By: Carolyn Napolitano,
on 11/5/2015
For more than forty years now, the Religious Right has been a powerful force in the United States, helping reshape the Republican Party and realign the nation’s politics and culture.
The post Six predictions for the future of the Religious Right appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Carolyn Napolitano,
on 11/2/2015
No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith's distinctive approach to sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth-century stand against the Equal Rights Amendment and its twenty-first-century fight against same-sex marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights.
The post How much do you know about Mormon feminists? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: AlyssaB,
on 7/11/2014
Mormon bloggers have been in the news lately, with two bloggers recently being excommunicated from the church. It was Ordain Women founder Kate Kelly’s call-to-action writings, meant to recruit Mormon women to her cause, that recently led to her excommunication from the Mormon Church.
If Kelly is an example, Mormon women are no wimps. Because the Church is staffed by lay members, Mormon women routinely run entire Church organizations numbering up to 200 people; they make up one-third of the current missionary population; they believe in education; and they have a long tradition of writing—both in public and in private—from pioneer beginnings up to the current “Bloggernacle.” Here are some examples of this tradition.
(1) Between 1872 and 1914, Mormon women published their own periodical called the Woman’s Exponent that early on went to several thousand women throughout the United States and Great Britain and prompted exchanges with other women’s journals. In its early years, a number of writers argued for polygamy. Exponent editor and polygamous wife Emmeline Wells condemned the false notion of the pedestal, and argued in favor of equal pay for equal work and equality in athletic programs.
The September 15, 1880 issue of the Woman’s Exponent. (Volume 9, Number 8.) Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
(2) More intimately, many nineteenth-century women kept diaries and wrote autobiographies, including some obscure polygamous wives. In the 29 I’ve studied closely, these writers held their heart and faith in one hand, and their guts and hesitations in the other. They explore the chasm between romantic love and triangular love, between resistance to other wives and friendship with them, and between religious belief and lived experience. This tradition of keeping personal writings continues today—for example, my 80-year-old mother has written about 12 journals during her lifetime and is working on her autobiography.
(3) Between 1914 and 1970, the Church’s women’s organization published The Relief Society Magazine to unite and educate women and provide ordinary women with an outlet for their writing, including stories, poems, and plays. Although less polemical than Woman’s Exponent, the Magazine was edited by women, for women, and had a wide readership.
First page of the January 1917 issue of Relief Society Magazine. Pubic Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
(4) After The Relief Society Magazine was merged with a new church publication for both male and female readers called Ensign, in 1974, a group of northeastern Mormon feminists started the independent Exponent II, which they describe as “a newspaper forum for Mormon women to share their life experiences in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance,” an “exchange” that allows them to “better understand each other” and “shape the direction” of their lives. Exponent II celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and since 2005, they’ve added a blog.
(5) The “Bloggernacle,” a nickname for the Mormon blogosphere (a port-manteau of ‘blogger’ and ‘tabernacle’ where Mormons worship on special occasions), is so vast that bloggers are currently organized by Mormon Archipelago into big and small islands and isles of the sea—and among them, one can find the orthodox and the heterodox and everything in between. Here are links to a few popular women bloggers:
(6) Which brings us back to Kate Kelly, currently the most notorious Mormon woman blogger. In contrast to websites such as Feminist Mormon Housewives that embrace anger (“angry activists with babies to feed”), Kelly’s Ordain Women perhaps attempts to mimic official church publications with its non-threatening word choice and colorful high-quality photographs of church-going Mormons that are similar to church magazine Ensign photos. Her website frequently cites scriptures and male and female Church leaders, concluding that “The fundamental tenets of Mormonism support gender equality.” Her means to reach this goal? She invites Mormons to “coalesce around the goal of women’s ordination” by participating in “public actions”—Mormon versions of civil disobedience such as marching on Temple Square with the goal of attempting to enter all-male meetings. Most recently, her website encourages Mormon women to host six “discussions” on topics related to women’s ordination. To get started, followers are provided with a downloadable invitation, get advice about who/how to invite, and can watch the “live launch.” The six discussions come with detailed lesson plans and six accompanying sample video discussions that are each at least an hour long.
In the excommunication letter Kelly received from her bishop, he explains to her that it’s not a problem to question or “even that you believe that women should have the priesthood,” but that she “persisted” in an “aggressive effort” to “persuade” others “to join [her] movement,” one he believes undermines the church. Subsequently, the Bloggernacle is straining under the weight of its innumerable bloggers discussing where the Virginia bishop should have drawn the line, or whether he should have drawn it at all.
And so the tradition continues, if in new and much faster, and thus much more public, media.
Paula Kelly Harline has been teaching college writing for over 20 years for the University of Idaho, Brigham Young University, and Utah Valley University. She has also worked as a freelance writer and artist. She currently lives with her husband, Craig, in Provo, Utah, and is the author of The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women.
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The post Mormon women “bloggers”: a long tradition appeared first on OUPblog.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were famously the age of “Bardolatry,” Shakespeare-worship that permeated artistic, social, civic, and political life. As Victorian scientific advances including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, published in On the Origin of Species (1859), destabilised Christianity as ultimate arbiter of truth, rhetoricians invoked Shakespeare’s plots and characters to support their arguments.
The post Shakespeare and the suffragettes appeared first on OUPblog.
Another week, another great staff member to get to know. When you think of the world of publishing, the work of videos, podcasts, photography, and animated GIFs doesn’t immediately come to mind. But here at Oxford University Press we have Jack Campbell-Smith, who joined the Social Media team as a Multimedia Producer just last year.
The post Catching up with Jack Campbell-Smith, Multimedia Producer appeared first on OUPblog.
This year’s International Law Weekend (ILW) will take place in New York City, from November 5th through 7th. Organized by the American Branch of the International Law Association and the International Law Students Association, this annual event attracts over 800 attendees including practitioners, diplomats, academics, and law students.
The post Preparing for International Law Weekend 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.
“Western clerical celibacy is in an unprecedented crisis,” says the conservative Catholic canon lawyer Edward Peters. The reason? Since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has permitted married men to be ordained as deacons, an order of clergy just below that of priests; and in the past 35 years about 100 married converts, all former Episcopal priests, have been ordained to the Catholic priesthood."
The post The future of married priests appeared first on OUPblog.
As a long-time student of politics I have often found myself assessing various kinds of attempts to create new democratic processes or arenas. From citizens’ juries through to mini-publics and from area panels to lottery-based procedures the scope of these experiments with ‘new’ ways of doing politics has taken me from the local ward level right up to the international level.
The post Raw politics: devolution, democracy and deliberation appeared first on OUPblog.
In a widely quoted interview with USA Today, Ben Bernanke said that ‘It would have been my preference to have more investigations of individual actions because obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.’ He makes it clear that he thought some Wall Street executives should have gone to jail.
The post Ben Bernanke and Wall Street Executives appeared first on OUPblog.
What role does international law play in addressing global problems? How can international lawyers innovate to provide solutions? How can they learn new approaches from different legal systems? Which fields require greater research and expertise?
The post What are the biggest challenges facing international lawyers today? appeared first on OUPblog.
It is said in the domestic practice of law that the facts are sometimes more important than the law. Advocates often win and lose cases on their facts, despite the perception that the law’s formalism and abstraction are to blame for its failures with regards to delivering justice.
The post The killing of Osama bin Laden: the facts are hard to come by, and where is the law? appeared first on OUPblog.
The term fragile state originated as an alternative to “failed state” – a worldview predominated by assertions about “weak” or “strong” states, with very weak states referred to as “failures”, “failed states", etc. A lot of critics rightly pointed out the naivete of a single dimension in conceptualizing the myriad ways in which states and societies can go wrong.
The post Fragile systems and development appeared first on OUPblog.
No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith's distinctive approach to sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth-century stand against the Equal Rights Amendment and its twenty-first-century fight against same-sex marriage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights.
The post How much do you know about Mormon feminists? appeared first on OUPblog.
We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live - our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values - seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this?
The post “Challenging change” – extract from A Foot in the River appeared first on OUPblog.
S.B. 185, recently signed into law by California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., requires California’s public employee pension plans to divest their investments in publicly-traded companies that derive half or more of their revenue from “the mining of thermal coal.”
The post California’s S.B. 185, thermal coal, and the fallacies of social investing appeared first on OUPblog.
Our legal history stretches back well over eight centuries. But however long this history may be, it is not one of which we can be universally proud, and the freedoms which we enjoy today have had to be hard won over the centuries.
The post The right to a fair trial: part one appeared first on OUPblog.
Depending on your tastes, bagpipes are primal and evocative, or crude and abrasive. Adore or despise them, they are ubiquitous across the city centers of Scotland (for tourists or locals?). In anticipation of St Andrews Day, and your Robert Burns poetry readings with a certain woodwind accompaniment, here are 10 facts you may not have known about the history of the bagpipes.
The post Ten fun facts about the bagpipes appeared first on OUPblog.
The conspirators in what we now know as the Gunpowder Plot failed in their aspiration to blow up the House of Lords on the occasion of the state opening of parliament in the hope of killing the King and a multitude of peers. Why do we continue to remember the plot? The bonfires no longer articulate anti-Roman Catholicism, though this attitude formally survived until 2013 in the prohibition against the monarch or the heir to the throne marrying a Catholic.
The post The literary fortunes of the Gunpowder Plot appeared first on OUPblog.
A debate over whether to remove lymph nodes from the neck during surgical treatment of early oral cancer has gone on for decades. Now findings from a randomized control trial reported last June at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting, in Chicago may finally put that controversy to rest.
The post Elective Neck Dissection in Early Oral Cancer: Debate Resolved appeared first on OUPblog.
The durable Bond is back once more in Spectre. Little has changed and there has even been reversion. M has back-morphed into a man, Judi Dench giving way to Ralph Fiennes. 007 still works miracles, and not the least of these is financial – Pinewood Studios hope for another blockbuster movie. Hollywood roll over and die.
The post Spectre and Bond do the damage appeared first on OUPblog.
What have the Romans ever done for us? Ancient Rome is well known for its contribution to the modern world in areas such as sanitation, aqueducts, and roads, but the extent to which it has shaped modern thinking about sexual identity is not nearly so widely recognized.
The post What have the Romans ever done for us? LGBT identities and ancient Rome appeared first on OUPblog.
With elections just about a year away, Americans can expect to hear a lot about regulation during the next twelve months—most of it from Republicans and most of it scathing. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump typifies the GOP’s attitude toward regulation.
The post Clean air… hot air appeared first on OUPblog.
His books are famous around the world, but their author struggles to get by – two themes that quickly become familiar to any reader. Martial has an eye for fabric. He habitually ranks himself and judges others by the price and quality of their clothing and accessories (e.g. 2.29, 2.57), a quick index in the face-to-face street life of the crammed metropolis.
The post Distinctive dress: Martial’s index to life in a crammed metropolis appeared first on OUPblog.
For a long time I have been dealing with the words bad, bed, bud, body, bodkin, butt, bottom, and their likes. The readers who have followed the discussion will probably guess from today’s title that now the time of path has come round.
The post Pathfinders appeared first on OUPblog.
It is hard to quantify the impact of ‘role-model’ celebrities on the acceptance and uptake of genetic testing and bio-literacy, but it is surely significant. Angelina Jolie is an Oscar-winning actress, Brad Pitt’s other half, mother, humanitarian, and now a “DNA celebrity”. She propelled the topic of familial breast cancer, female prophylactic surgery, and DNA testing to the fore.
The post The Angelina Jolie effect appeared first on OUPblog.
For more than forty years now, the Religious Right has been a powerful force in the United States, helping reshape the Republican Party and realign the nation’s politics and culture.
The post Six predictions for the future of the Religious Right appeared first on OUPblog.
Thank you to those of you who participated in the voting period for our Place of the Year 2015 longlist. The top five contenders have moved on to the next round into our shortlist, and we need your help again. If you're interested about each place and why each has been nominated for Place of the Year 2015, read back on our previous blog post. Vote for your pick in this year's shortlist by 30 November. The Place of the Year 2015 will be announced 3 December.
The post Announcing the Place of the Year 2015 shortlist: vote for your pick appeared first on OUPblog.
Long excluded from serious consideration within psychology and the neurosciences, consciousness is back in business. A new journal Neuroscience of Consciousness will catalyse this new understanding by publishing the best new research, review, and opinion on how our "inner universe" comes to be.
The post Can neuroscience explain consciousness? appeared first on OUPblog.
The October Revolution was probably the determining event of the twentieth century in Europe, and indeed in much of the world. The Communist ideology and the Communist paradigm of governance aroused messianic hopes and apocalyptic fears almost everywhere.
The post The day that changed the 20th century: Russia’s October Revolution appeared first on OUPblog.
The following extract is excerpted from Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City. The chapter, titled ‘Learning to Leisure’ traces the leisure lives of a group of young men from Langview, a deindustrialised working-class community in Glasgow.
The post (Getting a) Malling: Youth, consumption and leisure in the ‘new Glasgow’ appeared first on OUPblog.
Mormon feminism may seem to some a recent phenomenon, but events and writings in the history of Mormon feminism date back to the early 1970s. Here we have compiled these key moments in when Mormon women have engaged with question about gender in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a timeline of the pre-history and history of the Mormon feminist movement.
The post Key events and writings in contemporary Mormon feminism appeared first on OUPblog.
At the dawn of the children’s hospital movement in Europe and the West (best epitomised and exemplified by the opening of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (GOSH) on 14 February 1852), the plight of sick children was precarious at all levels of society. After a long campaign by Dr Charles West, Great Ormond Street hospital was the first establishment to provide in-patient beds specifically for children in England.
The post Charles West and Florence Nightingale: Children’s healthcare in context appeared first on OUPblog.
Listen closely and you’ll hear the squeak of sneakers on AstroTurf, the crack of a batter’s first hit, and the shrill sound of whistles signaling Game on! Yes, it’s that time of year again. As fall deepens, painted faces and packed stadiums abound, with sports aficionados all over the country (and world) preparing for a spectacle that is more than just entertainment. Which leads us to the following questions: What is the place of sports in our modern lives? And how should we understand it as part of our history?
In this month’s episode, Sara Levine, Multimedia Producer for Oxford University Press, sat down to discuss the evolution of our favorite pastimes with Chuck Fountain, author of The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball, Julie Des Jardins, author of Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man, Dr. Munro Cullum, a Clinical Neuropsychologist who specializes in the assessment of cognitive disorders, and Paul Rouse, author of Sport and Ireland: A History.
Image Credit: “Baseball” by Anne Ruthmann. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.
The post Game on – Episode 28 – The Oxford Comment appeared first on OUPblog.
But what’s the right term, really? After all, much of the political disagreement and legal wrangling over this issue is rooted in this fundamental conceptual question, is “physician-assisted suicide” really suicide? Let’s see if we can figure it out.
The post ‘Death with Dignity': is it suicide? appeared first on OUPblog.
The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a natural genius who had no need of art or reading. That tradition grew from origins which should make us suspect it. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson famously declared that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’.
The post Shakespeare the Classicist appeared first on OUPblog.
Psychologist Stephen P. Hinshaw, along with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author Katherine Ellison, authors of ADHD: What Everyone Needs to Know, answered a few questions for us in hopes of decluttering some information about ADHD.
The post Debunking ADHD myths: an author Q&A appeared first on OUPblog.
What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week (8-14 November 2015) and Academic Book Week (9-16 November) with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Today, we present Oxford's list of ten academic books that changed the world.
The post 10 academic books that changed the world appeared first on OUPblog.
According to philosophical lore many sentences are self-evident. A self-evident sentence wears its semantic status on its sleeve: a self-evident truth is a true sentence whose truth strikes us immediately, without the need for any argument or evidence, once we understand what the sentence means.
The post Paradox and self-evident sentences appeared first on OUPblog.
We're getting ready for the annual American Musicological Society Conference, beginning 11 November 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky. From panels to performances, there's a lot to look forward to. We asked our past and present attendees to tell us what make AMS and Louisville such exciting places to be this month.
The post Preparing for AMS Louisville appeared first on OUPblog.
For over two centuries, newspapers were the dominant news medium. Yet today “dead tree” media-like stamp collecting is, well, so twentieth century. Now that millions of Americans get their news from social media on-line, newspapers have been in free-fall, prompting many pundits to wonder aloud if journalism has a future.
The post Does news have a future? appeared first on OUPblog.
What was happening in the world last year? Events such as the the devastating protest-turned-conflict in Ukraine, or the maritime disputes between states in the South China Sea, have wide-reaching repercussions - from the amount a country spends on its military, to the direction of foreign policies whole regions take.
The post International security and foreign affairs in 2014 [interactive map] appeared first on OUPblog.
What distinguishes good writing from bad writing? How can people transform their writing to make it more powerful and more effective? Are universities teaching students how to become better writers? In order to answer these questions and others, we sat down with Geoffrey Huck, an associate professor of the Professional Writing Program at York University.
The post What defines good writing? appeared first on OUPblog.
Many word games—Scrabble, Words with Friends, Scribbage, Quiddler and more, involve anagrams, or unscrambling letters to make a word. This month, we take a look at how to do that unscrambling, so here is an anagram for you to solve: naitp.
The post How to solve an anagram appeared first on OUPblog.