By Eowyn Wilcox McComb

The purpose of this course is to examine some of the issues and themes in the visual arts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from its restoration in 1830 to the current day, as well as to explore the position of Latter-Day Saint artwork within the wider historical and cultural context of western art history.

Each of the thirteen units will interrogate the assumptions in this purpose statement.  There are many unanswered questions: What is Latter-Day Saint art? Who makes it? Who has the right to label an artist or an artwork as Latter-Day Saint?  Is it appropriate to categorize artists and artworks according to religion? The attempt to categorize or interpret artists by a single trait, such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, risks flattening and simplifying their artwork.  Worse still, artists who are sorted into such subgroups are rarely considered within the wider historical and cultural context of their time and among the full range of their artistic peers.  Students should remember this throughout the course, which attempts to consider the problem of “Latter-Day Saint art” from many different angles and perspectives.

By Mason Allred

This course is designed around the concept of Latter-day Saint cinema as a "minor literature," constructed within a major language. In this sense, Latter-day Saint motion pictures can be seen as showcasing and shaping religious practice, belief, identity, and culture within the major and established language of cinema. From its earliest years cinema became a site to debate the prospect of fitting Mormons into the modern world. Could it also facilitate the modernization of Mormons? With an increasing awareness of public image and the medium's potential, Latter-day Saints entered the public sphere of cinema to express their worldview. As it did for other minority groups, cinema offered Saints opportunities to celebrate, critique, and work through their culture and religious tradition.

By Kimberly Johnson

This class will survey the development of a strong tradition of devotional poetry in the Anglophone tradition, and discover its application in and influence on Mormon literature. We will begin our conversation with a brief introduction to the genre’s earliest expressions in the hymns of ancient Greece and Rome and of the Bible, and its development in early Christian lyrics. We will discover how medieval Scholastics used poetry to augment affectively their intellectual engagements with Christianity, which together would govern the later expansion of lyric poetry in English, both secular and sacred. Shaped both by the generic fashions of continental literature and the upheavals in continental theology, the devotional lyric in English sees an unprecedented efflorescence during the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, and establishes this mode of poetic writing as central to the literary landscape. This seminal period codifies the conventions and expectations of the devotional lyric, and influences its development for the succeeding centuries up until the present day.