Upcoming Paper: “Religious Regeneration: Political Theologies of Belonging in the Americas and Europe during the Age of Revolutions”

I’m excited to fly out to Charleston, one of my favorite American cities, this Thursday for the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era conference. This is my first time to this particular conference, but I’ve heard great things, and the program is packed with smart people and interesting papers. If you’re gonna be out there, shoot…

Review: Richard Van Wagoner, NATURAL BORN SEER

Prior to his untimely death, Richard S. Van Wagoner was a prolific and respected amateur historian of the LDS faith. Besides an excellent biography of Sidney Rigdon, he also authored a well-received history of Mormon polygamy. It was therefore justified when the Smith-Pettit Foundation tapped him to write the first of a three-part biography of…

CFP: Toward a Conversation on Book of Mormon Studies

Some good friends of mine are launching a new conference and organization, so please check out the details. Here is a poster, and I’ve pasted the text from this pdf file below that. Academic study of the Book of Mormon has never been more promising than at present. Royal Skousen’s work on producing a critical text…

The Modern Mormon Athletic Image

Mormons have always held a precarious yet consistent place in America’s sports culture. Danny Ainge, Steve Young, Ty Detmer, and, most recently, Jimmer Fredette are among those have captured the nation’s popular imagination at various moments in the past four decades with their college accomplishments and, at least in the first two cases, professional success. (Still…

Book News: “American Nationalisms” Now Has a Home

When I was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, I often walked past the Cambridge University Press bookstore that was directly in front of Kings College Chapel. They always had the “recent releases” on display, and I spent many hours skimming through their pages. I dreamt that one day I might add my…

Blogging about Robert Orsi at Juvenile Instructor

The Juvenile Instructor has been running a series on Robert Orsi’s newest book, History and Presence. I was privileged to contribute the third entry. You can read it here. And below is an excerpt.  One final thought from the chapter. Robert Orsi concludes this topic by addressing the scholarly (and modern) anxiety to find a purpose…

Barack Obama, Eddie Glaude, and the Black Prophetic Tradition

I’ve always been an apologist for Barack Obama since reading Audacity of Hope shortly after it was published in 2006. I think he’s the most careful and sophisticated interpreter of and proponent for deliberate democracy to be elected president in over a century. I was therefore really excited to receive the first substantive edition of…

Mormons and the Trump Administration: Some Recent Essays

Since this blog is a scrapbook of sorts for my writings elsewhere, I figured I should register a couple recent essays that I wrote related to the LDS Church’s relationship to the Trump administration.  The first essay, “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Will Usher In the Trump Era,” puts the inauguration in context of Mormonism’s peripheral…

Review: William Mackinnon, AT SWORD’S POINT, PART II

For such a small chronological scope, William MacKinnon’s documentary history of the Utah War covers a lot of ground. Though the armed confrontation in 1857-1858 was theoretically isolated to the Rocky Mountains, its tentacles touched far and wide.  Soldiers were sent as far south as New Mexico to purchase supplies. Facing the threat of another…

Review: James Alexander Dun, DANGEROUS NEIGHBORS

On Monday, the Junto featured a Q&A I did with James Alexander Dun, who teaches history at Princeton University, about his new book: Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (UPenn Press, 2016). Make sure to go read his smart and provocative comments over there. But I thought it’d still be worthwhile to jot…