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The author of All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men: Love, Alienation, and "Reconciliation” in a Big, BIG Mormon Family (Xlibris, 2000) and the controversial Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004) is at it again. American historian by day and Canadian jazz musician and playwright by night, Clyde R. Forsberg Jr. has also written five original “jazz-musicals.” A word of explanation is required. These five plays, four of which have been tested on stage and not found wanting, do not obey many of the rules of so-called dramaturgy. The playwright has no real right or claim to the office or title of playwright. Havin...
Both the Prophet Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon have been characterized as ardently, indeed evangelically, anti-Masonic. Yet in this sweeping social, cultural, and religious history of nineteenth-century Mormonism and its milieu, Clyde Forsberg argues that masonry, like evangelical Christianity, was an essential component of Smith's vision. Smith's ability to imaginatively conjoin the two into a powerful and evocative defense of Christian, or Primitive, Freemasonry was, Forsberg shows, more than anything else responsible for the meteoric rise of Mormonism in the nineteenth century. This was to have significant repercussions for the development of Mormonism, particularly in the articulat...
Scholars credit the European Renaissance and Enlightenment to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Greek scholars in particular were driven from the Byzantine capital, taking with them everything they had learned about their own Greek intellectual heritage and classical philosophical tradition, thanks, in part, to the scholarly enterprise of Islamic scholasticism and a spirit of intellectual cooperation that had existed until that time. The “expulsion of excellence” that followed closely on the heels of Mehmed II’s military victory in 1453 proved problematic for an emergent, modern-Muslim, imperial power, which his capture of the Byzantine capital instigated, although it was a boon...
Divine Rite of Kings: Land, Race, Same Sex, and Empire in Mormonism and the Esoteric Tradition is a social-historical-political analysis of the religion of the Latter-day Saints as deeply indebted to a variety of esoteric systems of belief. It argues that the present campaign against gay marriage and other homophobic policies of the “American religion,” targeting the LGBTQ community, and, indeed, children of same-sex parents, are connected to erstwhile racial doctrines and practices, which excluded persons from full fellowship on the basis of race alone, Africans the supposed offspring of Cain and Canaan and thus cursed. Narrow heterosexist notions of “sexual purity” merely replaced Anglo-Saxon supremacist notions of “racial purity” in the imperial and the millennial understanding of Mormonism. The new heterosexism, this book suggests, can be viewed as a form of boundary maintenance better suited to an emergent international church and world religion, ironically, which continues to make inroads in parts of Asia, where its social conservatism and, indeed, virulent attacks against the “gay and lesbian lifestyle,” continue to attract followers.
As Christopher Columbus surveyed lush New World landscapes, he eventually concluded that he had rediscovered the biblical garden from which God expelled Adam and Eve. Reading the paradisiacal rhetoric of Columbus, John Smith, and other explorers, English immigrants sailed for North America full of hope. However, the rocky soil and cold winters of New England quickly persuaded Puritan and Quaker colonists to convert their search for a physical paradise into a quest for Eden's less tangible perfections: temperate physiologies, intellectual enlightenment, linguistic purity, and harmonious social relations. Scholars have long acknowledged explorers' willingness to characterize the North American...
"Donald Akenson writes authoritatively and with verve about this controversial mixture of religion, politics, and culture ... this is a good book that rewards repeated readings." Books in Canada
This is the remarkable story of the first stars of women's basketball. In the early 1970s, few women participated in organized athletics, but in Catholic Philadelphia, women's basketball was already a well-established, thirty-year tradition. In this vivid account of Immaculata basketball, Julie Byrne explores the unusual lives of these young women, the rare opportunities and pleasures they were allowed, their religious culture, and the broader ideas of womanhood that they inspired and helped redefine.
Mormon founder Joseph Smith is one of the most controversial figures of nineteenth-century American history, and a virtually inexhaustible subject for analysis. In this volume, fifteen scholars offer essays on how to interpret and understand Smith and his legacy. Including essays by both Mormons and non-Mormons, this wide-ranging collection is the only available survey of contemporary scholarly opinion on the extraordinary man who started one of the fastest growing religious traditions in the modern world.
While no one thing can entirely explain the rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the historical influence of Freemasonry on this religious tradition cannot be refuted. Those who study Mormonism have been aware of the impact that Freemasonry had on the founding prophet Joseph Smith during the Nauvoo period, but his involvement in Freemasonry was arguably earlier and broader than many modern historians have admitted. The fact that the most obvious vestiges of Freemasonry are evident only in the more esoteric aspects of the Mormon faith has made it difficult to recognize, let alone fully grasp, the relevant issues. Even those with both Mormon and Masonic experience may not b...
A transdisciplinary Mormon history, this book is a work of American religious history, theology, science history, and cultural and historical geography. It deconstructs the âraceâ creationism, White supremacy, and Christian imperialism of leading interwar Mormon theologian B.H. Roberts. Roberts hoped to introduce the front-rank post-Darwinian, scientific, and philosophical postulates of his timeâpolygeny, preadamitism, electromagnetism, idealism, the multiverse, infinity, and interstellar travelâto an increasingly fundamentalist Mormon establishment. Church authorities, however, including eventual âprophetâ Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., proscribed and rejected Robe...