Religion and the Historical Profession
“Several scholars respond to the news that the proportion of historians who specialize in religion continues to climb, and to reflect on both the causes and the significance of of this distinct, and now confirmed, trend in historical studies.” The respondents are Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, John Schmalzbauer, Jonathan Sheehan, and Grant Wacker.
Archive for January, 2010|Monthly archive page
Links for 21 January 2010
In Uncategorized on 21 January 2010 at 4:36 pmWriting about the Supernatural; or, Fawn Brodie vs. Richard Bushman
In Uncategorized on 12 January 2010 at 5:56 pmBrodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1971. 499 pages. ISBN: 0394469674.
Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf, 2005. 740 pages. ISBN: 1400042704.
As part of a reading list to teach me about how biographies are written, I recently read two noted biographies about Joseph Smith. The two biographies were Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) and Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). Joseph Smith was, of course, a nineteenth century visionary, author or translator of the Book of Mormon, and the founder of the Latter Day Saints. Any historian who handles Smith must deal with the supernatural occurrences and claims that pervaded his life. The question I put to myself as I was reading was this: How should a historian treat supernatural? How should a historian write about alleged visions and miracles and prophecies?
The Protestant Deformation
In Uncategorized on 10 January 2010 at 1:16 am
James Kurth, a retired political scientist from Swarthmore College, is perhaps best known for his variation on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. In the early ’90s Huntington proposed that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of a global contest between people groups and nations that would be predicated upon cultural and religious cleavages. Huntington’s idea became de rigueur with the rise of global Islamic terrorism. But whereas Huntington’s clash was a matter for foreign policy, Kurth believed that the greatest crisis would surface in domestic affairs as a battle between liberal multiculturalism and the Judeo-Christian inflected Western tradition.
