Jan Shipps is this year’s Greenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow
What: Jan Shipps, a leading scholar of religion and this year’s Greenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow, will deliver a lecture entitled, “Polygamy and Proposition 8: The Mormon Question Today.”
When: Tuesday, March 24 at 4:15 p.m. A reception will follow.
Where: Wean Terrace Room B in Mather Hall on the Trinity campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available on Summit Street.
Background:
Each year, the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity selects a leading scholar of religion to spend a week on campus engaging with faculty, students, and members of the community. This year’s visiting fellow is Jan Shipps, the country’s foremost non-Mormon scholar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Proposition 8, billed as the Protect Marriage Constitutional Amendment, was a California ballot question that was narrowly approved by voters in November 2008. It decreed that the only form of marriage that is valid or recognized in California is that between a man and a woman. In essence, Proposition 8 banned gay marriage.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints supported the amendment, a position that disturbed some Mormons. As Lola Van Wagenen wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “based on the unique history of Mormons, there is no religious group in our country that should be more tolerant of ‘nontraditional’ forms of marriage than those of us whose ancestors were polygamist Mormons, who were persecuted because of their ‘nontraditional’ marriages.
Shipps is the author of Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition and a senior editor of The Journals of William McLellin, 1831-1836, the earliest extended account of the Mormon experience. Her most recent book, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons, combines her personal experiences among the Mormons with a lifetime of study and observation. She is now working on a book about Mormonism since World War II.
Shipps taught at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis for many years and is professor emeritus of history and religious studies. Shipps continues to write about Mormon history and consults with journalists about news on Mormonism. She has served as president of the American Society of Church History, and as the first non-Mormon and first female president of the Mormon History Association.
For more information, please contact Christine McMorris at Christine.McMorris@trincoll.edu or at 860-297-2353.