This paper has been the scholastic gadfly, the bane of my existence for the last few months. Here's why:
1. Never wanted to do it in the first place
2. Couldn't think of a good topic
3. The class is called "Writing about Religion"
This point deserves a little bit more of an explanation. You see, this isn't the write-in-your-journal-about-some-spiritual-experience-you-had-that-made-you-feel-good "Writing about Religion." This is a class taught by a guy who publishes in Sunstone and Dialogue, as well as the Journal of Mormon History. Actually, my professor is the book review editor for the Journal of Mormon History, and, come to think of it, I myself will be published next year in it for a book notice I wrote on a picture book called Orem. Wow, I'm really going places in the literary world.
ANYWAY the fact is that my professor is interested in the fringe side of Mormon scholarship. The people that like to write about taboo stuff, you know, the stuff that when someone starts talking about it you're like, uh-oh, bad feeling, should we really be broaching this subject?, etc, etc. And really it's that kind of "Writing about Religion" that my professor wanted.
I didn't really want to try this. For one, when writing about Mormon topics, it's really hard to distance yourself from the subject matter and not write apologetically. But that's what he wants. Basically, if I started bearing my testimony, or if it even sounded like I might, he'd flunk me.
That's not really the problem though. The problem is, as is mentioned on Reason Number Two above, that I had a terribly difficult time picking a topic. What I eventually landed on was kind of a cop-out, owing its existence to the fact that I was also taking History of the Reformation class this semester. It started out being something ridiculous like "I'm gonna compare Martin Luther and a whole bunch of other Reformers to the LDS Church and try to prove some irrelevant point."
Let me just skip the painful evolution of this topic and jump to what I've now got, which is what I will have to turn in tomorrow: "The Evolution of Martin Luther in Mormon Thought." That is, I'm trying to trace how Mormon Church leaders thought about and portrayed Luther from the start to the present day.
Why is this worth writing about, let alone even thinking about? Don't know. But it's what I've got. And I've discovered a few things that are sort of interesting.
From what I've found, Joseph Smith didn't talk too much about Martin Luther explicitly, but he has this quote that the German members of the LDS Church love to refer to all the time. It's the one where he says that the German translation of the New Testament was the best, he thought, and most closely resembled the revelations that he himself had been giving for like 15 years.
Most bizarre was the way that Brigham Young used Luther as a justification for polygamy. Taking a history precedent for polygamy from the Reformation was not something that I expected. But it's there, take a look in the Journal of Discourses: JD 11:127, Brigham Young, June 18, 1865.
After Brigham Young, they mostly just place him in the context of the cycle of apostasy and restoration that forms one of the Mormon Church's grand narratives as a sort of John the Baptist figure, a Forerunner to the Restoration, preparing the way for the greater prophet (Joseph Smith). Or they use him as an example of religious leader who had good intentions, but in the end did not have priesthood authority and did not restore the truth.
So... to sum up this long and rambling post, the main problem is that I'm supposed to write 20-30 pages about this topic and I think that I'm just about done with the five pages I've got.
Bad. Very bad. This is a mean dragon that I gotta kill.
Wow this is reminding me why it is awesome to not be in school anymore because you can just think about cool ideas like that one you have without having to be all OH SHIZ OH SHIZ IT IS MIDNIGHT AND I ONLY HAVE *>% PAGES GAAAHHHHHHHH.
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