Is There No Blessing for Me?

2019 ◽  
pp. 104-118
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Salt Lake ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Dead ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church

By the 1880s, Jane James began a campaign to get permission to perform the temple rituals she believed were necessary to reach the highest degree of glory after death. She wanted to be sealed to Joseph Smith as a child and to receive her endowment, requests that church leaders denied. In 1888, James received a temple recommend to do baptisms for the dead in the Logan Temple. James’s children, meanwhile, made their ways out of the church. She received a second patriarchal blessing in 1889, which may have encouraged her to persist despite her disappointments. Her ex-husband Isaac James returned to Salt Lake in 1890 and lived with Jane James until his death in 1891. The following year, Jane James’s brother Isaac Manning came to live with her. In 1894, church leaders created a temple ceremony to seal Jane James to Joseph Smith as a servant rather than a child.

Priesthood Ordination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Power And Authority

Early Mormons used the Book of Mormon as the basis for their ecclesiology and understanding of the open heaven. Church leaders edited, harmonized, and published Joseph Smith’s revelation texts, expanding understandings of ecclesiastical priesthood office. Joseph Smith then revealed the Nauvoo Temple liturgy, with its cosmology that equated heaven, kinship, and priesthood. This cosmological priesthood was materialized through sealings at the temple altar and was the context for expansive teachings incorporating women into priesthood. This cosmology was also the basis for polygamy, temple adoption, and restrictions on the participation of black men and women in the church. This framework gave way at the end of the nineteenth century to a new priesthood cosmology introduced by Joseph F. Smith based on male ecclesiastical office. As church leaders expanded the meaning of priesthood to comprise the entire power and authority of God, they struggled to integrate women into church cosmology.

Aftermath

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-206
Author(s):  
Spencer W. McBride
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Decision To Leave ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Church

This chapter describes the aftermath of the assassination of Joseph Smith. This aftermath includes mourning and a funeral in Nauvoo, debates over who should succeed Smith as the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who the Mormons should vote for in the election, and the decision to leave the United States altogether. The Mormons were contemplating leaving the United States before Smith’s murder, but the violent act seemed to make this departure the only way forward in the minds of many church leaders. They had come to realize that without significant reform, the United States was incapable of protecting them. This chapter also considers the result of the presidential election of 1844 and what became of each of the candidates in the years that followed.

scholarly journals 'Go in peace – and die!' The task of the church in the HIV and/or AIDS context

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alta C. Van Dyk
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Aids Prevention ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Minimum Support ◽  
Electronic Questionnaire ◽  
Main Message ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
Health And Well Being

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the white Afrikaans-speaking churches in the Reformed tradition are dealing with the health and well-being of its parishioners in the HIV and/or AIDS context. An electronic questionnaire was filled in by 142 clergy from various Afrikaans-speaking churches. Results showed that clergy (90%) believed that HIV and/or AIDS is a much bigger problem outside the Afrikaans-speaking church than inside the church. Although 66% agreed that HIV was also a problem in white Afrikaans-speaking churches, only 30% admitted that it was a problem in their own congregation. Most (70%) believed that HIV and/or AIDS can be ignored in their own congregations. A small number of clergy took it on themselves to provide HIV and/or AIDS counselling (21%), care (19%) and education (18%) with minimum support from church leaders. When it came to HIV and/or AIDS prevention, most clergy were only prepared to preach abstinence and faithfulness, with their main message that ‘our bodies are the temple of God and that it should not be violated’ (70%). Is it not time for clergy to confront reality and to protect their flock by also teaching them prevention skills?Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article is relevant to the fields of pastoral care, psychology and HIV and/or AIDS.

Baby Blessing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Basin ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Church Members ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Mormon Church ◽  
Church Elders ◽  
The Church ◽  
At Home

The baby blessings performed by Mormon church elders were among the very first rituals adopted by the church. While Joseph Smith revealed no explicit details of this ritual beyond its necessity, church members began to perform it on the eighth day of the child’s life and in many cases associated it with naming the child. Baby blessings functioned in the early Zion period to delineate citizenship in the salvific community. After the fall of the temporal Zion and the rise of the Nauvoo Temple cosmology, baby blessings functioned to annunciate the sealed position of the child in the priesthood of heaven. After the arrival in the Great Basin, two concurrent practices emerged: the blessing of children at home by family members and the blessing at church by ecclesiastical leaders. In the twentieth century, church leaders focused exclusively on blessings at church, recasting them as the solemn duty of priesthood-holding fathers.

scholarly journals The Over-Emphasis on the Paying of Tithe and the Quest for Materialism among Religious Leaders: An Evaluation of the Biblical Teaching on Tithe

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-200
Author(s):  
Philip Igbo
Keyword(s):  
Church Leaders ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Biblical Teaching ◽  
The Church

The concept of tithe and tithing is a biblical concept. Tithing was a hieratic tax instituted as a means to support the Levites who ministered at God’s sanctuary. The Levites were to receive the tithes offered by Israel to Yahweh, because of the service they rendered at God’s sanctuary, and because they had no landed inheritance. The tithe system was enacted as a hieratic tax meant to provide support for the priests and Levites “for the service that they perform at God’s sanctuary (Num 18:21f). The tithes are voluntary; tithable things were products from the land or the herd. The tithe was basically for the support of the Levites who served at God’s Sanctuary. However, it has been observed and sadly so, that some contemporary Church leaders, especially in Nigeria, seem to be laying undue emphasis on tithing to their own financial advantage. This study was, therefore, conceived as a re-evaluation of the concept of tithing and the context under which it developed. The goal is to use the findings of this reevaluation to mirror the over emphasis on tithing by contemporary Church leaders in Nigeria. Findings reveal that there is a deviation from the context under which tithing was developed to somewhat exploitation of unsuspecting members of the Church to the advantage of prosperity preachers in Nigeria. This raises the question as to whether  Christians of the contemporary era should still tithe since the context in which the tradition developed has changed.

Splintered Saints and the Temple, 1844–1900

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Howlett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Salt Lake ◽  
Salt Lake City ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Lake City ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church

This chapter begins in the mid-nineteenth century, just as competing Mormon denominations coalesced. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City) and the smaller Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints emerged as the most important denominations for Kirtland's future. These two churches were rivals and actively competed with each other for converts, especially in the first decades of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' organization. More than simply competing for converts, though, the two churches developed different visions for the purpose and permeability of temple spaces, and much of these differences centered on their understanding of the legacy of the Kirtland Temple. In short, the Kirtland Temple was a living testament to different lineages of temple teachings present within Joseph Smith's many churches.

#MeToo and #ChurchToo: Putting the movements in context

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Kelly Colwell ◽  
Sheryl Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
White Women ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The Church

The #MeToo movement, exposing sexual harassment and abuse through Twitter and other social media platforms, has had a significant impact on many segments of society, and the church has been no exception. In addition to prominent celebrities, many church leaders have been accused, and in some cases convicted, of sexual assault after stories were brought to light on social media using hashtags like #MeToo and #ChurchToo. In the church context, particular dynamics are at play, such as purity culture and a culture of shame and silence in relation to women’s sexuality. The #MeToo movement has been critiqued for a number of reasons, including that its founder, woman-of-color Tarana Burke, has not received much credit and that privileged white women (especially actresses) have tended to receive the most attention and be understood as the focus of the campaign. This article provides an overview of the history of the movement, exploring some prominent cases and investigating some of the critical engagement with the campaign and its impacts.

Cunning-Folk Traditions and Mormon Authority

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Stapley
Keyword(s):  
Church Leaders ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Folk Traditions ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Church

Cunning-folk found what was lost, healed the sick, foretold the future, influenced love, and, perhaps most importantly, battled witches in a time when churches had lost interest in them. When Joseph Smith established Mormonism, American villages lacked cunning-folk, though aspects of their traditions remained on the fringes of society. Smith and other early church leaders translated aspects of this culture into the LDS Church’s liturgy and cosmology. However, he and other church leaders also created alternatives to cunning-folk practice that were more explicitly rooted in the patterns of the Bible. Key to this process of translation and creation was Mormonism’s explicit anticessationism and the establishment of institutional structures that integrated folk practitioners into the church by channeling their impulses into orthopraxic liturgical forms. This context is useful for explaining modern uses of CAM among Mormons and to further contextualize the rise of the priesthood bureaucracy that regulates Mormon lived religion.

Your Sister in the Gospel

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
Salt Lake ◽  
White Male ◽  
American Woman ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

In this biography of Jane Elizabeth Manning James, Quincy D. Newell traces the life of a free African American woman who converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s and remained a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS, or Mormon, Church) for the rest of her life. James worked as a servant for LDS founder Joseph Smith and his successor Brigham Young. She traveled to the Salt Lake Valley with the church and lived there until her death in 1908. In the last decades of her life, James persistently requested permission to perform the temple rituals that would ensure that she reached the highest degree of glory after death, but church leaders denied her requests because she was black. Nevertheless, they created a ritual just for her: a master–servant sealing that allowed her to be a servant in Joseph Smith’s household for eternity. James’s life provides a different angle on the development of the LDS Church than the experiences of white, male Mormons, whose perspective dominates the narrative of Mormon history. Her story is an important addition to the history of African American religion, American women’s history, the history of the American West, and the history of the LDS Church.

“That These Things Might Come Forth”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Talbot
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Announcement ◽  
The Family ◽  
Plural Marriage ◽  
The Church

This chapter traces the development of some of the fundamental theological turns that made Mormonism so unique among nineteenth-century Americans, including the doctrinal place of polygamy from the founding of the Church in 1830 through the Mormons' exodus to Utah in the late 1840s. The theological and political concepts that Joseph Smith outlined in the early years of the Church—including the plan of salvation, sealing and adoption, and eternal increase—intimately tied gender, plural marriage, and the family to the building of Zion and the advent of the kingdom of God in all its places. Since the public announcement of the Church's belief in and intent to openly practice plural marriage, Church leaders publicly endorsed the practice as a fundamental, even defining, aspect of Mormonism and integrated the practice into a broader vision of Mormon political philosophy.

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