Barlow, Historian and Arrington Chair, Awarded Fellowship at BYU Institute
Religious studies professor Philip Barlow has accepted a year-long fellowship at the BYU-based Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Barlow, who holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture, approaches the impact of Mormon history in North America from an academic point of view. Photo courtesy of Claremont University.
Philip Barlow, a history professor who holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture, will change venues but not his scholarship after being named a fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
Barlow will in January begin the year-long fellowship at the Brigham Young University-based institute. It continues for a calendar year during which the historian will work primarily on his upcoming academic book.
Barlow is “a bit of a gem within the state of Utah,” said Maxwell Institute executive director Spencer Fluhman.
And because this fellowship is a first for the Maxwell Institute, Barlow “is a perfect fit,” he said.
“Dr. Barlow is a nationally prominent scholar of religion, and his work has been celebrated for being interdisciplinary,” Fluhman continued. “Barlow is a historian who received his doctor of theology degree at Harvard Divinity School. As a result, he crosses a lot of borders intellectually. We find that exciting.”
USU’s Arrington Chair and professorship, which Barlow has held since its inception in 2007, is housed in the history department of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He approaches religious history from an academic viewpoint and is the author of such books as the soon-to-be published Mormonism (Columbia University Press), co-authored with respected historian Jan Shipps.
Barlow also wrote Mormons and the Bible (Oxford University Press, updated 2013) and is co-editor with Terryl L. Givens of the The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism (2015). Givens, a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond, will join Barlow as a Maxwell fellow during summer semester 2017.
“In terms of Mormon history,” added Fluhman, “Dr. Barlow has done it all.”
Fluhman described the fellowship awarded to Barlow as continuing “the great cross-pollination we have with Utah State. We’re thrilled to be able to share intellectual resources in this way.”
The Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU, which is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, takes its name from the former University of Utah political science professor and administrator who served as an LDS apostle from 1981 until his death in 2004. In 1981, Utah State University awarded Maxwell with an honorary doctor of humanities degree.
The fellowship marks the institute’s evolution from its origins in the sometimes-controversial FARMS (the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) to an institution that Fluhman said seeks to “support serious scholarship on religion” and speak to an international audience of scholars.
“We’re an institutional bridge between the academic audiences interested in Mormonism and the practicing community of Mormons,” said Fluhman. “So we try to translate both ways — the LDS experience for scholars and the scholarly world for Latter-Day Saints. Dr. Barlow will definitely be part of that transition to scholarly audiences.”
Barlow said he will take the opportunity of this sabbatical of sorts to address his next project, an academic look of the tradition of a pre-earthly war in heaven in Judaism and Christianity and its historical underpinnings. The story of Lucifer as a fallen angel can be found in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Hebrew scripture. But Barlow suspects the story’s antecedents go as far back as Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest enduring religions.
He’s been mulling the concept since graduate school, he said, when he first read The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Russian author tackles the idea of the burden of free will. Barlow summarizes the view of one of the book’s central characters: “Human beings like to dribble freedom out of their lips; but it’s a concept that terrifies them, it terrifies them that they have to make choices in ambiguous circumstances.”
In the Mormon version of this conflict that took place in the preexistence, Lucifer offered unborn spirits the choice of exchanging their free will for “salvation, security and comfort,” said Barlow.
Lucifer’s plan was rejected by those beings who sought their freedom. According to the Bible, “a third of the angels fell from heaven” and Lucifer — known from here on out as Satan in Mormon tradition — was “cut down to the ground.”
Barlow said the “seeds of this great issue as Dostoevsky framed it” — free will versus security — “are all there in the Mormon account of a premortal conflict. Joseph Smith elaborated an interpretation of the cause and meaning of this war beyond what is found in most of Christianity.”
His academic interest, he added, “isn’t to pretend to have access to what happened before the world was; it’s rather to explore the idea that, like in Dostoevsky’s very mortal story, the narrative of the war in heaven is ultimately about this planet and about what’s at stake in our existence. Ultimately, what does it mean to be human?”
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Writer and contact: Janelle Hyatt, Janelle.hyatt@usu.edu, 435-797-0289
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