Donations from LDS church and others fund future of USU Mormon Studies program
The Mormon Studies program at Utah State University recently received two large donations totaling $1.5 million from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and another anonymous donor.
The $1 million sum gifted by the LDS church will be used toward the endowment for the Leonard J. Arrington professorship of Mormon history and culture. An endowment is a fund owned by the university which generates interest, and the interest can be used to support a professor or program.
The anonymously given $500,000 sum is intended to match future donations, meaning that the anonymous donation is worth up to an additional $1 million for the program as long as partners of the program continue to provide support.
80 percent of the matching donation will also help fund the professorship endowment and 20 percent will help fund the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series.
The professorship of Mormon history and culture is the “first of its kind in the world at a secular university,” said Philip Barlow, a professor of religious studies and history and the current Leonard J. Arrington professor of Mormon history and culture.
Regardless of personal religious affiliation or non-affiliation, “the study of religion is terribly important because our culture, our society, is deeply affected by religion,” Barlow said. “Mormonism is an extraordinary case study for how new religions form and adapt.”
No matter what a person’s attitude may be toward the LDS religion, “it’s fabulously interesting — more colorful, more complex, more controversial and more ample in sources than any other religion I know of with a comparable lifespan,” Barlow said.
Barlow emphasized that Mormons and non-Mormons alike benefit from Mormon studies.
“The study of Mormonism shouldn’t be just for Mormons, any more than the study of Russia should be just for Russians. Yet church members gain from formal study because when you’ve grown up in a movement you can know a lot from the inside, but there are many aspects invisible to you because you assume them,” he said.
Scholarly research “has tremendous value in promoting self-understanding for Mormons,” said Chad Nielsen, an amateur Mormon historian and graduate student in biological engineering.
“Looking at Mormonism within a broader context provides more room for building bridges of understanding between religious groups that may otherwise be at odds with each other,” Nielsen said.
Barlow hopes the donations will fund the professor who follows him long after he has moved on.
USU plans to establish the endowment to fund the Leonard J. Arrington chair of Mormon history and culture at $3 million, Janelle Hyatt of Utah State Today reported.
Barlow hopes the endowment will be complete in two or three years, but said “it’s impossible to know for sure.”
“It depends on the partnership of those who are interested in seeing the program succeed,” he said.
Ultimately, the funds provided by the endowments enable not only focused courses in the study of Mormonism, but provide scholarships for students and bring conferences and speakers “that enrich the intellectual life of the university and community.”
Nielsen likewise viewed the donation positively.
“It’s another sign that the Church accepts that taking a scholastically rigorous approach to understanding Mormonism is a good thing. I am optimistic that as more graduates of Mormon Studies programs become available — thanks in part to the LDS church’s contributions to Utah State University — they will be put to good use.”
Barlow is on leave from USU during 2017 while serving as the Neal A. Maxwell Fellow at the Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University, where he is researching and writing a book on the idea of a war in heaven before Earth’s creation. He will return to Utah State on March 16 to host a conference on Joseph Smith and translation. When he returns full-time to the university in 2018, he will offer new courses on global perspectives of Mormonism and the roles of religion in film.
— joshua.hortin@aggiemail.usu.edu
Photo by Sam Brown