Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation

2019 ◽  
pp. 233-258
Author(s):  
Nancy Bentley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kinship Theory ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Free People

What relations do modern Americans have to dead ancestors? In the first half of the nineteenth century, this question preoccupied authors of many stripes, from ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, to Iroquois prophet Handsome Lake. Both from rural New York, Morgan and Handsome Lake each grappled with the effects of white settlers’ occupation of indigenous homelands by turning to questions of kinship. When The Book of Mormon was published in 1830, it too turned to the deep history of human kinship forms to define how red and white Americans were bound together by vexed ties of violence and habitation of the same land. This ancient Amerindian history told a story of how personal agency and private families could transform “backward” tribes into free people. It reconnected secular doctrines of free agency with Christian theology, disclosing the theological origins of secular thought about kinship. But while this “American Bible” shared key assumptions with Morgan’s secular kinship theory, its status as modern revelation left the Mormon faithful vulnerable to being dismissed and displaced.

Guilt: Yours, Ours, and Theirs

Worldview ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore R. Weber
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Collective Phenomena ◽  
Collective Guilt ◽  
White Racism ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Guilt ◽  
Martin Luther King

On June 9, 1968, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Dr. Michael Halberstam that raised and examined the question, “Are You Guilty of Murdering Martin Luther King?” The question was addressed to all white Americans, and it presupposed a concept of collective or corporate white guilt. It was prompted by a. particular event, but its application was not limited to that event. As the question itself implied and Halberstam's argument made clear, the question applied to problems of white guilt and white racism as collective phenomena in the whole history of black-white relationships.The question was not unique at that time, for collective guilt had emerged as a fairly common aspect of social protest.

A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry E. Morris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
Ancient Record ◽  
Gold Plates

This book includes key documents, along with annotation, related to the origin of the Book of Mormon, from Joseph Smith’s first mention of the gold plates to the book’s publication in 1830. Smith claimed that on the night of September 21–22, 1823, an angel, later identified as Moroni, appeared to him and informed him of an ancient record, inscribed on gold plates, buried in the nearby Hill Cumorah. Smith finally obtained the plates in 1827, and, assisted by Martin Harris, began translating in 1828. After Harris lost the first 116 pages of the manuscript, however, translation essentially ceased until 1829, when Oliver Cowdery arrived on the scene. The Book of Mormon, considered scripture by believers, was finally published in Palmyra, New York, in 1830. Key topics discussed in both introductions and endnotes include the question of whether Smith’s story of the angel actually originated as a treasure-seeking yarn, whether the gold plates actually existed, and whether the testimonies of the three witnesses and eight witnesses count as historical evidence.

Messy, Energetic, Intense: A Roundtable Conversation among New York's Asian American Experimental Filmmakers of the Eighties with Roddy Bogawa, Daryl Chin, Shu Lea Cheang, and Rea Tajiri

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Vince Schleitwiler ◽  
Abby Sun ◽  
Rea Tajiri
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Asian American ◽  
York City ◽  
American Film ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of

This roundtable grew out of conversations between filmmaker Rea Tajiri, programmer Abby Sun, and scholar Vince Schleitwiler about a misunderstood chapter in the history of Asian American film and media: New York City in the eighties, a vibrant capital of Asian American filmmaking with a distinctively experimental edge. To tell this story, Rea Tajiri contacted her artist contemporaries Shu Lea Cheang and Roddy Bogawa as well as writer and critic Daryl Chin. Daryl had been a fixture in New York City art circles since the sixties, his presence central to Asian American film from the beginning. The scope of this discussion extends loosely from the mid-seventies through the late nineties, with Tajiri, Abby Sun, and Vince Schleitwiler initiating topics, compiling responses, and finalizing its form as a collage-style conversation.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Classical Conceptions of Visuality and Representation in John of Damascus' Defense of Holy Images1

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-308
Author(s):  
James A. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
John Of Damascus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Culture ◽  
Common Era ◽  
Iconoclastic Controversy

The Defense of Holy Images by John of Damascus stands as the archetypal exposition of the Christian theology of images. Written at the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy, it has been mostly valued for its theological content and given scholarly short shrift as a narrowly focused polemic. The work is more than that. It presents a complex and profound explication of the nature of images and the phenomenon of representation, and is an important part of the “history of looking”in western culture. A long chain of visual conceptions connects classical Greek and Roman writers, such as Homer and Quintilian, to John: the living image, the interrelation of word and image, and image and memory, themes elaborated particularly in the Second Sophistic period of the early Common Era. For John to deploy this heritage so skillfully to the thorny problem of the place of images in Christianity, at the outbreak of a violent conflict that lasted a further 100 years after his writing, manifests an intellect and creativity that has not been sufficiently appreciated. The Defense of Holy Images, understood in this context, is another innovative synthesis of Christianity and classical culture produced by late antique Christian writers.

Beérkezett könyvek

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-770
Author(s):  
Csaba Pléh
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
New Science ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Oxford University Press

Danziger, Kurt: Marking the mind. A history of memory . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008Farkas, Katalin: The subject’s point of view. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008MosoninéFriedJudités TolnaiMárton(szerk.): Tudomány és politika. Typotex, Budapest, 2008Iacobini, Marco: Mirroring people. The new science of how we connect with others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Du vrai, du beau, du bien.Une nouvelle approche neuronale. Odile Jacob, PárizsGazzaniga_n

Esotericism and the “Coded Word” in Mormonism

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Clyde Forsberg Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Popular Religion ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
New Religion

In the history of American popular religion, the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, have undergone a series of paradigmatic shifts in order to join the Christian mainstream, abandoning such controversial core doctrines and institutions as polygamy and the political kingdom of God. Mormon historians have played an important role in this metamorphosis, employing a version (if not perversion) of the Church-Sect Dichotomy to change the past in order to control the future, arguing, in effect, that founder Joseph Smith Jr’s erstwhile magical beliefs and practices gave way to a more “mature” and bible-based self-understanding which is then said to best describe the religion that he founded in 1830. However, an “esoteric approach” as Faivre and Hanegraaff understand the term has much to offer the study of Mormonism as an old, new religion and the basis for a more even methodological playing field and new interpretation of Mormonism as equally magical (Masonic) and biblical (Evangelical) despite appearances. This article will focus on early Mormonism’s fascination with and employment of ciphers, or “the coded word,” essential to such foundation texts as the Book of Mormon and “Book of Abraham,” as well as the somewhat contradictory, albeit colonial understanding of African character and destiny in these two hermetic works of divine inspiration and social commentary in the Latter-day Saint canonical tradition.

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