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Scholars & Saints is the official podcast of the University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies program, housed in the Department of Religious Studies. Scholars & Saints is a venue of public scholarship that promotes respectful dialogue about Latter Day Saint traditions among laypersons and academics.
60 Episodes
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In this episode I chat with anthropologist Jon Bialecki about his new book Machines for Making Gods: Mormonism, Transhumanism, and Worlds Without End (Fordham University Press, forthcoming).
In this episode I chat with Professor Jake Johnson of Oklahoma City University about his book Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
In this episode I chat with Professor Rebecca Janzen from the University of South Carolina about her book Liminial Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2018).
On this episode of Scholars & Saints I’m chatting with Latter-day Saint philosopher Dr. Joseph Spencer about a book by Lebanese philosopher and poet Jad Hatem called Postponing Heaven: The Three Nephites, the Bodhisattva, and the Mahdi. Postponing is a comparative theological work drawing on the continental philosophical tradition that considers the concept of “human messianicity” and especially its implications for time and what it means to be a human being. A note for listeners: we had some technical difficulties that interfered with the quality of the recording.
What do an archeologist, historian, philosopher, and literary critic have in common? They're all members of the Department of Religion at Claremont Graduate University! Continuing our series on Mormon studies in the academy, Dr. Matthew Bowman, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at CGU joins host Nicholas Shrum to discuss his own journey to Mormon studies as a trained historian, how Mormon studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field, the history of its foundational authors and scholars, and the current and future state of Mormon studies scholarship at CGU and beyond. To find out more about Dr. Bowman and his work, visit his CGU profile page.
What is Mormon Studies? How does one do it? In what way does it fit into the broader field of Religious Studies? In this all-new season of Scholars & Saints, UVA Religious Studies Ph.D. student Nicholas Shrum goes back to the basics of the discipline with renowned LDS historian and Utah State University professor Patrick Q. Mason. The two discuss Dr. Mason's personal journey to Mormon Studies, his experience in making it educationally accessible and engaging, and his broader insights into the field.
Today on Scholars & Saints, we’re chatting with McKay Coppins, a Latter-day Saint journalist who has covered American politics for Newsweek, Buzzfeed, and The Atlantic for the past decade. In December 2020, Coppins wrote a long-form essay for The Atlantic called “The Most American Religion,” in which he probes questions about Mormonism’s relationship with American culture and “what Mormonism might look like in its 3rd century”
Today on Scholars & Saints I’m chatting with Dr. Cristina Rosetti about a controversial new document making the rounds on Latter-day Saint social media called the Latter-day Saint Radical Orthodoxy manifesto. Today we’ll situate the manifesto within its broad historical context and compare it with similar groups among other Christian denominations. This is part 1 of a 2-part special episode.
In the second part of our special episode on the Latter-day Saint Radical Orthodoxy Manifesto, I'm chatting with Dan Ellsworth, a signatory to the manifesto and a prominent writer and advocate within the Radical Orthodoxy community. This is part 2 of a 2-part special episode.
On this episode of Scholars & Saints, we're chatting about Mormons and secularism. In his recent book Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, Peter Coviello argues that early Mormonism resisted the biopolitical disciplines of the secular nation-state, largely because of Joseph Smith's doctrine of human divinization, or what Coviello calls "the radiant body."
Today on Scholars and Saints we’re talking about the ways in which the American Frontier acted as a kind of religion of “Americanness” in 19th century America. We’ll talk about how Latter-day Saints fit into that American Frontier religion, and how they negotiated and contested the boundaries of Americanness and good religion in their encounters with Protestants. Ultimately, this is a story about secularization, in which we learn that for Mormons, “becoming secular” didn’t mean becoming areligious; secularization was a constant process of creative give and take in an American culture that was learning to tell new stories about itself.
Today on Scholars & Saints, I’m chatting with Professor Ronit Stahl about the US military chaplaincy. During World War I, the unprecedented size of the US military, along with a mandatory draft meant that the military had to contend for the first time with large scale religious pluralism. Over the course of the twentieth century, the military chaplaincy changed both the military and religion. Along with other minority faiths, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posed unique challenges but also served as a catalyst for change in the ways that the military categorized and interfaced with religion.
Today on Scholars & Saints, I’m chatting with Professor Stephen Taysom about former Latter-day Saint president Joseph F. Smith. The nephew of church founder, Joseph Smith, Jr., Joseph F. Smith witnessed many of the most striking events of early Mormonism from his childhood in Nauvoo, to his adolescence on the Midwestern plains, to the settlement of the Great Basin in Utah, and more. A complex figure, Smith was known as much for his courage as for his temper. He was supremely confident and privately insecure. He was a committed polygamist, and yet he was responsible for transitioning the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into a new era of exclusive monogamy. In this episode we’ll discuss Smith’s complicated life and reflect on what it means to apply the methods of religious studies to biography. Please note: this episode contains descriptions of domestic violence that some listeners may find disturbing.
Today on Scholars & Saints, I’m chatting with Professor Michael MacKay of Brigham Young University and Dr. Mark Ashurst-McGee of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Joseph Smith Papers Project about Joseph Smith and what he termed “translations” of ancient documents. In this episode we review essays by Ann Taves, Michael MacKay, Jared Hickman, Samuel Morris Brown, Mark Ashurst-McGee and others, which bring new methods, including the methods of religious studies to bear on the question of what it meant for Joseph Smith to “translate” and how his translations contributed to the development of Mormon Christianity.
The body has always played a central role in Latter-day Saint religious experience: touching, seeing, building, walking, sweating, and even bleeding sculpt the ways Latter-day Saints think about God, the world, and themselves. From the Gold Plates, to the Mormon Trail, to the Salt Lake Temple, Latter-day Saints mark and interpret space in ways that have profound implications for history and memory. Today I speak with Professor Sara Patterson about her recent book, Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory Along the Mormon Trail, published by Oxford University Press.
From the early days of Joseph Smith’s religious movement, Mormons have creatively navigated tensions with American culture and government through political activity. In 1844, Joseph Smith ran for president and even sent out missionaries to campaign for him. In the early 20th century, Apostle Reed Smoot served in the US Senate for many years. Decades later, Apostle Ezra Taft Benson would serve as US Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower. In recent years Harry Reid, a Democrat, served as Senate Majority Leader, and in 2012 Mitt Romney was selected by the Republican National Committee as the Republican candidate for president. Today I speak with Professor David Campbell and Professor Kathleen Flake about Latter-day Saints, American Politics, and the 2020 presidential election.
In this episode, Quincy Newell joins me to talk about her book Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. We explore how Jane James's experiences shed light on race, gender, and religion in the American West of the 19th century.
We explore Mormon ideas about the end of the world. In his recent book, Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse, Christopher James Blythe argues that Latter-day Saint apocalyptic prophecy has changed over time. What began as the expectation of an imminent apocalypse in early Mormonism changed in the early 20th century as Latter-day Saints in the United States returned from isolation in the Rocky Mountains to become culturally American again. Dr. Blythe reveals how change and adaptation have been driven by tensions between lay and official prophecy and the relationship between church and nation.
The mysterious gold plates are the gravitational center of the Latter Day Saint tradition. Although twelve people other than Joseph Smith claimed to have seen or handled the plates, Smith said he returned them to an angel soon after completing the translation of the Book of Mormon. Even now, nearly 200 years later, the plates continue fascinate and confound interpreters in American culture. Today on my last episode as host of Scholars and Saints, I’m chatting with Richard Bushman, renowned biographer of Joseph Smith, about his new book, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates.
Ryan Ward is a professor of experimental psychology. But during his time serving as a Latter-day Saint bishop several years ago in New York, the needs and concerns of his congregation motivated him to study theology in his spare time. We're chatting today about his recent book, And There Was No Poor Among Them: Liberation, Salvation, and the Meaning of Restoration (Kofford, 2023). We talk about liberation theology, atonement, the nature of God, and Joseph Smith's vision of a covenant community.
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