Thoughts on Approaches to the Book of Mormon

A suggestive quote jumped out at me while I was reading for a very different project.  It proposed a lot of ideas and opened analytical paths about a passion of mine, Mormonism. 

It brought to mind immediately the endless arguments and hand-wringing among many Latter-day Saints about whether the Book of Mormon is an ancient American text, as it was claimed.  More about this, but first the quote. 

Missionaries and LDS Pilgrimages

A tall, redheaded guy in a BYU ball cap slowly wound with the line waiting to go through security at the Lima airport for national flights. He conversed in unusually fluent Spanish with a Peruvian guy about his same age dressed in an iteration of twenty-something style.

There was an easy camaraderie among them that you seldom see. Tourists (European looking people, or the groups of Japanese and Chinese) tend to stick to themselves while Peruvians have their own family and friendship relationships that clump in these too slow lines. These two guys fit together. There was just something that connected them that was more than an occasional or temporary relationship between a local guide and a foreigner. 

What Happened when Mormons Came to Mine and Build Peru?

Daffodils and forsythia bloomed with abandon as April conference ended. Soon will come lilacs and high spring, and the Church just released its membership statistics. Growth and eternal progress are the stories people love, but in Mormonism there are many others, like the gaps in the garden of bulbs planted that did not come up, the missing blooms in a field of sunshine yellow. 

As the Brethren spoke in their dry, yet captivating, voices retelling their versions of the gospel one more time, always old and yet ever new, I was poking around documents from more than 100 years ago and stumbled on one of those fields with missing blooms. 

Black and White and Authority, a Breaking Mormon Mood

More than two decades ago, now, I spent some time with my Stake President, Kerry Heinz, discussing the articles I had published in Mormon scholarly venues and the transcripts of talks I had given. President Heinz was very concerned that my work would damage people’s testimonies.  

I felt the opposite. We argued strongly, because I felt that Heinz’ approach built people’s testimonies on sand.  

One Current of the Mormon River, Highly Active Members in Bolivia

Many Latter-day Saints have expressed concerns over the loss of members, especially among the young. These are very important concerns, but they can easily cause us to not see other aspects of the Mormon community. 

At the moment, I am in a working class, proto-middle class part of El Alto, Bolivia, the fascinating city on the edge of the nation’s de facto capital, La Paz, staying with a Latter-day Saint family, the elder members of which became LDS in the seventies. 

Ramah, Chiapas, and Vogt: What They Say about Mormons

As you drive around the little Mormon town of Ramah, New Mexico, close to the city of Gallup and Zuni Pueblo, you see a mailbox standing on a rustic post with an important name on it, Vogt. 

This name struck me again this morning, far from the Land of Enchantment, in an article celebrating the decades of the Harvard Chiapas Project. In it I not only learned more about the famous Evon Z. Vogt, of Ramah and his project, but also about Mormons.

Mormons, Ex- and Still-

Ex-Mormons, the very word suggests an absence.  

That ostensible absence, the missing center in a world of apparently isolated, secular individuals bereft of religion’s anchor and community was the subject of a paper read by researcher E. Marshall Brooks at yesterday’s meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC.  

An hour or so before a die-in claimed all who were in the central lobby of the Woodley Park Marriott, where the conference is taking place, Marshall convoked his panel concerning secularity and personal meaning.  He, a non-Mormon Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, had come to Utah to carry out ethnographic research for his dissertation.