The Beautiful Mind and Life of Jen Lindell

by Edward J. Blum

You’ve never heard of her, but you would have. She had earned a doctoral fellowship to the Religious Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania and in the fall would have begun her apprenticeship under Anthea Butler and Sarah Barringer Gordon. She had just finished a Master’s Thesis on Mormon-Indian interactions beginning with the initial publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 and ending with the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857. She was my star student who taught me so much about race and religion, helped with my own projects even amid her own routine trips to the hospital, and died far too earlier

.Jen Lindell wrote a Master’s Thesis that easily could have been expanded into an award-winning dissertation. Her broad interest was in the dynamic ways religion influenced the lives of everyday people and on how religious ideas influenced racial perceptions and vise-versa. She fixated on early Mormons and their conceptions of and interactions with Native Americans. She wanted to understand how white people who weren’t considered white by others (in large part because of their distinct faith) at first reached out to non-white people (Native Americans) as potential brothers and sisters, but then years later treated those people with disdain and violence. Lindell refused to take a “top down” approach – which would focus principally on Joseph Smith and Bringham Young – and instead looked to the laity. Reading deeply and widely through diaries, letters, memoirs, and local newspapers, she found epic encounters and love and betrayal, missions and murder, friendship and violence.

Soon, Lindell’s thesis will be deposited in the San Diego State University library and will be available online. I hope scholars interested in Mormonism and race will check it out. She’s got some rich material and fascinating insights. Even more, anyone who reads it will get to know in a small way the brilliant mind that I had the pleasure of learning from for a season. We miss you, Jen, and we’re so glad we got to be a part of your beautiful life.

Nancy Hardesty (1941-2011) and Biblical Feminism

Paul Harvey

Julie Ingersoll has posted a very warm tribute to Nancy Hardesty (1941-2011), Founding Mother of Biblical Feminist Movement, at Religion Dispatches. Thank you, Julie; and thank you, Nancy, for a life of scholarship and activism. I did not know Nancy personally except for a few brief exchanges, but I'll always remember Nancy's wry look during an encounter I had at a conference years ago with Dorothy Patterson, the famously flamboyant Southern Baptist conservative and author of the statement about family roles and gracious submission in the Baptist Faith and Message Statement, who spent a few minutes at the Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism conference in Chicago in 199? (can't remember the year now) berating my scholarly research and credentials to write about Southern Baptists (some of you regular blog readers were there, not to name any names Judith). Nancy got to spend a lot of time being berated by biblical anti-feminists, and she countered them both with her scholarship and with her everyday work. You may find a bibliography of her work here.

Edwin Gaustad, 1923-2011

Paul Harvey

It's a sad week for American history scholars, with the passing of Manning Marable just on the verge of the publication of his magnum opus, and now of Edwin Gaustad, an eminence grise of and prolific scholar in American religious history. The New York Times has his obituary here. A brief excerpt:

Although his principal field was colonial religious history, Professor Gaustad ranged far and wide as a scholar. He explored the contested territory of religious liberty, pluralism and dissent in colonial America, but he also wrote general histories that carried the story forward to the present day and published a series of atlases, frequently updated, that gave a geographical picture of religious belief in the United States. His first book, “The Great Awakening in New England” (1957), made the case that the religious revival fanned by preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield had more than religious importance, profoundly affecting political and intellectual life in America. He also challenged the revisionist view that the movement was really an economic and class insurgency, arguing that it enjoyed support among all classes.

Manning Marable, Dies at 60, Before His Time and Before His New Book

Emily Clark

Friday evening, I read the saddening news that Columbia professor Manning Marable passed away in Manhattan. His new biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a project he began in 1987, is set to hit the shelves tomorrow. Marable's new biography will contest many parts of Alex Haley's collaborative work The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and this is one of the main reasons I have been looking forward to his book. Marable questions the accuracy of The Autobiography after uncovering details on the Haley-Malcolm collaboration and never published "missing chapters" from the final Haley text. Marable also consulted with archival sources not yet tapped by other historians of Malcolm X, including a selection of personal letters, transcriptions of certain speeches, and FBI files. Clicking around the website for his Columbia based Malcolm X Project is a great homework assignment for undergrads - not to mention a wonderful resource for anyone interested in Malcolm X. The project's site has government documents, interviews with Marable about his book, footage from some of Malcolm's speeches, and interviews with former acquaintances of Malcolm's. Marable was deeply invested in this project, and it is sad that he won't see the reception of this book.

Particularly since reading Marable's essay, "Rediscovering Malcolm's Life: A Historian's Adventures in Living History," in his recent 2009 co-edited volume Black Routes to Islam, in which Marable discusses the new biography project, I have been excited about this book. The essay discusses the "Americanization of Malcolm X," beginning with the 1965 printing of The Autobiography, which made Malcolm's story the "quintessential story about the ordeal of being black in America." Another significant moment in this "Americanization" process was Spike Lee's 1992 film with Malcolm X doppelganger/actor Denzel Washington. After this film, "X" was everywhere - even on President Clinton's jogging hat. As Marable so well put it, "One of America's sharpest and most unrelenting critics was now being praised and honored by the same government that had once carried out illegal harassment and surveillance against him." Malcolm had become a kind of specter, able to be appropriated by many. This ambiguity about the meaning of Malcolm and unknowns about his own life allow him to become malleable to popular culture. Marable's project aimed to find answers to the unanswered questions about Malcolm's life, his work, his theology, his politics, his appeal, and his death.

Malcolm's "Americanization" and appropriations by various groups and persons is one of the reasons why he is so fascinating to me. In his book Lives of Indian Images, Richard Davis tells the afterlives of various Indian images as they move from site of darsan in a Hindu temple to status symbol in an English colonial home to educational artifact in an American museum. For Davis, the identities and meanings of the images are not fixed, but are rather "repeatedly made and remade through interactions with humans." Malcolm's identity is like these former temple images - something than changes due to its environment and "ownership." His identity is something that has a biography of its own after his death (check out Igor Kopytoff's essay "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process" for more). Malcolm is not alone in this camp. Tecumseh, Shawnee leader and brother to prophet Tenskwatawa, has held different meanings for different groups at different times. He has been a source of pride and often exalted, and the Shawnee, Creek, and Cherokee all claim him as their own.

Complex leaders like Tecumseh and Malcolm X in socially unstable times can take on new, dynamic identities after their death. They can become more like myth than human, which is where scholars like Marable come in. Once the semester is over, I look forward to reading Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention on the Florida beach.

Peter Gomes, Harvard Minister and Theologian, Dies at 68

Randall Stephens

This obituary for Peter Gomes appeared in the Boston Globe this morning. Gomes was a wonderful preacher and author. The sermons I heard him deliver at the Harvard Memorial Chapel were always as memorable as the were filled with meaning.

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, who was known internationally as Harvard's pastor and was just as pleased to call himself a son of Plymouth, died Monday night at Massachusetts General Hospital. He had suffered a stroke in early December and his death was confirmed by a hospital spokeswoman.

He was 68 and had divided his time and identity between a 1799 house in his hometown and Sparks House, the 19th-century residence reserved for the leader of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. . . .

Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate, told The New Yorker that the Rev. Gomes's "style is full of cadence, roguery, and scampishness, which is redemptive. With Gomes there is always an element of masquerade as he tempts his audience into complicity."

The man who during four decades at Memorial Church would become known as the conscience and soul of Harvard, was the grandson of a Baptist preacher and was baptized a Catholic.>>>