Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been pretty busy although I should have a bunch this weekend. One news story that caught my eye was from the NYT today. For some reason it's not coming up correctly on my home computer. So I'll quote excerpts below. It's basically a little story on Richard Bushman and how he's become the main defender and explainer of Mormonism in the press.
As an undergraduate at Harvard , Richard Lyman Bushman was offered some friendly advice by a favorite professor: he was a fine student, but his Mormonism was seen by the Harvard establishment as a "bunch of garbage."
Mr. Bushman would do himself a favor, the professor told him, to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints behind as a relic of his upbringing.
"I reacted just the opposite," Professor Bushman said in a phone interview. "I said, 'You're not going to bully me, you big representative of Harvard culture.' "
That was 57 years ago. Since then, Professor Bushman has retained his Mormon faith even while forging an Ivy League academic career, earning posts at Columbia and Harvard.
In fact, as his teaching and research focused on colonial American history, Professor Bushman also managed to become something of an ambassador for Mormonism to the outside world.
Now, with the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney (whom Professor Bushman knew when both were at Harvard in the '70s and whose son is a member of Professor Bushman's New York congregation), Professor Bushman is being thrust further into the public spotlight, becoming the nation's chief defender and explainer of Mormonism. When The New Republic published a cover article in January questioning whether a Mormon was fit to be president, the magazine asked Professor Bushman to write a "Mormon" response. At the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's journalism conference in May, Professor Bushman was asked to lead a session titled "Mormonism and Democratic Politics: Are They Compatible?"
Note that this Pew forum discussion can be found here. It's very much worth reading, if only to see what about Mormonism is of interest to the press. T&S reacted with some thoughts on LDS scholars and the press that is probably worth reading.
And as news media outlets run stories about the current "Mormon moment," his phone keeps ringing. He considered it a blessing that he was already on his way out of New York for his annual summerlong sojourn in Provo, Utah, when "Good Morning America" and "The Daily Show" started calling.
"I'm still kind of a babe in the woods when it comes to TV," Professor Bushman, 76, said from Provo, where he is joined by his wife, Claudia, who has also taught at Columbia and has written books on Mormonism with him.
And yet he says his stomach for so many media appearances, answering the same questions over and over, is born of duty to his faith. He believes Mormons can overcome prejudice only through vigorous dialogue with outsiders. For the nation's nearly six million Mormons, a largely insulated community that is barred from discussing rituals outside of temple, it is not a natural posture.
As they receive more public attention, not only from Mr. Romney's candidacy but also from the HBO series "Big Love," about a polygamist family, and the coming movie "September Dawn," about a 19th-century massacre led by Mormon zealots, "Mormons are ambivalent about how to respond," Professor Bushman said. "There's this feeling that we'll rise above the fray."
"I think we've overdone that," he said. "That's how a lot of misunderstanding gets propagated."
At the same time, Professor Bushman's efforts to straddle the devout Mormon and secular academic worlds have won him critics in both. His 2005 book "Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling" (Alfred A. Knopf), a biography of Mormonism's founder, upset some believers with its depiction of Smith's father as an alcoholic and its claim that Smith wed 10 women who were already married.
Some secular historians, meanwhile, criticize Professor Bushman's reliance on the writings of Smith and his followers as the best sources on early Mormon history.
"He never follows things to their final conclusions to say this did or didn't happen," said Jan Shipps, a non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism at Indiana University- Purdue University in Indianapolis who admires Professor Bushman's work. "He simply tells the story the way that Joseph Smith and his family and followers tell the story."
Professor Bushman, who published a book of essays in 2004 titled "Believing History" (Columbia University Press) admits as much. A Columbia professor emeritus who is being considered for a new chair in Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, he is the first to warn Mormons against defensiveness. He responds to the news media's questions — which often reflect incredulity at Mormon beliefs — by owning up to Mormonism's eccentricities, calmly explaining its doctrine, and, if need be, gently setting the record straight.
"Every time you meet a reasonable Mormon, you have to readjust your beliefs about how wacky Mormon beliefs are," Professor Bushman said. "You have to say, 'I can't stomach it myself, but apparently it really works for these people.' "
So when a journalist at the Pew conference asked Professor Bushman about the historical justification for polygamy, which thrived in Mormon circles before the church outlawed it in 1890, he framed it as a "perplexing problem for Mormons" themselves because it is "so contrary to Mormon contemporary ideas of family." He also floated a practical-sounding theory, that roughly half of all plural wives were converts to Mormonism who lacked husbands or older brothers in the Mormon community; plural marriage provided male protection.
Once the conference transcript was posted online, e-mail messages from Mormons poured in to Professor Bushman, praising him for braving "the lions' den" of reporters.
Even the church, which had not previously endorsed Professor Bushman's work, linked to the transcript on its Web site. The church has also expressed interest in a seminar he is convening this summer, bringing together Mormon intellectuals to discuss how to better communicate Mormon doctrine and history.
Still, Professor Bushman has his work cut out for him.
"He was really, really good, and as good as he was, people still came away with questions," said Michael Cromartie, a religion and politics scholar who moderated Professor Bushman's appearance at the Pew conference.
For Professor Bushman, the invitation to address an elite group of journalists on Mormon history and doctrine was itself a victory.
"Simply being accepted as normal is a pretty big step for Mormons," he said. "That is the only progress we can hope for."
Thank you for posting this article. Actually, one of the more interesting features of this article, I thought, was NYT using the term "chief explainer" rather than something like chief apologist. Being referred to as Explainer and Ambassador is quite a complement.
For those interested, I posted a collection of Bushman's media interviews over the years. After listening to a few of these again, one can really get a sense for Bushman's contributions as “an ambassador for Mormonism to the outside world.”
http://journals.aol.com/aquinasvi/summatheologica/entries/2007/07/28/a-richard-bushman-archive/827
It is interesting to see how an objective Mormon scholar doing Mormon history fares working outside the church versus Dr. D. Michael Quinn, who was working inside the church, and whose objectivity basically cost him everything.
Though we will not learn about the eccnettric church history or leadership in the church priesthood and relief society manuals used in our meetings, there are many 'thinking' members who accept it's reality and have no problem acknowledging men lack the omniscinence of God and that all things, institutions, and people grow line upon line and precept upon precept. At the same time we also recognize the trend of deconstructionist and even current pop culutre to dwell on the sensational and find darkness and mal intent in every corner.
Bushman's work on Joseph Smith is a step in the direction of realizing than members can receive 'meat' instead of 'milk' when it come to looking at our own history. For outsiders, he shows our eccentricity in context- as his focus period from our modern perspective, was indeed 'perplexing'.
Quinn's objectivity is questionable. In some ways he was an apologist as much as Hugh Nibley only with some significantly different views. In many ways he had the same failings in his scholarship as Nibley did. (One can't read Mormonism and the Magic World View without thinking of Nibley and his flaws)
In any case the reported cause of his problems was largely a political issue over priesthood in his article in Women and Authority. I strongly suspect other things were going on as well. (I haven't listened yet to the podcast where he gives his side of the story - just the goings on at the time)
Quinn's post-excommunication books to me don't seem that different from what went on before. 90% of what he writes is fairly uncontroversial and then he just throws in some dozies he knows will be controversial and which tend to involve highly subjective (and often selective) quoting and interpretation.
I wish Quinn was more like Bushman in style since I think Quinn did a lot of important research. As flawed as his Magic World View was it was also amazingly significant (both in Mormon studies and arguably in general American studies causing a rethinking of a lot of issues of 'hermetic culture' on 19th century figures and history). The fact that his second edition is so subjective and filled with pretty severe polemics and ad homen I wish someone else would come along and revisit the topic in a more objective fashion.
I do agree though that Bushman is doing good work. I think he also shows that objective history is acceptable to folks. The portrayal that it is not is misleading, I think. One just has to adopt a more objective style. Of course the reception Bushman got by non-Mormons suggests that the kind of objective style has to presuppose that Mormonism is all made up and adopt that stance. I don't think one need do that (and not just in Mormon studies - Bushman gives quite a few non-Mormon study examples in his introduction).
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble