The Center's Studio Podcast
The official podcast of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts with interviews of artists and scholars on topics of art with host Glen Nelson.
The Center's Studio Podcast
Latter-day Eloquence and the Power of Mormon Oratory
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This episode features an interview with the editors Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards about their new book, Latter-day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory. They discuss why public speaking is central to Latter-day Saint life, how touchstone speeches from the 19th century to the present tell the story of the LDS people, and why they remain essential reading and relevant today.
For a 30% discount for the book, use the code: S26UIP at the publisher’s website: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p089329
Music: "Please Only Tell Me Good News” by Stephen Anderson; used with permission.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Center of Studio Podcast. I'm your host, Glenn Nelson, and today I have the pleasure of talking to the editors of a brand new and exciting book, Latter-day Elquit's Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory. They are Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards. Hello, gentlemen.
SPEAKER_01Hello, Glenn. Pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_02I have to say, when your book arrived, I was a little intimidated. It's a substantial work, like, you know, 650 pages. But once I started reading it, I could not put this thing down, guys. I really couldn't. This is an indispensable volume, and I can imagine many people wanting to have this treasury of LDS public speech of fine. I would love to know from the two of you how the idea for the book came about. I know it's a generic question, but it seems so obvious that a book like this should have already existed, but I don't think that's the case. So what do you think of that?
SPEAKER_01I'll take the lead on this. I know Isaac has some thoughts on this as well. There was a coincidence at the root of our collaboration on this project. I had always thought, well, there ought to be an anthology of Great Mormon speeches. I'm a rhetorician, I study oratory. You have these sorts of anthologies in seemingly every category of culture and history. There was no such anthology in Mormonism or in the Latter-day Saint tradition. There are niche anthologies. There are anthologies of speeches by women, there are anthologies of speeches by, say, people at the BYU devotionals, there are anthologies of speeches by general authorities, and so forth. Most of these anthologies are devotional, and none of them try to capture the full breadth and diversity of what Isaac and I would call the Latter-day Saints speaking voice. And so years and years ago, I thought, well, we should create a volume called Mormon Eloquence or Latter-day Eloquence or whatever. And I even got a research assistant to get started on it. But as all artists and academics know, things got interrupted by eight other projects until one day, Isaac, a student of mine, came up to me and asked this same question. Why isn't there an anthology of Great Mormon oratory? And I said, that's a question I have. I've got all these other things going on. And then Isaac did what uh Isaac James Richards does. He said, let's do it. Let's just get it done. And he became the engine behind the execution of this project. And now it's in your hands and our hands, and we hope many other people's hands.
SPEAKER_02Amazing. What would you add to that, Isaac? Yeah, I would just say other than saying yes, I am brilliant, and I'm so glad that I'm a nudge.
SPEAKER_00No, but I I will more just say I was so glad that, you know, I could take on the copyright permissions and the ubiquitous emailing that had to happen to make the book happen. I mean, you know, Glenn, from working with the Latter-day Saint art, a critical reader, and many of your listeners know what it takes to put together a large anthology volume, right? How many logistics that takes. And um so yeah, trying to streamline that just to get it to come together as quickly as possible. But the only other thing I would add is that, you know, Latter-day Saints are good at collecting our speeches. We've been doing this since the Journal of Discourses days, right? We we like to collect our speeches and cite them and read them. It's a rather unique thing about Mormons that if you sit down in a room with them, you can say, What's your favorite talk? You know what I mean? And we have them. We have favorites and we and we talk about it. And so this was an attempt to make academic and professional and as objective as possible a really rigorous study of that kind of really niche, unique phenomenon, which is Latter-day Saint rhetoric and oratory.
SPEAKER_02All right. Well, let's talk about terms briefly. What does oratory and rhetoric mean to you?
SPEAKER_01Rhetoric is the craft of persuasion. That's how the ancient Greeks thought of it. Aristotle's famous definition is that rhetoric is the ability to find in any given case the available means of persuasion. So it's a theory of persuasion, a craft of persuasion. And for the ancient Greeks, the primary mode of persuasion was, of course, the spoken word, because that's how communication was given. That's how it was made. Oratory is the name for the spoken mode of rhetoric, of uh speech giving. So there are all kinds of theories and uh volumes and histories of rhetoric, and those cover the written word, they cover the spoken word. In today's world, that even covers what we call visual rhetoric or rhetorics of space and place. Rhetoric has become something that we can apply to and recognize in all sorts of different categories of human experience. But the most traditional and historical mode is oratory, the spoken mode of rhetoric. And we are, as Isaac said, a an oration-giving people. And so we feel like a foundational text that would open the conversation on the study of oratorical rhetoric and the Latter-day Saint tradition was necessary.
SPEAKER_02I was in church on Sunday and a five-year-old gave a speech. And I thought, okay. It started.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, Latter-day Saints are more likely, probably than many of their peers, to have spent long amounts of time standing in front of lecterns and pulpits in front of large audiences, right? From that very young age, like you say, we learned to do this. And that's interesting because oratory, I would just add, Glenn, it's an art form. We don't always think of it this way, right? We have our classic uh art modes, right? We have visual, you know, drama, we have music, and then in writing, we have subgenres, right? Poetry, uh, fiction, creative nonfiction. But the premise of our book really is that a well-delivered speech is also worthy of aesthetic analysis and appreciation and and that giving a sacrament talk, right, is an art form. It can be learned, right? And it can be improved upon. So I think that's a it's a it's not a science here, public speaking, right? It's it's an art like all other fine arts and communications disciplines.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02So this book then includes speeches, commencement addresses, talks at church, talks at political rallies and events, speeches that were written for publication, and speeches that are primarily oral but later ended up being published. Am I missing some categories? It's quite broad.
SPEAKER_01It is. It in and it includes the very traditional genres of oratory in the Latter-day Saint world. So sermons, general conference addresses, devotional. Uh I think you've covered pretty much all of it, Glenn. I might be missing one or two. We have a couple of very unusual artifacts, for lack of a better word. One is an actual interview between Larry King and Gordon B. Hinckley back in the 90s. So we allowed this interview style to be framed as an oration because the parameters we set up were where it has to be an orally delivered speech, and speech can be defined broadly, to a live audience. And Gordon B. Hinckley's interview with Larry King qualifies. We have one pretty creative, uh, I don't know, mediated artifact, and that is um Killer Kane's interview segments from uh from that from the famous movie. Oh, I'm forgetting the name of the movie now. New York Doll. New York Doll, yeah, of course. You know, he was, of course, the basis for the uh for the New York dolls. So there are a couple of creative approaches, but 90% of the speeches come from those traditional genres you listed.
SPEAKER_02You write in the book's introduction, and this was published by University of Illinois Press just uh now, June 2nd, 2026. The goal of this volume is to capture the history, diversity, and centrality of public speaking in Latter-day Saint Life writ large. So tell me more about the goals for this book. You you've touched on it slightly so far, but why is public speaking part of the goal rather than essays and published articles produced specifically to be printed?
SPEAKER_01Uh Isaac, why don't you take that away? I know we both have some thoughts on this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think um there are several answers we could make to that question. One is if you kind of take the other side of the extreme, right? What's everybody talking about these days? Artificial intelligence, right? Everyone's talking about all the kind of content, digital media that's all over on the internet. When I teach public speaking here at Penn State, I look my students right in the eyes and I say, this face-to-face interaction is never going away. Ever. And in fact, it's maybe becoming more valuable, right? If there's recorded, right, media, alive, spontaneous, human, speaking from the heart. That stands out. And so I think one thing that's important about uh oratory and public speaking is we're seeing a return to it a little bit, a return to orality in this kind of everything's written, everything's recorded, everything's digital. But this, I mean, our sacrament meetings, right, in the church are evidence of this. We've decided that it's important to come together every week, face to face, and talk to each other. And it's it's a it's a radically democratic notion. It's a it's a radically, you know, American, distinctly kind of American democratic that comes out of the 19th century, Great Awakening, and all the way to this day. And that's a special part of our tradition that we wanted to highlight.
SPEAKER_01I'll add that just before this discussion, literally maybe five or 10 minutes before we started, I was online and an advertisement popped up. Ironically, it seemed like an AI advertisement. It seemed like AI had made the advertisement, but we'll set that aside for a moment. And it was on uh an articulation course that you can buy, a 28-day articulation challenge. And it showed this woman from her childhood uh growing up and maturing and all the while being afraid to speak and being intimidated and bullied in her schoolwork and in her job life until she takes this 28-day challenge and then she becomes this boss, you know, and she becomes confident and she transforms. Obviously, that's an advertisement. Obviously, there's a lot to critique there, but the basic principle I think is real. We need to learn how to talk to each other in the flesh in real time. This is, as Isaac alluded to earlier, an art form. It is a literature, it is the original literature. The original literature was the rhapsode, traveling from place to place, telling stories with his mouth to a live audience. That's where our first poetry comes from. So if we're not really studying this art form, I don't think, and this is this may sound like hyperbole, but I don't think we're really studying what makes us creators of art uh and human beings in the first place.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You know, I live in New York and I go to a lot of live performances. And um a written essay that was written to be published and not produced orally has a very different audience and there's a different spark that happens when somebody's speaking, and you have a fair number of political discourses here, um, trying to persuade people, um, not knowing if you're gonna get heckled, not knowing if it's gonna go well, not knowing if there can be a groundswell of enthusiasm for what you're saying, not knowing if the cadence of your speech in that Martin Luther King way builds and builds to a crescendo, and people want to stand up and do something. You can get that with text only maybe, but it's not the same thing. I mean, I remember, you know, Isaac, uh you had mentioned to me that this book was forthcoming, and I imagined it to be a collection of talks and lectures. The two of you selected and edited, but that's not what what this is. So you invited, is it 56 scholars to participate? Give us the backstory on that and like what their role was in all of this.
SPEAKER_01We decided early on that we did not want to be the ones selecting all the speeches. If if we wanted to capture the full breadth and diversity of the Latter-day Saint voice, we wanted to have an open call. So we sent out invitation after invitation to every listserv we could think of in the Latter-day Saint academic, intellectual, artistic world, uh into departments of universities, uh, you name it, if if it's if there was a listserv, we sent the in the call. And we asked people to propose speeches for this volume on the condition that one, it be an orally delivered address to a live, real audience, and two, that they would include an evaluative head note, a kind of short essay arguing for why this speech merits inclusion in a volume of great Latter-day Saint oratory. So one of the wonderful things about this volume from Isaac's and my perspective is that it's not just our idea of what Latter-day Saint eloquence is, it is a broad collection of perspectives on what that idea might be. So that's why there are 55 different 55, 56 different contributors and um uh and as and and as many contributors as there are, there are 55 different voices and speeches to read. So there are well over a hundred voices in this volume.
SPEAKER_02They're very different the way that they're they're approached to the introduction. Some of them are structural, some of them are contextualizing, some of them are completely historical, some of them are kind of funny, some of them have a point of view, you know, maybe arguing almost, like that they're imagining that they were there and they're kind of talking back and forth with it in a way. They're kind of they're being advocates, certainly, for um their own selection. So let's dive in. Let's dive into this book. I uh I said at the beginning of this interview that I think it's an indispensable volume. And what I meant by that was that readers will want to have a ready resource for these important speeches in our history. And I love, love in the introduction when you're talking about oratory as a historical object that tells our story. So not to put words in your mouth or quote words that you that came out of your mouth, but what can you tell me a little bit more about this idea first of oratory being an object and how we tell our own history through them?
SPEAKER_01Feel free, Isaac. Take it away, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Did you notice that so far Isaac is getting all the hard work? Isaac is like the guy with the machete going through the going through the jungle, and then Ben you're like the cleanup guy. Is that is that your dynamic here? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I I Isaac Isaac does all the uh all the hard work, and I'm I'm quality control. I'll uh yeah, I'll I'll I'll bat second here.
SPEAKER_02I don't suspect that that's true, but okay, go ahead, Isaac.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, Ben and I, we we love working together, work together for a long time and complement each other very well. Oratory is an object that tells our story. One of the beautiful things about a speech is at the moment it's given, it involves several different factors. The person who's giving the speech, the audience who's listening, and the time and the moment in history in which it's given. And so it captures a lot, right, in in a given moment. And this I think could be said of several different art forms. Um, but I think it it honors that kind of tension between the individual and the community, the many and the one, right? And and and each one becomes a kind of snapshot. So if you if you flip through the pages of the book and you pick a speech, you're diving all of a sudden headfirst into the world of, you know, the 1950s uh American culture, or, you know what I mean, whatever other decade you've dropped into and what was important, what what types of rhetorical resources were people using, what were they talking about? And so um it's not, it doesn't have a distinct narrative arc. It's more like little flashes, right? Little moments scattered throughout the 200 years of our history that illuminate the many different multifaceted elements of the Latter-day Saints story.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You know, some of these are quite short. I mean, some of these are a page and a half, but there are a few of them that are referenced kind of frequently in classes and conversations within Italianist culture, certainly within the Mormon studies programs that I'm aware of. To your mind, what are some of the examples in this camp of greatest hits?
SPEAKER_01I'll start. I'll start because uh Isaac and I like to think about this question a lot, and we were discussing this briefly right before this interview. And my favorite in the volume keeps changing. I've talked about several different chapters. The one I'll bring up now is John Durham Peters' contribution to the volume. John Durham Peters is one of the, not just one of the great scholars in the Latter-day Saint world, but literally one of the finest scholars of communication and media theory of the 20th century. And he's offered a uh a reading of Levi S. Peterson's A Christian by Yearning from 1988. This is a beautifully written analytical head note and a beautiful, eloquent speech that Peterson gives as a keynote at a Sunstone Symposium back in the late 80s. I'm tempted to quote from Peterson himself, but I would rather actually quote from Peters, who's writing the headnote here, because uh John Durham Peters is a great example of eloquence, and if you don't mind, I'll just mention briefly uh or quote something from his piece. He says Peterson offers a kind of religious agnosticism, agnosticism in the gentle sense of not knowing rather than aggressive disbelief. He shifts the basis of religious experience from knowledge to hope, from certainty to awe. Our faith can rest on an epistemic minimalism, and if there is anything we can know for sure, it is that we will die. The next world will be as surprising as a sunrise. Just as Peterson transfigures the common speech genre of bearing testimony, so he transfigures beliefs so common that they are rarely perceived in their stunning blazingness. So that's just a taste, I think, of the analytical eloquence of what's happening in the volume. And it's a teaser for actually going to Peterson's speech and reading his speech, given that it can inspire someone to write that about the speech. So that'll be my favorite for today's podcast.
SPEAKER_02You must have been eavesdropping because when I was reading through it, I went chronologically and uh and I said to myself, well, maybe I'll just scan it in some, you know. But I started reading an introduction, I was like, well, I have to read this now. This sounds amazing. Whatever. Okay, so Isaac, what uh on this greatest hits idea, um, what are some that that struck you? Probably probably didn't surprise you that uh people selected that to be included.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it didn't surprise me. I mean, I think I could really quick I have a particular speech I want to talk about, but the greatest hits, we had to make some sure those were in there, right? So when people think about um Bruce R. McConkey's last testimony, right? Where he says, you know, I shall not know any more then than I know now that Jesus is a Christ. That's the greatest hit, right? The Spencer W. Kimball's second century address at BYU, right? That's the greatest hit. The King Fallet sermon. That's like the first greatest hit, right? You know, there are a lot of these really famous Orson F. Whitney's Milton's and Shakespeare's of our own, right? Where he says, we're gonna have Milton's and Shakespeare's of our own. That's a beloved one in Latter-day Saint art circles, right? This kind of call to home literature. So there are many of those types of speeches there. But there's also uh unorthodox, unusual ones. One of my favorites is uh by Wayne Booth. He might too. Oh, one of yours too?
SPEAKER_02This one's now, now, as of as of yesterday. Yeah. Never heard of this before.
SPEAKER_00So Wayne Booth attended, it was uh, I guess it would have been uh it was like an anniversary, maybe a 150th anniversary of BYU or something like that. This would have been um in 1980. So in 1980, he goes to this BOU Humanities uh conference and he delivers address called Art and the Church, and he structures it like the screw tape letters, like C.S. Lewis's screw tape letters. So he has um a person named Smoother, who's like the kind of low-tier devil, writing letters to Chief, who is maybe supposed to represent, I don't know, some sort of church administrator at some level. And the letters they're writing to each other are about how can we smooth out everybody's brains with with bl bad art, with bland art that makes them not think creatively or not think originally, not respect diversity or Or anything like that. And um it's a funny, it's a parody, it's a satire, and I think it's really an homage to great art, right? Wayne Booth cared a lot that the Latter-day Saints had a great artistic culture, a vibrant critical culture. They had conversations about art and about oratory and about literature. And uh, that's a great example of a speech in there that I think should be of interest to the Center for Latter-day Saints Arts and for the larger Mormon community as well as for rhetoric as a whole.
SPEAKER_02I was thinking of Stephen L. Peck as I was reading that. The book's organized by century, the 19th century has a dozen examples or so, all fascinating. But the pace picks up in the 20th and 21st centuries, including nearly a dozen in the last 10 years alone. Given all the work that's being done right now with LDS historians and the church history department to bring out unknown texts from early church history, why do you think the contributors end up with so many works that lean more to contemporary life?
SPEAKER_01I think there are so many reasons for this, but one of those reasons is really very just structural. It's a mathematical problem. There were so there were only so many members in the original century of the church. It was a small, much smaller group of people. In the 20th century, the church starts to grow rapidly. In the 21st century, not only is the church continuing to grow rapidly, but technology is such that you can capture all sorts of oratorical artifacts. So everything's recorded, everything's archived, every speech. And then finally, there are scholars who are promoting certain speeches or advocating for certain speeches for inclusion in the volume, who are simply contemporaries of the artifacts they're interested in. So yeah, it's partly a function of people's preferences, it's partly a function of their own leaning toward uh their own time period. But just mathematically, if you have a church that is comprised of 50,000 people in the 19th century, and there's no technology to record every speech, then you're going to have fewer opportunities to choose from that century. Once you get into the 20th and 21st centuries, due to numbers and technology, there are just so many more artifacts to choose from.
SPEAKER_02I was really struck in the early, the 19th century uh speeches, how the authors there, you know, those who were making the introductions, um, explained how complicated it was to record these things, you know, and how like Le King Follette, for example, you know, you had multiple versions of it and how they came about. And then it was published, you know, in a a church uh in a church publication. But um, all of those sort of things were were fascinating to me. And I I felt like I was learning about the process of documenting an oral speech as I read through your book as well, Isaac.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you you took the words right out of my mouth, actually. I was talking about Did I say anything nearly as cleverly as you would, though? Yes, you no, you totally did. That that King Fallets sermon, people throw that around, right? Oh, the King Fallett sermon, the King Fall It sermon. When we were putting together the anthology, a great scholar Matt Bowman at Claremont, he said, okay, you're going to include the King Falls sermon. Which one? That's what he said, right? There's there's four different versions taken in Pittman shorthand, right? So these aren't even full, they're just, you know, notes basically scribbled while it's going on as fast as possible. We know we preach for two and a half hours. We don't have nearly that long of a sermon, right? We just have, you know, the notes for however long he took and um the chap that chapter by Bill Smith. He's written a whole book just about the King Fallet sermon. So we have a book about 55 speeches. But we will say that in our anthology as well, we do some of that primary documentation work, whether we have reprinted some speeches there for the first time, which have not appeared in print anywhere else. And another interesting example is um Truman G. Madsen's Joseph Smith lecture. There's a very famous speech that people love to listen to on cassette on their missions and things like that. Um, we have his published version, uh the the way he wrote it, his like transcript, and then we will have what he actually said. And in the chapter in the anthology, we've compared where he goes off script to elaborate and embellish and engage the audience. So, yeah, there's a there's a unique tension there between the orally delivered and then how it gets transcribed and recorded that is running through the whole book.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it that part of it is just completely brilliant, too. You know, I'm not surprised about how much I was engaged with these historical texts. But, you know, since the book started there, that's where I started thinking about it more than I probably had in the past. But many of the speeches and their introductions felt so relevant to my life right now, these 19th-century speeches. Like I read Sidney Ringdon's fiery speech delivered on 4th of July, 1838, you know, on 4th of July. That was Isaac, actually, that was Isaac uh your selection. Why was that text, which it's kind of wild, why was that an important text for you to include?
SPEAKER_00Oh, that is such an important speech. It's a speech that fits in this larger genre of people in the United States speaking to the larger nation from whatever their identity category is. So if you think about and drawing on its founding documents. So um, Elizabeth Ketty Stanton, right? Her Declaration of Sentiments is an imitation of the Declaration of Independence. And uh, you know, Frederick Douglass's What to a Slave is the Fourth of July kind of critiques slavery by using the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is Sidney Rigding saying, hey, we Mormons are here to stay in the United States of America, and we want our religious liberty and our freedom. And boy, do we see that thread running not only from 1838, but to Dallin A. Jokes, right? Who's really pushing that, uh pushing that important tradition of religious liberty and the relationship between church and state. That's an interesting thread through the book and a very important speech, not only for the fact that it kind of gets everybody angry and gets them kicked out of Missouri. So important for history as well.
SPEAKER_02That's true. You know, the the the consequence side of this, of these things, is like I'm I'm really curious to know. I mean, some of it uh is kind of hard to exactly pin down, but but you're right exactly about about what happened after they've stopped talking. You know, I was struck by the political wrangling of Orson Pratt's anti-slavery speech of 1852, the Native American relations speech by Brigham Young in 1866, Eliza R. Snow's speech of the Great Indignation Meeting in 1870, uh Senator Reed Smooth's U.S. Senate uh speech in 1907, and many others that deal with social topics of the era. What do you make of these ideas of political speeches and their audience? Um why was that important?
SPEAKER_01I think for two reasons. For one, I think political speeches represent the Latter-day Saint grappling with the larger social context that they've always existed within. And for two, and I'll come back to that, but second, these are opportunities for the Latter-day Saint voice to flourish. So they say something important both about the context in which Latter-day Saints exist, and they also say something about the voice of that particular prominent Latter-day Saint. So for both of those reasons, they are important artifacts for this volume. But going back to that first one, Isaac just brought this up because uh because Mormons in the 19th century, and you know what, 20th century and even 21st century to some extent, are marginalized people. Whether it's structurally and politically, or if it's attitudinally, they are considered strange, alien, awkward, weird, whatever. And it's important that we see how other Latter-day Saints situate the Latter-day Saint experience within this broader context. If we're not capturing those voices, Mitt Romney's Faith in America speech is one of the prominent chapters in the book. For example, Jeff Flake's speech, essentially denouncing MAGA is a prominent chapter in the book. Uh, and uh, Lenore Romney, too, actually, uh, she's in the book too. So we do have these politicians. If we're not trying to capture their voices, then I really think we're missing out on an essential part of the Latter-day Saint experience, particularly in the United States, because we are not normal American citizens. We're just not. I there are probably lots of Latter-day Saints that would like to think we are, but we have historically been and continue to be of people that have been shunted, whether again, just by attitude or by actual political and legal structures, shunted to the margins a little bit. So, how do we talk about that? What do Latter-day Saints say about that? That's an important rhetorical exigency that needs to be dealt with.
SPEAKER_02Well, I think that the early women writing, for example, let's say the polygamy era and the post-polygamy era, were saying, you know, don't project onto us what you think we are and what we're what we're capable of doing. I found those really interesting. Some of them are, you know, familiar to me, but I was struck again by them. I knew I was going to be talking to you then, of course. And so I wrote to Richard Bushman, who appears in your book. His speech, uh, it was a BYU commencement speech uh that he delivered in 1991, is all about being a scholar in the church with all that entails. Uh he says, by the way, that he hasn't received his copy of this book yet, so he doesn't entirely know what's in it. That was his caveat. Maybe you could address that with him separately. I'll make it. But I said, like, what question would you ask these two guys? And so here's his question. I would be interested to know how they situate our oratory in the larger American scene. The great or great oratorical achievements in American history are political, Washington's farewell address, Gettysburg, etc. Do Mormons do political oratory, or do we even propound visions for the nation? In other words, are we parochial? The answer may be evident in the book's table of contents, which I don't have, but it is one thought that came to my mind. A version of this thought is the question of audience. Do Mormons speak to anyone besides themselves, or are we stuck in our parochial boundaries?
SPEAKER_01I'm tempted to pass the baton to Isaac again, but I I won't do that this time because this is a tough question. I think we've sort of addressed it a little bit with our conversation about these political speeches, the chapters from politicians and those addressing political issues already, but a really key part of this history is where Mormonism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself emerges from. We're talking about the Second Great Awakening in the United States. This is very late 18th century through middle 19th century. We're talking about a massive resurgence of religious enthusiasm in the country. And out of that context, there was a kind of inspiration that allowed people to believe they could have a voice in the broader, not just religious, but in the broader culture of the United States. So Joseph Smith is one of the key figures, and perhaps the most key figure in this history who decides that we do we don't have to be subject to highly credentialed, elite, institutional, bureaucratic religious authorities anymore. We can have our own revelation, we can create our own movements, and the only real criterion that we need to be mindful of is whether or not we inspire each other. That's what the Second Great Awakening was all about. And that movement was concomitant with other movements in American history, such as abolition, eventually suffrage. We're talking about economic populism in the Jacksonian era. So during this whole hit, the whole essence, the whole inspiration behind this historical period was the sense that we are going to create not just a new religious cultural framework, but we're going to challenge the existing political, social, and economic frameworks as well. So I think we are essentially a political movement, not just a religious movement. And then I think also we do need to work on transcending our parochialism because that's the, you know, we started out of this very vibrant movement. We should, we should kind of return to that to some extent and keep trying to speak truth to power, not just within our own institutions, but to other institutions as well.
SPEAKER_02There's a fair amount of Utah-centric uhness in the book. It goes through, you know, different periods have different points of emphasis. And I think, let's say in the 1970s, 60s and 70s, when the Mormon arts movement was happening, when dialogue and sunstone were just starting, when Mormon Studies programs were just starting, there was a lot of inward-looking um text coming out. And I think it was uh in hindsight uh a bit narrow. Um but you know, my my experience with with the content that you're talking about is slightly different. When I went to college, and I didn't go to BYU, I uh NYU speaks almost the same thing. Uh but uh you know, I came to study literature and in American literature it starts with the religious authors, you know, it starts with John Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson and so on. And so those were those were literary texts. I think one of the fascinating surprises for me of your book is how in the initials uh introduction and some early chapters, talking about the the concepts of rhetoric and the construction of it, you know, and how that works. And I felt I felt like it was like a literary um analysis in a way that was exciting to me. Um that's not the purpose of your book, I wouldn't say it's literary, but it has that effect for me.
SPEAKER_01Again, I'll take the lead on this really briefly. I'll be short so Isaac can uh can add to it because I know he has thoughts on this. But I wanted to comment on that because we very much do want people to approach these texts as literary, even though they are oratorical artifacts. As we said at the beginning of the podcast, oratory is the original literature, it's the original poetry. We want people to close read these texts, to look at them as artistically constructed artifacts that merit a close and appreciative readings. Um and then I'll just add, I'm gonna get a little, I'm gonna get really nerdy and a little pretentious here, Glenn. So fair warning. Get in Lawning Powell. Yeah, exactly. This is the right, this is the right place for this, right? Um we were talking about stories earlier. You know, you you were looking at this as a story. You were talking about the introduction or a reference to the storiness of the oratorical tradition in the Latter-day Saint world. The word the ancient Greeks might use for story is Lagos. It's the same word they might use for speech. And this is what we see in the New Testament as well when we read in in John 1 in the beginning was the word, you know, inarchaienha lagos. Lagos is it could it means word, it means speech, it also means story. So at the very root of not just our own history, but we might believe if we take that language seriously. At the root of everything, at the root of God Himself, at the root of the very creation of the world is a commitment to this mysterious power that we call the Lagos or speech or storytelling. So we very much want people to look at this as a literary, as an anthology of literature in many ways, and we hope they appreciate it on that level. Really cool.
SPEAKER_00So I think what we're seeing here is there's at least all three of those tiers. Um, and to kind of bring together a few of the threads, at least a dozen of the speeches out of the 55 are outward-facing. They're addressed to non-Latter-day Saint audiences or broader audiences. This would be, you know, Tara Westover's commencement speech at a secular university, right? Or um Elizabeth Smart's TED Talk, right? Or, or of course, the politicians we've listed, even Gordon Behinkley's interview with Larry King is clearly a little bit of a PR move, right? It's talking out rather than just internal. Um, and so there's kind of you get a sense of all these different voices talking. The thing that religion and politics have in common and that the logos points towards is um it's debates about the good. What is good? What is the good life? How do we decide? And both religion and politics and each individual person and community are negotiating that through language. And uh, you know, Wayne Booth often talked about trying to achieve a plausible harmony, get some sort of unity or understanding across all these different voices pushing us in different directions. That's one thing that's beautiful for me about the book is that it holds all those different perspectives on the world between two covers. You can tell that the authors and speakers don't all agree. Ben and I don't agree with every single thing that's in the volume, right? And that's part of its beauty.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I'm I I had the same reaction. There are there are certain people that I, you know, appeal to me less. You know, there's there I I lived through some of the debates that they're talking about. I it's I there's some been there, done thatness uh for me with uh some of these. But one thing that I that struck me and a minute ago I was kind of harsh on um on the Utah-centric aspect of some of our output in mid-century and a little bit later, but I find great value in those entities that were capturing and producing and publishing those things. So, you know, I mentioned Dialogue and Sunstone, of course, they're not the only ones, and and that's going to the present as well, including all the digital uh publishers. What do you think is the value that these organizations have had um the creation and dissemination of oratory?
SPEAKER_00Well, one huge thing they've done is record and archive them for us, right? I mean, when we were doing the copyright permissions for these, many of these speech, I mean, first off, they create a venue for it to happen in the first place, right? So come give a talk at our, you know, our little gathering, our little conference. But then they, if they do their job well, they collect, they preserve, they record these speeches, and you can go through and find them. A lot of those institutions you just listed are all listed in our acknowledgments places as the places we went to get copyrights to secure the, you know, these speeches.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02You mentioned in the uh in in the introduction and as apparent in the table of contents, a big book, however big it is, is not going to be complete. And you talk about gaps. And then there are, you know, there are things that are are logically absent. What do you think looking forward, you know, the next 10 and 20 and 50 years is likely to emerge from um from segments of our culture that are not currently fully represented? So let's say the entire Spanish-speaking world or Africa, Asia, and so on. How do you imagine that oratory will evolve with in those segments of our culture? I'm completely fascinated by this possibility.
SPEAKER_01I'm fascinated by it too, partly because I really don't have what I would consider to be a confident answer to that question. But I will say, of course, we hope that international voices come to the fore uh more than they have in the past. We we hope to see Latter-day Saints who come from uh places other than the United States assume not just leadership positions, but major leadership positions, or even if they don't assume major leadership positions, that they take leadership for themselves and they speak in ways that we would consider eloquent. We have uh politicians elsewhere in the world who are doing interesting things, and some of them are not Mormon anymore, Latter-day Saints anymore, you know, Jacinda Ader in uh in New Zealand, for example. I would love to see more Latter day Saints become prominent voices outside of the United States. That would be one. The other big question, Mark, is whether or not we will have more people of color speaking in the church in prominent ways. That was a Another that's another gap in the book. There are of course uh lots of members of the church in Latin speaking America, in South America, Central America, and we would hope to see some prominent uh voices from that area come to the fore as well.
SPEAKER_02We're recording this on July 8th, and it's gonna come out as a the podcast of the next week. Uh by the time it comes out, the center will have published a new article on an Uruguayan uh photographer uh whose work is all on social issues, teen pregnancy, uh uh immigration, etc., whose work has appeared in National Geographic, New Yorker, New York Times, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, award-winning guy, returned missionary, now he's living in Norway, and it shocks me that the church doesn't know who this guy is. He's like, you're kidding. With credentials like that, no one knows, you're kidding me. And it's all about the stuff that you're talking about. He's not a text guy, you know, he's a photographer, but they're photojournalism. And he, and so these are, you know, uh photo essays essentially on these issues. And I think you're gonna die when you see them. And I I imagine that this kind of this kind of coming forth is a green line for other people to say, hey, I'm here too. I'm in Zimbabwe, and I'm doing some really amazing stuff. Like I was recently talking to a filmmaker in Nigeria, um, and he he was every bit as serious as anybody I've talked with in the church who's living in Hollywood, every bit as serious about it. And so there has to be a venue for that. Uh and I don't think we can hide behind the translation problem as being the barrier any longer, because technology has really uh made that quite a bit uh less of a thing, and AI is gonna continue to help with some of that. But I'm just curious, I mean, I I don't want to like blindside you with some of these issues, but you had it's you know, you had mentioned this idea about gaps, but any additional thoughts on these kinds of possibilities.
SPEAKER_00I think that you've really just gave an amazing vision of what the third century of Latter-day Saint rhetoric and oratory can look like, right? So this first volume, we had some pretty narrow constraints on it. It had to be orally delivered to a live audience, right? But a video essay is by, you know, a Uruguayan, you know, photojournalist in Norway is still rhetoric. It's still trying to, you know, make an argument, persuade people to do change. And so we kind of had that artificial constraint on public speaking. Um, but I mean, uh a future edition, you know, of the studies, this type of stuff will take in to all the digital and multimedia formats. It will take in a greater international scope. And we do address that in the introduction, just that uh there have been more, you know, Latter-day Saints outside the United States than within for several decades now. And so the phenomenon of study is a little bit slow to catch up. Uh, but we're seeing that work done already. Just uh, you know, earlier this year, Wayfair emailed me and said, we want to reprint this speech that was delivered originally in Spanish in a Central American country. And can you write a little, you know, head note introduction to it? And I was reading through the speech, he's citing local politicians, you know what I mean? And and interesting, so it's an interesting hodgepodge of culture. It's globalization, I think, is that you're pointing to, right? That we're no longer going to be isolated by time and space. That's what the internet has done is collapse time and space, and it furthered a little collapse language. One of the regrets I have is that when I was on my mission in India, I didn't have a little tape recorder to record all the Telugu speeches that were being given in church. But it's important, I think, to point out that the structure of the church, that even children give up and bear testimony and give sacrament talks, that's a global phenomenon. And so that's that's transcultural wherever the church as an institution exists. And it's going to be very interesting to know whenever those archives become available. And for all the great international scholars who are already doing this work, um, what types of sacrament talks were being given in these different countries and places for a long time. It'll be fascinating.
SPEAKER_02Uh Ben, you had mentioned John Pierce in Yeah at Yale, and he's not the only LDS academic whose focus is media in in the church. And I think some of them, Mason Kamana Alred is one, and others, really can really could take this and run with it, you know, and kind of spearhead this as more of an expanding uh area of of discussion, you know, a topic really worthy of exploring that I think is cool. Um we probably should kind of start winding things down, which is gonna be uh a pain for me. How do you imagine that the book will be used by readers?
SPEAKER_01Any way they want to, first of all.
SPEAKER_00Uh as a as a book stop, as a door stop or uh paperweight.
SPEAKER_01I I was I was gonna say it Isaac and I want wanted to make sure it looked good on a shelf. So if that's all you do with it, that's fine with us. You care about the spine a lot. Yeah. So so uh we wanted a nice, serious-looking volume that would look weighty and important on someone's shelf. Two, it can serve as a reference. You don't have to open it up and read it from start to finish. You can do, kind of as you said earlier, Glenn, a skimming approach. You can say, well, that one looks really interesting, and that one looks really interesting. That one I'm not that curious about. I'm gonna kind of skim it, move on to the next one. You can move around, so you can use it as a reference point. That's probably the main purpose that Isaac and I had in mind when we created it, not as something to be read from start to finish, but something that would create a foundation upon which other scholars in rhetoric, communication, media, perhaps literature, would build as we expand the conversation about the history of Latter-day Saint rhetoric, oratory, eloquence. We want this to be a starting point for a much bigger, broader conversation, which we hope will trail well into this uh upcoming third century.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I would say that the stranglehold of Mormon studies on topics like this should be broken. Like I didn't go, you know, I didn't go to church school, I didn't go to a Mormon studies program. Um, and so I've had to cobble my own to the extent that I know anything about these things just by people recommending things or my own curiosity. I think your book is a self-guided tour of highlight moments. Um and, you know, I was at church on Sunday and I was it was fast and testimony meeting, and I thought of all these people who are giving speeches, and they're it's like it's kind of improvisational, this open mic thing that we do. But our emphasis on this um in any given Sunday, we're discussing talks previously given. Um, there's one other way that this book can be used that um makes me feel a little bit ashamed. I've given relatively good uh speeches from time to time and moderately bad speeches uh from time to time. In your introduction, which is a uh must-read document to my view, you also break down the components of speechifying and you use some various um approaches. And one of them, just to quote here, you write, whether this leads to eloquence or banality depends upon the speaker. Those who merely mimic humdrum familiarities, an opening joke, points presented as a list, inspirational stories of tenuous relevance, produce forgettable redundancy. End quote. Well, I take your book as a challenge. I've determined to be a better speaker. So any advice for us who, you know, we all have to speak sometimes. Any advice for us to upgrade?
SPEAKER_00One quick one, I'll just say based on what you said. We have to change the way we read speeches. So if you're asked to give a talk, right, and you think, oh, I'm gonna go read talks that I can then quote from, right? This book's invitation is why don't you read a talk to see how it's given? Right. And that's a mindset change. I'm not going to get content. Here's an anthology of 55 examples of a person speaking well. And you can find your own voice by creatively imitating, not a perfect imitation, not copying, but how can I make a similar move for my place and time, my day and age, my issue and topic? And that it hopefully the book can be just that type of inspiration that'll help you find your own eloquence and voice to anyone who picks it up.
SPEAKER_02All right. I have to hear from you on this.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'll add the we have lots of thoughts on this, Isaac and I, but I'll add one. And I think this is probably the most key thing any speaker can do to reframe themselves as speakers. Stop focusing on yourself so much. Focus on the audience. That is the heart of rhetorical theory. When you decide that you're less worried about how you look and how you sound, and more worried about whether or not your audience is getting the message you want them to get. When you stop focusing on how you feel and start focusing on how they feel, you are going to be transformed as a speaker. That is, I think, the key to good rhetoric. I also think that's a gospel principle. That when we reframe ourselves as servants, as rhetorical servants, we're going to become better rhetoricians. So that's probably the biggest uh key piece of advice. And then just to appreciate the power that you have as a speaker. It's a it's a remarkable gift. Uh one of the Greek myths Isaac and I have published on elsewhere is the idea that the logos, right, speech came from the gods and it's the one thing that sets us apart from the animals. They have all the other cool tools, the claws and the wings, and the they can fly and all that stuff. And humans are pretty pathetic creatures, with this one exception. We have the ability to think and reason and speak with one another. And that's why we survive and thrive. So appreciate that, reverence it, magnify it.
SPEAKER_02On behalf of the center, I want to thank Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards for being my guests today. And I thank you all listeners for your attention and support. Last month, the podcast celebrated its 100th monthly podcast interview. And I invite you to go to our center's website, Center for LatterdaySaint Arts.org, and find a podcast on any of the major platforms and do a little exploring. There are many, many great interviews there. Maybe 50 years from now we'll be looking at them as some kind of oral history of significance. I don't know. So thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Glenn. What a pleasure. All right. Bye-bye.
