entire playdate at the playground climbing and chasing without a single quarrel and I had just complimented Jared on his courteous behavior. “She has hidden cameras.” We had only recently arrived in Hong Kong and Jared’s mother Naomi had been one of the first people to reach out to our family. The ingenuity and authority implied by this “hidden camera” technique... Read more
With such strong allegations against Paula Deen, and in light of her own botched attempts at an apology, it’s hard to believe that anyone would not consider her decisions racist. In addition to using a racial slur which is itself a product of centuries of hatred and abuse against African Americans, Deen is condemned by the wedding she attempted to plan and a history of making racially insensitive remarks. Yet, despite all the evidence of Deen’s racism, the majority of... Read more
Reflections on the Case of Edward Snowden Happy birthday, America! For all of you thinking about getting the country a gift, the good news is that you don’t have to worry about giftwrapping, since the government (and Google, and Amazon, and Apple) already knows what you’re going to give, when you got it, and how much you paid! The Edward Snowden case, following on the Bradley Manning and Julian Assange leaks and others in recent years, has opened a... Read more
In a newspaper interview in 1994, Marty Baudet, the executive director of Affirmation, the flagship gay Mormon support group, said: “I predict society will acknowledge gay rights and, 20 years down the road, the church will find itself out of step once again [as in the case of LDS racial restrictions] and trying not to look bad.”1 Baudet’s prediction was not quite as prophetic as it seems. It took only 19 years. In the wake of this prediction, the Church... Read more
Partway through Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks’s ambitious fictional account of John Brown’s adult life, our narrator, John’s third son Owen, reflects that his relationship to his father is analogous to Job’s relationship with God. That is, God is, well, God, just like John Brown was John Brown, and the status entitles this looming divine presence to behave as he will, and Job or Owen must simply follow, because one does not question the divine. As Job says, in chapter 42: I... Read more
Thanks to many wonderful donations, the IMS Book Drive is nearly ready to ship its first collection to the French Institute for Research on Mormonism in Bordeaux, France! The IMS Book Drive aims to promote quality scholarship on international Mormonism and the development of a global Mormon studies community by placing Mormon studies collections (books, journals, and access to online resources) at universities and research centers outside of North America. Donations of books (via the Amazon.com wishlist) and funds for international... Read more
While Memorial Day in the United States is an opportunity to cultivate memory of all kinds—remembrance of ancestors, family, and departed friends—it is often used to memorialize courage, and even heroism. Whatever the politics of the war in which they died, for instance, most Americans honor war dead for the courage it took to endure the peril of conflict. And the valorization of courage extends to Mormons in the United States as well. On Memorial Day many Mormons (particularly those... Read more
Peculiar People
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