A little more than a week ago, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released an update to its online edition of the Bible and other authoritative texts, with a print edition to follow later this year. Some of these changes reflect better historical knowledge of LDS history, as well as improved study aids, and some historical contextualizing of some important LDS texts. The new edition of the LDS Bible is incremental, offering a few minor spelling and punctuation updates... Read more
For Mormons (and for their friends and for interested observers), the big news this week is the announcement of a new edition of the LDS scriptures. As the culmination of what the Church noted was eight years of work and preparation, this new 2013 edition is the first comprehensive refreshing of the LDS canon since 1981, and it registers a variety of adjustments. While changes to the scriptural texts themselves were few and minimal (generally limited to matters of punctuation),... Read more
In one month, General Conference will come again to the red brick building with the crossless gray spire that sits on Gloucester Road, the east-west artery into Hong Kong’s throbbing urban heart. By Hong Kong standards, the Wanchai building is a modest twelve-story low-rise, dwarfed on all sides by great and spacious towers easily over four times as tall. But small as it may seem, it contains worlds. Hong Kong is famous for its diversity and discontinuities. Its tiny borders... Read more
The first time I was asked to teach Sunday School, I was petrified. Though I’d grown up with a mother who teaches for a living, surrounded by other family members who were interested in teaching in one form or another, I’d never considered myself a teacher and didn’t imagine I could be at all effective in that role. The joke is that since then I’ve fallen in love with teaching and am in fact a teacher by profession, but I’ve... Read more
However improbably, on Thursday Pope Benedict XVI will retire. Much has been said and will be said about what this means for the Catholic Church, in terms of having a pope living within shouting distance of his living predecessor. Benedict promises that his retirement will be a quiet one, dedicated to prayer and writing. He is not giving up his calling as a consecrated servant of God, but admitting that at age 85 he no longer possesses the “strength of... Read more
2013 is the 20th anniversary of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize for his groundbreaking play Angels in America, which first appeared on Broadway in two-parts in 1993. Kushner’s sweeping epic critiqued conservative politics in Reagan-era America and confronted the devastating realities of HIV-AIDS for the gay community. Along the way, Angels engaged with a variety of American identities, cultures, and issues, many of which are grounded in religion and spirituality. In addition to the obvious religious implications of the play’s millennial... Read more
As Mormonism continues to develop internationally, so too does the field of Mormon studies. More and more foreign scholars are looking to do work in the area, but often lack the requisite resources. The International Mormon Studies Book Project is a new effort to provide critical resources for developing Mormon studies internationally by purchasing books to form a base Mormon studies collection at institutions where scholars have demonstrated a keen interest in doing research on Mormonism. Currently, institutions interested in... Read more
Despite the fact that social scientists have yet to discover a single human society that is devoid of what we modern folk usually refer to as religion, it remains a highly contested category. Or, perhaps better, because of the ubiquity of religion, it’s a perspicuously polyvalent term that includes a massive variety of diverse expressions, and is thus notoriously difficult to pin down with precision. Still, however else one might understand the meaning and significance of religious ways of being... Read more
One of my earliest mentors in the historical profession was a former member of Students for a Democratic Society. He was also a remarkably dynamic teacher who enjoyed pulling reversals in the classroom: before the break, Arthur Schlesinger was the wise and normative advocate of measured reform; after the break Arthur Schlesinger was a googly-eyed plutocrat. This was a rather blunt way to introduce us to issues of master narratives, methodology, and historiography (in addition to Schlesinger), and it fostered... Read more
A couple of weeks ago in Sunday School, a middle-aged woman shared her conversion story to Mormonism. Born and raised a Methodist, she noted that she always felt like something was lacking. When she discovered Mormonism, she explained, “it was like Methodism, only more.” I smiled to myself as she said this, recognizing in her own conversion narrative a common refrain that dominates the autobiographical writings of her 19th century predecessors. Among the first generation of converts to Mormonism, roughly... Read more
Peculiar People
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