July 13-14, 2013 — Matthew Bowman

Miller Eccles Study Group Texas is excited to announce that our July 2013 speaker will be Matthew Bowman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Hampden Sidney College and associate editor of Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought.

STUDY GROUP:

Saturday, July 13, 2 pm (McKinney)
2806 Pinnacle Drive
McKinney, Texas 75071

Saturday, July 13, 7 pm (Arlington)
3804 Indian Springs Trail
Arlington, Texas 76016

FIRESIDE:

Sunday, July 14, 7 pm
Irving Chapel
1553 South Story Road
Irving, Texas 75060

THE STUDY GROUP TOPIC:

“Zion: the Progressive Roots of Mormon Correlation”

This talk evaluates the ideas, intentions, and aims behind the correlation movement of the 1960s. It first explains the history and the functions of correlation, exploring why the General Authorities felt that such a program was needed. It then explains what precisely ‘correlation’ is and how it works. Finally, it unpacks the theological reasoning and assumptions behind correlation, arguing that Harold B. Lee and the other General Authorities who administered the program understood it in millennial terms: correlation rightly administered, they believed, would re-make the church into the image of the City of Enoch, the Nephite civilization of 4 Nephi, and hence usher in the Second Coming.

THE FIRESIDE TOPIC:

“This Is My Body: Thinking about the Sacrament”

In a mixture of history, theology, and close reading of scripture, this talk explores the meaning of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. It presents a history of the sacrament meeting, tracing the ways the sacrament was administered and the meanings behind those ways from Joseph Smith’s time to the present three hour block. It also looks closely at the scriptures that we use to understand what the sacrament is, and connects those passages to the way we administer it.

THE SPEAKER:

Matthew Bowman is the author of The Mormon People: the Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012) and the forthcoming The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of liberal Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2014) as well as multiple articles on Mormonism and evangelicalism. The associate editor of Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, he teaches religion at Hampden Sydney College.

April 19-21, 2013 — George Handley

Miller Eccles Study Group Texas is excited to announce that our April 2013 speaker will be George Handley, chair of the Brigham Young University Department of Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature.

STUDY GROUP:

Friday, April 19, 7 pm (Arlington)
3804 Indian Springs Trail
Arlington, Texas 76016

Saturday, April 20, 7 pm (McKinney)
**Please take note of the different location.  The Saturday evening study group meeting will not be held at the Eccles home in Plano.  It will be held at the Miller home in McKinney.**
2806 Pinnacle Drive
McKinney, Texas  75071

FIRESIDE:

Sunday, April 21, 7 pm
Arlington Stake Center
3809 Curt Drive
Arlington, Texas 76016

THE STUDY GROUP TOPIC:

“RESTORATION OF ALL THINGS? LDS Environmental Beliefs and Practices and the Prospect of Ecological Restoration”

This presentation will explore the environmental ethics of LDS belief and their implementation in Mormon history.  It will also explore the relevance of LDS beliefs to contemporary environmental problems as well as to the broader crisis of climate change.

THE FIRESIDE TOPIC:

“Enduring All Things: Learning the Patience to Suffer”

This presentation will explore the challenges to our faith of trials that are beyond our control and sometimes beyond our understanding. It will specifically address the ways in which experiences of human sorrow that are not directly caused by human sin, such as depression, mental illness, and tragic accidents, are comprehended by the atonement and why charity, as the capacity to bear and endure all things, requires our willingness to suffer for ourselves and for others and rewards our faith with a lightening of our burdens.

THE SPEAKER:

George Handley is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University where he serves as chair of the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature. He was educated at Stanford and at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught briefly at Northern Arizona University before coming to BYU in 1998. He writes and teaches on the relationship between literature, religion, and the environment. Handley is the author of “Home Waters: a Year of Recompenses on the Provo River” published by the University of Utah Press in 2010. He is a former Bishop, and he and his wife, Amy, are the parents of four children.

January 26 – 27, 2013 — Samuel Brown

The Miller Eccles Study Group Texas is excited to announce that our January 2013 speaker will be Samuel Morris Brown, author of the recently-published and critically-acclaimed book, In Heaven as It Is On Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012).

STUDY GROUP DATE: January 26, 2013
STUDY GROUP TIMES: 2 pm (Arlington); 7 pm (Plano)

FIRESIDE DATE: January 27, 2013
FIRESIDE TIME: 7 pm
FIRESIDE LOCATION: Arlington Stake Center, 3809 Curt Drive, Arlington, Texas 76016

THE STUDY GROUP TOPIC:

“IN HEAVEN AS IT IS ON EARTH, Joseph Smith’s Translation of American Freemasonry”

Joseph Smith spent most of his religious career, indeed most of his conscious life, battling the specter of death. To that end he engaged and revised a variety of philosophies, what he and his followers understood to be fragments of ancient truths. Samuel Brown describes in his book, In Heaven as It Is on Earth, the ways that Joseph Smith and his followers brought those ancient philosophies into dialogue with early American beliefs in the founding of Mormonism.

Amidst the illness and death that haunted the founding of Nauvoo on a malarious bend in the Mississippi River, Joseph Smith brought Freemasonry into service of the conquest of death. Though his engagement of Masonry has led to much controversy, both apologists and critics have missed how profoundly Smith’s encounter with Freemasonry emphasized death and its conquest. In this presentation Dr. Brown will clarify this relationship, demonstrating that Smith “translated” Freemasonry, much as he had the King James Bible or Egyptian funerary papyri, finding in it fragments of ancient religion, eternal truths, and connections to the ancient past. As Smith translated Freemasonry, he made clear just how important relationships—among the living, and between the living and the dead—were to his faith.

THE FIRESIDE TOPIC:

“The Work of Faith and the Weight of Glory”

Many of us have come to think of faith as a statement about which of a list of possible beliefs we accept, but faith is much more than that. Faith is fundamentally about relationships, both relationships with God and with other people. In this fireside talk, Dr. Brown explores faith from the perspective of divine and human relationships, opening up new horizons for this very familiar topic. In the process he demonstrates that the old split between “works” and “faith” makes little sense and considers faith on analogy to family relationships.

THE SPEAKER:

Samuel Morris Brown graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in Linguistics with a minor in Russian, then received his MD from Harvard Medical School, where he was a National Scholar and Massachusetts Medical Society Scholar. After graduation he completed residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he remained on faculty as an Instructor in General Medicine at Harvard Medical School before moving to the University of Utah. He is now Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and Associate in the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah, based at the Shock Trauma ICU at Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City. He investigates hidden rhythms in heart function during life-threatening infection.

In his “free time,” Sam studies cultural history, with a particular emphasis on how religious ideas assist believers in coming to terms with embodiment, sickness, and death. He has published widely in both fields. His book, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death, fundamentally reinterprets earliest Mormonism in terms of the age-old struggle to conquer death.