Joe
Had no idea Armenian-Americans held such a rich response to tragedy. Staring into something hopeless and walking through it without lardering over it with boosterish “hope,” politics, or sentiment. More a sense of compulsory momentum, tragically persisted within.
The title story merits a second read after you’ve been startled. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” felt contemporary for the meeting of disembodied voices and their eventual loss.
Despite the title, Wuthnow is writing a sociologically-informed history of the interaction between religion and public life in Kansas. It rebuts the Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas by showing how religion largely served as a pragmatic, centrist framework knitting local communal life together.
However, in each case - slavery, populism, prohibition, evolution, and abortion - Kansas has served as a stage upon which national movements descended to act out an moral drama, sparking a blaze from plenty of dry local tinder. Geographically and politically, Kansas has served as a sort of American center stage.
Social-political movements in Kansas succeeded only to the extent they adopted a grammar of reaction to national forces hostile to its own religious values.
it’s difficult for outsiders to grasp just how pioneering McPherson was in early 20th Century American Christianity, making her mark in Pentecostalism’s urban institutional expansion, mass broadcasting, megachurching, formal leadership by women, and denominationalism. Blumhofer paints a scholarly study enlivened with McPherson’s antics like riding her motorcycle down the main aisle of her church and up to her pulpit.
Young’s final settlement of Zion in the Basin was the feat of a first-rate field Marshall. Within the Basin, the saints could build at peace. The rituals of the priesthood could bloom and flower in the temple. Young could develop fresh revelations around Adam-God, Adoption, Baptism for the Dead, and call for a more rigorous devotion to the church and to plural marriage. Though resisted fiercely, America eventually penetrated Zion by railroad, statehood, and secular jurisprudence. With it came more opportunities to prosper, prompting a rearguard experiment by Young to call Saints to consecrate their wealth unto collective ownership by the Church. Many such utopias blossomed and withered. Yet despite his calls to for all Mormons to consecrate their private property, Young viewed himself as a giant asterisk, and the Church President retained private ownership over 100% of his considerable assets until he died.
Vivid and fairly-told. I walked in disparaging, walked out respectful. Tied well to the Oklahoma region and its history, tying it into the charismatic movement in that place. The prosperity gospel is toxic, but Roberts is genuine. Looking forward to reading future research on the tie between Roberts’ mid-20C prosperity gospel and the emergence of the Word-Faith movement.
Fascinating as historiography. Tenured at BYU, the author (Ph.D, Univ of Wisconsin) evinces meticulously-footnoted skill at taking a secular “Mormon Studies” approach toward thematic threads of anti-Mormon reaction.
He describes the movement with studied evenhandedness until his chapter on its politics. At Nauvoo, Smith acts only defensively, and the catastrophe is triggered by internal dissent over the polygamy revelation. Generalizations warranting multiple citations in earlier chapters are simply claimed. Smith appears politically unagentic, the author omitting, for instance, mention of his candidacy for the U.S. presidency or his contested rhetoric in securing the settlement’s municipal charter from Illinois. The book is not an apologia or a hagiography of mormonism, but an academic contribution from a historian well aware of the world beyond it.
it is telling that its weakest portion lies in the failure to enter into critical reckoning with Smith himself and in the political claims he made as the singular voice of his religion.
