Thursday, December 1, 2011

The East

click this link after reading the title to get the sound effect that I couldn't successfully transcribe...


I've been researching James E. Talmage's scientific career for my history 490 project. It has been really fascinating. Talmage left Utah as a young man to attend universities in The East (Utah Mormons seemed to always refer to anything outside of Utah as this amalgamation of otherness, simply described as The East) to get a better scientific education. It was a pretty bold thing for a Mormon to leave Utah at the time, and in his journals he admits to feeling some anxiety about how his community will react to his desire to leave. The best part of the story is that even though the general public may have (and almost certainly did) had misgivings about Talmage leaving, President Taylor (then president of the Mormon church) wholeheartedly supported Talmage in his desire to get a better education.

This story is chalk full of controversy - science vs religion, Mormon isolationism vs The East, practical vs higher education...I have loved getting to research it. Having grown up in The East myself, I was surprised when I got to Utah to see how isolationist it still is, and how much different Mormon culture is out here compared to back home. Even though I could draw negative conclusions from these experiences, I am encouraged by stories like Talmage's. Like I said above, I think it is really inspiring that President Taylor (who was obviously in the midst of early Mormon culture) encouraged James Talmage to pursue his education. Mormonism as a culture definitely exists, with all of its flaws and oddities, but it is just as much of a fallacy for me to lump Utah Mormons together as it was for early Utah Mormons to lump everyone east of their state line together as "the other".

2 comments:

  1. James E Talmage is the man. End of story.

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  2. Talmage=my hero. When he was writing Jesus the Christ, he had a special room in the temple to write it.

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