Item Detail
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30926
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1
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0
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English
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Finding the Presence in Mormon History : An Interview with Susanna Morrill, Richard Lyman Bushman, and Robert Orsi
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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2011
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44
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3
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Dialogue Foundation
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174-87
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Mormons should be interested in Orsi’s work. His essay is a challenge to traditional scholarly method : It asks what categories of interpretation there are for supernatural events–for what Orsi calls supernatural “presences” or “abundant events”–that influence human behavior and with which humans construct relationships. Though Orsi’s area of study is American Catholicism, and though he wrestles with apparitions of Mary and the presence of the saints, his questions speak directly to the heart of struggles within Mormon historiography. Many students of Mormon history continue the wars over Joseph Smith’s trustworthiness; many seek to account for his feats through appeals to environmental influence or his psychology while many others refute such appeals. More recently, a younger generation of scholars have often cast such questions aside, concluding that the tools of history cannot explain Joseph and that such attempts are therefore a dead end. Orsi’s work should invite all of these camps to consider new ways of thinking about how we might discuss what happened to Joseph Smith. Recently, Dialogue asked Susanna Morrill, associate professor of religious studies at Lewis and Clark College, to moderate a discussion between Robert Orsi and Richard Lyman Bushman, then chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. The three discussed the relevance of Orsi’s work to Mormon historiography, his impressions of Bushman’s Joseph Smith : Rough Stone Rolling (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), and how scholars of religion might strive to deal with religious experience in more satisfying ways. [Author]