New Content at Joseph Smith Papers Web Pages

Check out the updated content at the Joseph Smith Papers website.

Edited Volumes: George Whitefield, Mormon Women

My second favorite Methodist itinerant has spawned a new volume:

George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy (Oxford UP) edited by Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones. The material originated in a conference at Oxford University in 2014 to observe the tercentenary of the Grand Itinerant’s birth.
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The excellent Kate Holbrook and Matt Bowman have collected some important essays on Mormon women in Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (U of U Press).

Look for them at a bookstore or website near you.

Review. Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England

Jeremiah’s Scribes : Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England
Meredith Marie Neuman
University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia) 2013.
Hardcover: $64.00 (Amazon).
280 pages.

I have been meaning to write something on Meredith Neuman’s study of Puritan preaching for some time, first because I enjoyed her careful work on sermons and their impact in a community that valued preaching as the Christian prophetic voice. Second because I found it useful in my own work on preaching. Neuman’s approach reveals much of preaching as lived religion in early New England.

High Resolution Scans Now Available for the Complete Jonathan Edwards Collection at Yale and Andover Newton Theological School

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, completed a high-resolution scan of the entire Edwards Collections at both Yale University and Andover Newton Theological School. To view and use the scans, go to http://edwards.yale.edu/node/973.

Review: First Principles and Ordinances

First Principles and Ordinances: The Fourth Article of Faith in Light of the Temple
Samuel M. Brown
Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2014.

Joseph Smith was born into the Second Great Awakening. Gravitating to Methodist preaching, he ranked it above his other experience. Visions and golden plates prompted a New Covenant, born in April 1830. At first the New Covenant looked for a place in the landscape of antebellum Protestant thought and doctrine but gradually that seeking turned to renewal and rethinking. Mormonism moved from the American individualism that played over the billions of pages of Protestant imprints and wrote a new way of seeing the ancient. It didn’t simply try to restore (unsuccessfully) the all things in common of Jerusalem’s Acts. It wrote a story of ritual and liturgy that made family of believers and eternal friends of family.

Release of the Final Volume in the Journals Series, Joseph Smith Papers

[Cross-Posted as BCC]

Capturing Joseph Smith on paper has been a goal of Mormon church historians for almost two hundred years. First efforts involved scribal minutes of church meetings, recording revelations and commandments that fell from Smith’s lips, and keeping a history of the early church. Those early efforts went to writing a canonical faith promoting history, one that steered the internal dialogue of Mormonism for more than a century. The primary sources that supported that faithful dialogue were largely under wraps. Why would anyone be interested?

Joseph Smith Papers Recent Content Bump

The Joseph Smith Papers has added significant new content on their web page.

Nearly one hundred and fifty more documents from 1841, including priesthood licenses and land deeds for Nauvoo, Illinois.

Documents from six legal cases in Ohio in which Joseph Smith was involved.

Earliest manuscript copy of the revelation on eternal marriage (now D&C 132).

Topic page for documents found in the current Pearl of Great Price of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

New and updated reference material, including source citations for eighteen biographical descriptions.