John-Charles Duffy

Though Mormon scholars have pursued Mormon studies since the 1960s, only in the first years of the twenty-first century did a few non-Mormon schools begin to institutionalize the study of Mormonism. Bringing Mormon studies into the academic mainstream has required negotiation among various interests. The most influential Mormon players in these negotiations promote "faithful scholarship," scholarship predicated on orthodox Mormon presuppositions. Efforts to mainstream faithful scholarship offer a case study for examining issues currently debated in religious studies, especially around the question of how much academic authority insiders' discourse about their religions ought to have. First, I narrate the development of scholarship on Mormonism from 1959 to 2006, focusing on the contests within Mormonism that led to faithful scholarship's becoming the dominant model for Mormon scholars. Then I analyze the means and consequences of faithful scholarship's influenc...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Mormon and evangelical intellectuals in the United States initiated theological dialogues and other exchanges meant to promote friendlier relations between their religious communities. This Mormon-evangelical dialogue was unexpected. During the late twentieth century, evangelical countercult apologists had launched the most intensive wave of anti-Mormonism seen in the U.S. since the anti-polygamy campaigns of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Mormons and evangelicals had historically been aloof or hostile toward interfaith dialogue and the ecumenical movement. Mormon-evangelical dialogue represented a turn toward pluralism by groups known for their theological exclusivism. Theirs was, however, a cautious turn toward pluralism. Afraid of compromising their religious identities or truth claims, Mormon-evangelical dialogists rejected pluralist theologies and defied the liberal convention that divorced interfaith dialogue from evangelism. Inst...

I N PART ONE OF THIS FRAMING ARTICLE, PUBLISHED inthe October 2008 issue of SUNSTONE, I provided an overview of the history, the arguments, and the positions that constitute the ongoing Book of Mormon historicity debates. Intelligent people have reached a variety of conclusions around this question, with credentialed scholars arguing both for and against the Book of Mormon’s being an authentic ancient record. In this second part of the article, I take up the question: How can people arrive at opposing conclusions about historicity? Why do arguments that apologists find overwhelming strike skeptics as negligible, and vice-versa? To answer those questions requires a theoretical discussion about the nature of knowing. But there is much more at stake in this discussion than theory. For someone who is trying to decide what to believe about Book of Mormon historicity—for someone, that is, who is rethinking his or her faith—understanding how other people faced with the same arguments can r...

113 5 Elders on the Big Screen Film and the Globalized Circulation of Mormon Missionary Images JOHN CHARLES DUFFY Since the lateytwentieth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Lattery day Saints has maintained a widely recognized standard image for the young men ...

Although often regarded as marginal or obscure, Mormonism is a significant American religious minority, numerically and politically. The successes and struggles of this U.S. born religion reveal much about how religion operates in U.S. society. Mormonism: The Basics introduces the teachings, practices, evolution, and internal diversity of this movement, whose cultural icons range from Mitt Romney to the Twilight saga, from young male missionaries in white shirts and ties to polygamous women in pastel prairie dresses. This is the first introductory text on Mormonism that tracks not only the mainstream LDS but also two other streams within the movement—the liberalized RLDS and the polygamous Fundamentalists—thus showing how Mormons have pursued different approaches to defining their identity and their place in society. The book addresses these questions. Are Mormons Christian, and why does it matter? How have Mormons worked out their relationship to the state? How have Mormons diverged in their thinking about gender and sexuality? How do rituals and regulations shape Mormon lives? What types of sacred spaces have Mormons created? What strategies have Mormons pursued to establish a global presence? Mormonism: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone wanting to understand this religion within its primarily American but increasingly globalized contexts. (From publisher)https://scholarworks.smith.edu/rel_books/1006/thumbnail.jp

IT IS A CRITICAL COMMONPLACE that homosexuality — or, to use a more common term of the period, “male love” — appears as a theme in certain of Oscar Wilde’s works.1 It is also a critical commonplace that many Victorian readers were aware of this fact.2 Scant attention, however, has been given to homosexual themes in Wilde’s first book, his 1888 collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, which he supplemented in 1891 with a second collection, A House of Pomegranates. The lack of critical attention is surprising, considering that the fairy tales not only mark the beginning of Wilde’s “reputation as an author” (Ellmann 299), but were written in the wake of his first homosexual experience — with Robert Ross in 1886 — a coincidence which gives us grounds to expect, or at least suspect, the presence of homosexual themes.3

Unpublished graduate paper, 2006. A reflexive reflection on reflexivity, in relation to my relation to the field of Mormon studies.

"I want to examine how reflexivity not only announces a religious studies scholar’s position in relation to those he or she studies but also seeks to position the scholar in relation to those who read his or her work. Furthermore, because rhetoric is about suasion, and thus about interests and agendas, examining reflexivity as rhetoric can throw light on where scholars stand politically in relation to the religions they study (a question, we shall see, on which even religious studies scholars who espouse reflexivity have not been very forthcoming)."