Mormon History Association: Summer Meetings in Calgary

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Some additions to BoAP.org

We have added a few items to the website:

First, a couple of what I would characterize as Joseph Smith tract sermons. These are Times and Seasons editorials. I’ve been rather suspicious of these items and I’m still not sure of their value as JS documents, but I’ve come to the grudging conclusion that the particular entries we’ve added are JS productions. We’ve had an April 1, 1842 up for years and I would say that I’m somewhat more leery of it than the ones we’ve recently added. My new proverb, Approval is not the same as Production, applies to the April 1 entry, but it clearly does contain ideas from JS, though not I think, his dictation. The new entries may be somewhat closer to the mark. Time will perhaps tell.

Tract sermons were big business in the antebellum period and I think these qualify. Anyway, have fun reading there. You will find these in the Parallel Joseph under 1842. They are new entries in May and June I believe.

We have added a few more items to the Early Saints compilation, the most notable being the Joseph C. Kingsbury diaries/memoirs. These are merely links to the diary images but the script is very readable and the Nauvoo period is fun, especially the polygamy bits.

There you have it. By the way, if you have any typescripts of journals for individuals that were contemporary Mormons of Joseph Smith, we want to put them up for reading. You can email us at boap (at) boap (dot) org.

Preaching, Rhetoric and Mormons

[Cross posted at BCC.]

With the recent conference, many Church members saw what has become the pinnacle of Mormon Preaching: The General Conference Address. But is it really representative of the Mormon sermon? I say no. In my paltry experience, Mormon preaching is much more like classical Methodist homily than the considered rationalist stuff you might get from an Anglican pulpit. General Conference preaching is very carefully scripted. No off the reservation speculation, no fire and brimstone to speak of, no getting lost in the rhetorical moment allowed, much. (I think Church presidents have their leeway and there is descent evidence for that.)

Sermons, More Sermons and Funeral Sermons

Sermons in antebellum America were both innovative and derivative. While disestablishment opened wider the doors of American Religious Culture to the radical, it also strengthened the radical establishment (by that I mean the unsettled Methodists and Baptists). Preachers naturally came in similar breadth and hence their sermons found all sorts of niches in which to settle.

We are dependent on the egos or concerns of the preachers themselves (for the most part) to see what they preached and where and when they did it.

The Pearl of Great Price – A History

[Reposted from 2010.]

In our priesthood meeting a few weeks back a part of the lesson involved inviting class members to offer brief accounts of “how we got them and what’s in ‘em” in regard to the Mormon scriptures. Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants went about as short and sweet as you might imagine, but no one volunteered anything about the Pearl of Great Price beyond the usual bit about its contents. (I don’t usually comment – unless someone points at me and asks. Its been a good policy)

Antebellum Liberty vs. Mormon Individuality

I put this one up a couple of years ago, but I want to revisit it in light of some current discussion on Mormonism and politics. Patrick Mason’s recent article in Church and State (summer 2011) 53:349-375, made me wonder again about our presentist impositions.

In a 1990 article, Gregory Schneider observed,

Early versions of republicanism conceived of liberty and rights as belonging to the people taken as a whole in opposition to the power and interests of rulers. Liberty was, first of all, public and political, not private and individual. Hence, there could be no legitimate opposition between individual liberties and the common good of the people in the republic. Those who place their private interests above the common good were diseased tissue in the body politic, and might be subjected to harsh remedies. Unity in the cause of the common good, then, sometimes required an oppressive conformity.[1]

John Jaques – A life.

John Jaques, whose claim to continuing fame is his composition “Truth,” a poem which appeared in the first edition of The Pearl of Great Price and was later set to music, appearing in the present LDS hymnal under the title “Oh Say, What is Truth,” offered this summary of his life, near its end.

“Apply the subject to the cases of such as are convinced of the truth of Christianity but do not heartily embrace it, and openly espouse its cause”

Within the little village of Palmyra, New York, at the corner of Main Street and Canandaigua Road stand four churches.

Joseph Smith Papers, Journals Vol. 2.

The Church Historian’s Press offers the second volume in the journals series of the Joseph Smith Papers. Volume editors Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith and Richard Lloyd Anderson bring us Joseph Smith’s journals from the period December 1841 to April 1843.

The Joseph Smith Papers: Journals, Volume 2.

The period covered by the journals was one of great importance and included political and infrastructure development of Nauvoo (including the temple), the establishment of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, the transition of the Times and Seasons to official Church organ, the printing of the Book of Abraham, the inauguration of the temple ceremonies (most of them) and proxy baptism for the dead, the quorum of the anointed, the extradition attempt and underground, the rise of the twelve apostles, polygamy, a much better though less personal account of JS’s doings and sayings and much more. During the period JS’s journals were recorded by Willard Richards, his private secretary and chief chronographer, William Clayton, Erastus Derby[1] and a few pages by Eliza R. Snow, the latter three only during the first year of the volume. That period is important for historical reasons, but as a documentary record perhaps the most interesting aspect is the now open availability of the journal record for the period from the famous “Book of the Law of the Lord.”

The Grand Unification Theory

[Cross-posted from BCC]

In physics, the holy grail in the present moment is a theory which explains, with the power of prediction, the fundamental things. The things of the small universe (weak force, strong force, electricity, magnetism) the quantum world, and the things of the big universe – essentially gravity. The historical inspiration for this frenzy was the achievement of the Scotsman, James Clerk [pronounced "Goble"] Maxwell. Maxwell proposed a version of this business, which unites the formerly disperate understandings of electricity and magnetism:

Maxwell's Unified Theory

This is a rich explanation which both predicts and accounts for much of what happens in your daily life – from the operation of your cell phone, computer and television – to how your eyeglasses and contact lens behave.[1]

Voice and Print – Sermon and Book and Media

Writing somehow reconstitutes (imperfectly and incompletely) a sermon (or any speech) into the three dimensional world. Printing that manuscript fixes that representation much more firmly and reliably, confidently, by making available many copies, exact duplicates, of that thought once expressed orally.

What about the hypertext world? It seems like a retreat. Going backwards somehow. Yes, the website is still there tomorrow, displaying the things that were there yesterday. But the webpage may be edited without trace. The text that was there yesterday may actually be different (even improved) today. But permanence, confidence, is left bleeding on the altar of technology. I exaggerate a little. Books were distrusted in the beginning and for good reason. In the environment of type blocks, sameness was not the rule.

Will the book die? Can the technoverse find a lasting replacement? Independent of server death, ISP disappearance, disk crashes and DVD aging?

A CD is a set of golden plates. You need a seer stone (disc drive) to access it. Unfortunately CDs don’t get Divine anti-aging blessings.

Then there’s the question of authorship. This isn’t the 1800s when the author was king, the center of the textual world. These days it’s the reader. The rabble interprets, creates meaning. That disease even reaches the canon. Oh well.

All of this is a little bit of what I’ve been wondering about as I try to finish up chapter 9 and jump into chapter 10. I mean, how to distribute the final product? Technology always wins. I love Gutenberg, but he may be dead.

Richard Turley and William Slaughter Talk About Their New Book, “How We Got the Book of Mormon.”

Assistant Church Historian and Recorder Richard E. Turley and coauthor William Slaughter of the LDS Church Historical Department were kind enough to answer a few questions about their new book, How We Got the Book of Mormon. Deseret Book, 2011. Cloth, ISBN13: 978-1-60908-062-4. $34.99. We’ll be posting a review of the book shortly.

Rejuvenated: Brigham, Heber and Co. in New York, 1843.

One of the interesting things about the Manuscript History of the Church, is its blending of sources to create a narrative of events in early Mormonism. Sometimes this effect is submerged by the 1850′s historians decision to unify the text by writing in the first person, as though Joseph Smith himself had penned it. Not an acceptable practice today, it was a common technique among writers of annals and “autobiographies” at the time.

More Yet. D&C 107. Part 11. Ordination Practices.

[Part 10 is here.]
For the first 90 years or so of LDS church organization, priesthood ordination gradually developed into more or less the following pattern:

By authority of the Holy Priesthood and by the laying on of hands, I ordain you an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and confer upon you all the rights, powers keys and authority pertaining to this office and calling in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Summertime and Recycling #10: D&C 107. Part 8

Continues Part 7
Joseph Smith founded two new priesthood offices early in 1835, the Twelve Apostles and the Seventy. While the apostleship had been presaged before the formal organization of the church (D&C 18) the first formal ordinations took place in February 1835. The apostles felt the need for some more detailed direction regarding their standing and duty in the church and asked Joseph Smith for such direction. Heber C. Kimball noted the experience in his journal as follows: