Thomas W. Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469628639
- eISBN:
- 9781469628653
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628639.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, college-age Latter-day Saints began undertaking a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage to the nation's elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia, ...
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In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, college-age Latter-day Saints began undertaking a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage to the nation's elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, and Stanford. Thomas W. Simpson chronicles the academic migration of hundreds of LDS students from the 1860s through the late 1930s, when church authority J. Reuben Clark Jr., himself a product of the Columbia University Law School, gave a reactionary speech about young Mormons' search for intellectual cultivation. Clark's leadership helped to set conservative parameters that in large part came to characterize Mormon intellectual life. At the outset, Mormon women and men were purposefully dispatched to such universities to "gather the world's knowledge to Zion." Simpson, drawing on unpublished diaries, among other materials, shows how LDS students commonly described American universities as egalitarian spaces that fostered a personally transformative sense of freedom to explore provisional reconciliations of Mormon and American identities, and religious and scientific perspectives. On campus, Simpson argues, Mormon separatism died and a new, modern Mormonism was born: a Mormonism at home in the United States but at odds with itself. Fierce battles among Mormon scholars and church leaders ensued over scientific thought, progressivism, and the historicity of Mormonism’s sacred past. The scars and controversy, Simpson concludes, linger.Less
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, college-age Latter-day Saints began undertaking a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage to the nation's elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, and Stanford. Thomas W. Simpson chronicles the academic migration of hundreds of LDS students from the 1860s through the late 1930s, when church authority J. Reuben Clark Jr., himself a product of the Columbia University Law School, gave a reactionary speech about young Mormons' search for intellectual cultivation. Clark's leadership helped to set conservative parameters that in large part came to characterize Mormon intellectual life. At the outset, Mormon women and men were purposefully dispatched to such universities to "gather the world's knowledge to Zion." Simpson, drawing on unpublished diaries, among other materials, shows how LDS students commonly described American universities as egalitarian spaces that fostered a personally transformative sense of freedom to explore provisional reconciliations of Mormon and American identities, and religious and scientific perspectives. On campus, Simpson argues, Mormon separatism died and a new, modern Mormonism was born: a Mormonism at home in the United States but at odds with itself. Fierce battles among Mormon scholars and church leaders ensued over scientific thought, progressivism, and the historicity of Mormonism’s sacred past. The scars and controversy, Simpson concludes, linger.
Emily Suzanne Clark
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469628783
- eISBN:
- 9781469628806
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628783.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
The next chapter remains in the local concentric circle of New Orleans and examines Afro-Creole Spiritualism over and against Catholicism, its religious neighbor. The members of the Cercle Harmonique ...
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The next chapter remains in the local concentric circle of New Orleans and examines Afro-Creole Spiritualism over and against Catholicism, its religious neighbor. The members of the Cercle Harmonique pushed against Catholicism to carve out a space for their own religious identity. Yet at the same time, resonances of Catholicism echoed in the Cercle Harmonique’s practice in the form of advisement from Catholic spirits and reverberations of a few Catholic ideas. Though their practice included Catholic ideas and prominent Catholic spirits, they also received numerous anticlerical messages demonstrating their negative perspective on religious despotism, tyranny, and exploitation. The spirits and members of the Cercle Harmonique regarded the revealed knowledge of Spiritualism as a more legitimate form of religious power than Catholicism’s formal authority.Less
The next chapter remains in the local concentric circle of New Orleans and examines Afro-Creole Spiritualism over and against Catholicism, its religious neighbor. The members of the Cercle Harmonique pushed against Catholicism to carve out a space for their own religious identity. Yet at the same time, resonances of Catholicism echoed in the Cercle Harmonique’s practice in the form of advisement from Catholic spirits and reverberations of a few Catholic ideas. Though their practice included Catholic ideas and prominent Catholic spirits, they also received numerous anticlerical messages demonstrating their negative perspective on religious despotism, tyranny, and exploitation. The spirits and members of the Cercle Harmonique regarded the revealed knowledge of Spiritualism as a more legitimate form of religious power than Catholicism’s formal authority.
Grace Yukich
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199988662
- eISBN:
- 9780199346318
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199988662.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Chapter 2 solves the puzzle posed in Chapter 1 by revealing that the New Sanctuary Movement had religious targets as well as political ones, aims that required the creation of a new, interfaith ...
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Chapter 2 solves the puzzle posed in Chapter 1 by revealing that the New Sanctuary Movement had religious targets as well as political ones, aims that required the creation of a new, interfaith immigrant rights network. In recent decades, the rise of the religious right in the U.S. increasingly associated religiosity with conservatism and nationalism, threatening the identities and public authority of religious progressives. This contentious religious context motivated some religious progressives to create an explicitly interfaith immigrant rights movement, simultaneously challenging both immigration policy and the religious right's dominance. Since recognizing New Sanctuary's religious goals, not just its political ones, better explains its emergence, this chapter introduces the concept of multi-target social movements, movements simultaneously challenging authority in multiple institutional arenas, and begins to distinguish them from other types of movements, a task continued in the remainder of the book.Less
Chapter 2 solves the puzzle posed in Chapter 1 by revealing that the New Sanctuary Movement had religious targets as well as political ones, aims that required the creation of a new, interfaith immigrant rights network. In recent decades, the rise of the religious right in the U.S. increasingly associated religiosity with conservatism and nationalism, threatening the identities and public authority of religious progressives. This contentious religious context motivated some religious progressives to create an explicitly interfaith immigrant rights movement, simultaneously challenging both immigration policy and the religious right's dominance. Since recognizing New Sanctuary's religious goals, not just its political ones, better explains its emergence, this chapter introduces the concept of multi-target social movements, movements simultaneously challenging authority in multiple institutional arenas, and begins to distinguish them from other types of movements, a task continued in the remainder of the book.
Thomas W. Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469628639
- eISBN:
- 9781469628653
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628639.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
Because nineteenth-century Mormons could never fully realize their separatist dream of building the Kingdom of God in North America, the history of Mormonism has involved highly complex contacts and ...
More
Because nineteenth-century Mormons could never fully realize their separatist dream of building the Kingdom of God in North America, the history of Mormonism has involved highly complex contacts and negotiations with non-Mormons. In their attempts to convert, resist, or appease powerful outsiders, Mormons have engaged in a distinctive dialectic of secrecy and self-disclosure, of esoteric rites and strategic public relations. The result has been an extended process of controlled modernization, the evolution of a dynamic, global faith. This book focuses on a crucial aspect of that process of modernization and evolution: academic migration to the elite universities of the United States, which offered exiled and ambitious Mormons a unique, quasi-sacred cultural space of freedom and dignity. At schools like Johns Hopkins, Penn, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley, a rising, influential generation of Mormon women and men would undergo a radical transformation of consciousness and identity. Outsiders became insiders; those on the margins entered the mainstream. This revised cultural and intellectual history of Mormonism sheds light on the emergence and domestication of nineteenth-century Mormon feminism, the evolution of Mormon ethnicity, the development of Mormon intellectual life and anti-intellectualism, and the history of outsiders in American higher education.Less
Because nineteenth-century Mormons could never fully realize their separatist dream of building the Kingdom of God in North America, the history of Mormonism has involved highly complex contacts and negotiations with non-Mormons. In their attempts to convert, resist, or appease powerful outsiders, Mormons have engaged in a distinctive dialectic of secrecy and self-disclosure, of esoteric rites and strategic public relations. The result has been an extended process of controlled modernization, the evolution of a dynamic, global faith. This book focuses on a crucial aspect of that process of modernization and evolution: academic migration to the elite universities of the United States, which offered exiled and ambitious Mormons a unique, quasi-sacred cultural space of freedom and dignity. At schools like Johns Hopkins, Penn, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley, a rising, influential generation of Mormon women and men would undergo a radical transformation of consciousness and identity. Outsiders became insiders; those on the margins entered the mainstream. This revised cultural and intellectual history of Mormonism sheds light on the emergence and domestication of nineteenth-century Mormon feminism, the evolution of Mormon ethnicity, the development of Mormon intellectual life and anti-intellectualism, and the history of outsiders in American higher education.
Thomas W. Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469628639
- eISBN:
- 9781469628653
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628639.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
Mormon intellectual life suffered acutely in the wake of turmoil at Brigham Young University in 1911, but less than a decade later, major changes in church leadership and educational policy would ...
More
Mormon intellectual life suffered acutely in the wake of turmoil at Brigham Young University in 1911, but less than a decade later, major changes in church leadership and educational policy would help stimulate renewal. At the same time, Mormon scholars began gravitating to new disciplines like history, sociology, and the academic study of religion. A number of these students would become scholarly authorities on the Mormon community and the Mormon past. The students' epistemology, which placed supreme value on documentary and statistical evidence, was bound eventually to clash with that of theologically conservative church authorities, who exalted the private tutorings of the spirit. J. Reuben Clark Jr., a member of the LDS First Presidency, was the most forceful critic of Mormon scholars who, in his mind, threatened to lead Mormon youth astray. His 1938 "Charted Course of the Church in Education" remains a profoundly influential statement, and warning, about the "fundamentals" of church teaching and education.Less
Mormon intellectual life suffered acutely in the wake of turmoil at Brigham Young University in 1911, but less than a decade later, major changes in church leadership and educational policy would help stimulate renewal. At the same time, Mormon scholars began gravitating to new disciplines like history, sociology, and the academic study of religion. A number of these students would become scholarly authorities on the Mormon community and the Mormon past. The students' epistemology, which placed supreme value on documentary and statistical evidence, was bound eventually to clash with that of theologically conservative church authorities, who exalted the private tutorings of the spirit. J. Reuben Clark Jr., a member of the LDS First Presidency, was the most forceful critic of Mormon scholars who, in his mind, threatened to lead Mormon youth astray. His 1938 "Charted Course of the Church in Education" remains a profoundly influential statement, and warning, about the "fundamentals" of church teaching and education.
