By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

George Handley is President of Mormon Scholars in the Humanities.

Let’s face it: LDS scholars in the Humanities are a strange breed. Where the majority of members of the church who go to graduate school might choose law school, medical school, or business school, we are in that small minority in our own religious culture that decides instead to study something impractical and financially impotent. We are the ones asking those difficult and abstract questions in church meetings, the ones who our fellow members might murmur about from time to time because, truth be told, no one really wants to know the Greek roots of words or to hear yet another criticism of Church art. But we are also a minority in our fields of specialization, which are not often known for being particularly open to religious points of view. Few of us began graduate school with the intention of imposing a Mormon point of view on everything we studied, but many of us have experienced those awkward moments in graduate school when we learned that we are the token “Christian conservative” as the entire class turned to us for our “unique” perspective on a particular theory under debate or when we declined an invitation to a lecture or a gathering of students in a café because it conflicted with our previous commitment to our son’s Pine Wood Derby.

Discussions began in BYU’s College of Humanities two years ago about the need for a stronger network and more collaboration between LDS scholars in the Humanities across the world. While we enjoy the strength of numbers at BYU, we felt that greater contact was needed with scholars at our sister institutions as well as elsewhere. After several meetings of deliberation, we decided on a name, Mormon Scholars in the Humanities, and on the following objectives: MSH should work to promote intellectual and collegial exchange among LDS humanities scholars in the United States and abroad as an independent institution (we currently enjoy some financial support from the College of Humanities at BYU but we are not an official BYU organization); foster support and mentoring for the production of superior scholarship in all humanistic disciplines; provide a forum for exchange that explores and strengthens LDS values, especially as they relate to humanistic inquiry; and assist members in the successful integration of the intellectual and spiritual aspects of their lives.

That sounded great to all of us, until it came time to elect a President and actually start doing something. On the day we decided to hold the election, scarcely anyone showed. I can only speak for myself: I think I had another commitment (a Pine Wood Derby, perhaps?). So, as the person elected that day to be President, I must share with you this important lesson: ALWAYS attend your meetings.

Initially, it was a burden to get something off of the ground, but as time has gone along, the excitement of the new organization has been invigorating. One website and more meetings later, we held our inaugural conference on campus on March 23-24, 2007, with Richard Bushman as our keynote speaker.

The conference was a great hit and had good publicity before and after. The conference was held at the same time as the Society for Mormon Philosophers and Theologians, allowing us to take advantage of our common interests. We had close to eighty people in the audience for the duration of the conference. Richard and Claudia Bushman, Terryl Givens, and I were interviewed on KBYU Radio’s Thinking Aloud, just before the conference was underway, and an upcoming issue of BYU Magazine will highlight the story of the conference. Plans are underway for book publication of the selected proceedings of the conference and for a second conference next year to take place in May of 2008 on the campus of Southern Virginia University. A report on the conference has been posted on our website.

We had twenty-two participants, half of whom came from off campus, and we heard papers on a wide range of topics. The most valuable aspect of the conference was the chance to see how scholars reflecting on their areas of specialty in ways that were both intellectually and spiritually insightful for them as well as for their audience. In our professional lives, we are not often given this opportunity, especially when our areas of specialization have little or nothing to do with Mormonism. We enjoyed such papers as that of the Humanities dean at BYU, John Rosenberg, who in citations ranging from Chekhov, to Levi-Strauss, Joseph Smith, José Camilo Cela, and even the ever wise editorial page of the Daily Universe, spoke brilliantly about the meaning of reading and teaching in the humanities within the broader quest for our humanity. Other excellent papers by University of Pittsburgh’s John Lyon and BYU’s Bruce Jorgensen raised trenchant moral questions about why we read, what we read, and how we interpet. We also heard BYU’s academic vice-president, John Tanner, deliver a stirring articulation of the role of love as “The Gospel Ground for Study in the Humanities.” University of Northern Florida’s Bart Welling gave a stunning reading of LDS scripture and its view of the ethics of meat consumption in “Mormonism and the Question of the Animal;” Dale Pratt’s “Prosthetic Godhood” provided a whirlwind tour of the theological implications of posthuman theory and of the most recent scientific and technological advances that pertain to our bodies; and BYU’s Jenny Pulsipher, Jackie Thursby, and Valerie Hegstrom described poignantly their academic, spiritual, and intellectual journeys as LDS women and scholars in the humanities. We also heard a humorous and helpful panel of scholars provide anecdotal advice for aspiring PhDs about how to survive graduate school in the humanities as a Mormon.

And of course, Richard Bushman’s keynote address was a particular highlight. Addressing the religious foundations of learning, both historically and understood within the context of LDS revelations, Bushman argued that a striving for truth, as opposed to a declaration of arrival, and an openness to new knowledge found in texts and spoken by our own students should characterize a religious pursuit of wisdom. He struck this tone for all of us in his own admission that the conference had introduced him to many excellent insights shared by conference scholars who have perhaps for too long remained largely unknown inside and outside of our own college community.

If you missed the conference and this description gives you just a tinge of regret that you were not present or did not participate, then I have accomplished my purpose. At the risk of perhaps sounding too sanctimonious, I felt the greatest reward for our collective efforts when one graduate student approached me afterwards and confessed “being a part of this organization just might save my soul.”

If you are interested in joining, visit our website where you can read about our mission, about our recent conference and where we will post shortly our call for papers and more information for our conference in 2008.