Jane Manning James stood out among early Latter-day Saints as one of few black converts. She was baptized into the Church as a free black woman in Connecticut and migrated to Nauvoo with her family, where she soon found herself working in the prophet Joseph Smith’s home. After his death, she traveled west with the Saints and lived the rest of her life as a faithful member—though she was denied participation in the Church’s most sacred practices.

Through the years, Jane Manning James has been left out of books on African American history, women’s history, histories of the West, and until more recently, she was even left out of histories of her own church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dr. Quincy Newell recently published the first scholarly biography of this remarkable Latter-day Saint. The book is called Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-century Black Mormon. Dr. Newell joins us to talk about it in this episode.

Images of Jane discussed in the episode are available in the transcript.

About the Guest

Quincy D. Newell is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College. She is co-editor of the Mormon Studies Review and author of Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon.

This episode continues our special series of episodes on the Maxwell Institute’s brief theological introductions to the Book of Mormon. In his book on Mosiah, philosopher and theologian James E. Faulconer untangles a complicated narrative—a fragmentary history about a fragmented people, written by a record keeper obsessed with unity. Faulconer unpacks what King Benjamin had in mind in speaking of the “mysteries of God.”

About the Guest

James E. Faulconer is a professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University and a senior research fellow at the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Faulconer’s area of expertise is twentieth-century and contemporary European philosophy, especially the philosophy of religion. In addition to writing scholarly books and articles, he is the author of the Made Harder series of scripture study questions and Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions.

We live in an age of polemics. Choices are presented as mutually exclusive and we are given little time to listen. You are either secular or religious. You either believe in the exclusive truth of your own religion or you believe that truth is everywhere—or nowhere. The battle over truth rages on. But what if truth were a child? What if we pursued a relationship with the truth and each other in more caring ways?

Dr. George Handley joins us in this episode to talk about his book, If Truth Were a Child. If you’re a church leader who is looking to connect better with the flock, or if you’re one of the sheep who feels undernourished, George Handley has important things to share with you.

About the Guest

George B. Handley teaches interdisciplinary humanities at Brigham Young University, where he also serves as the associate director of the Faculty Center. He received his BA from Stanford University and his MA and PhD in comparative literature at UC-Berkeley. His scholarly publications and creative writing focus on the intersection between religion, literature, and the environment. His books include the memoir Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River, the novel American Fork, and two collections of essays in the Living Faith series entitled If Truth Were a Child and The Hope of Nature.