That Was Faith

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-133
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Salt Lake ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Health Concerns ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Special Events ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Women's Meetings

Jane James performed her last baptism for the dead in the Salt Lake Temple in 1894. Health concerns began to arise more often as she aged, but she remained active and regularly attended women’s meetings and special events. Her daughter died in 1897, leaving only two of her children alive for the last decade of her life. James was one of few remaining Mormons who had known Joseph Smith personally, so the community valued her memories and gave her regular opportunities to talk about them. James obliged, partly because this allowed her to press her case for temple privileges. James was regularly referred to as “Aunt Jane,” a title that conveyed respect but also reinforced the racial hierarchy and kept her at arm’s length. James’s 1908 death was front-page news. Her funeral was well attended and included remarks by the LDS Church president.

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.

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.

Desired to Do Right

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-103
Author(s):  
Quincy D. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Salt Lake ◽  
Salt Lake City ◽  
Ritual Space ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Lds Church ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Lake City

Jane and Isaac James divorced in 1870. Their reasons for doing so are unknown, but may have been related to Jane’s devotion to the LDS Church and Isaac’s inability to live up to LDS standards of masculinity. Jane reported that Isaac left her for a white fortune teller. After the divorce, Jane moved closer to the center of Salt Lake City; Isaac left Utah. Jane James lost several children and grandchildren to death. The Relief Society, the LDS women’s organization, supported Jane financially and spiritually in this difficult time. She got remarried to Frank Perkins, a black Mormon widower. In 1875, along with several other black Mormons, Jane and Frank Perkins went to the Endowment House—a temporary ritual space used until the LDS temple was completed—to perform baptisms for the dead. The Perkins’s marriage dissolved within two years.

The Nature of Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-80
Author(s):  
Samuel Morris Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
The Dead

The wild time of the Bible’s primeval history became progressively less accessible across the nineteenth century. Many philosophers and cultural agents intended time to be flat, linear, and homogeneous. Joseph Smith disagreed, strenuously. He encouraged his followers to live a different form of time, inhabiting the past and present simultaneously, even as he was coy about his relationship to traditional Christian understandings of eternity. Smith’s effort to bind time into a sacred simultaneity famously included attempts to live anciently biblical lives, which included polygamy and apparently never-realized plans for animal sacrifice. These efforts at sacred simultaneity were intended to create and strengthen relationships between the living and the dead and to free Latter-day Saints from the prison of flat time.

scholarly journals Safety and Security at Special Events: The Case of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott H Decker ◽  
Jack R Greene ◽  
Vince Webb ◽  
Jeff Rojek ◽  
Jack McDevitt ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Olympic Games ◽  
Salt Lake ◽  
Salt Lake City ◽  
Special Events ◽  
Lake City

Prophetic Authority

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Michael Hubbard MacKay
Keyword(s):  
Religious Authority ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Prophetic Authority

To explore the foundations of Mormon religious authority, this chapter introduces the idea of a Mormon prophet, demonstrates how the production of the Book of Mormon established Smith’s claim to authority, and show how his ongoing revelation created a hospitable environment to maintain his prophetic authority hierarchically within his church. This will lay the foundational concepts for how Smith developed and maintained a hierarchal role while also developing a democratic priesthood. It will also set the scene for how an inclusive populist priesthood could eventually embrace a hierarchical ecclesiology, demonstrated by Kathleen Flake’s work. The chapter will begin to define what a Mormon prophet looks like and how Joseph Smith establishes his prophethood and authority through the charismatic practices of communing with the dead and producing modern revelation and ancient scripture. It will establish that this kind a charisma founds authority and creates a space in which prophetic authority can exist charismatically without the grounding of an institution.

“My Tabernacle ‘Mormon’ Choir”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hicks
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Salt Lake ◽  
Salt Lake City ◽  
The Other ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
The World ◽  
Letting Go ◽  
The Face ◽  
Lake City ◽  
Made In

This chapter discusses the activities of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under the direction of its conductor, Evan Stephens. In 1890 Mormons outgrew two fads, one doctrinal, the other musical. First was the idea that the world would end between December 1890 and December 1891. This commonplace belief, which helped nurture Mormon ferocity in the face of anti-polygamy legislation, derived from a statement Joseph Smith had made in 1835. In musical terms, entering the mainstream meant full commitment to standard musical notation and a letting-go of the musical fad of the Tonic sol-fa method. In 1891, William D. Davies, Welsh cultural ambassador from the New York newspaper Y Drych, toured Utah, heard Stephens's Choir and pronounced it the best choir in the world. This chapter considers the controversies faced by the Choir during Stephens's term as well as its concerts, domestic tours, and the competitions it joined. It also examines how the Choir continued its mission of public visibility without even leaving Salt Lake City.

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