Scholarship

In this project, I examine an 1868 letter written by Mark Hill Forscutt to Lucinda Hartwell in Council Bluffs, in which he confessed that he was “anxious to see my children.” I situate this moment of longing at a personal crossroads within the broader Mormon crossroads of Council Bluffs, a place where migration, separation, and institutional transition frequently intersected. This study develops a dimension of Forscutt’s life that I did not address in my earlier article, Mark Hill Forscutt: Mormon Missionary, Morrisite Apostle, RLDS Minister (2001), by drawing on newly identified Utah divorce records, diaries, and correspondence.

Through close textual analysis, I show that although Forscutt’s marriage to Elizabeth Unsworth had been legally dissolved, the relational consequences of that rupture remained unsettled. His self-presentation in the letter reveals how he navigated shifting familial and marital possibilities, even as Elizabeth’s experience remained largely unrecorded. In exploring these dynamics, I trace how marriage shaped ministerial credibility within emerging RLDS networks and how family disruption was unevenly experienced and preserved along gendered lines.

In 1934, Forscutt’s daughter Ruby Faunce published “Biography of Mark Hill Forscutt; Arranged from His Diaries” in fifteen installments in the Saints’ Herald. For decades the serial was the only public access to the diaries, and later accounts of the Forscutt family descend from it. In this article, I collate the serial against the diaries to show how the record was edited. The cuts follow a single line: what made Forscutt’s first marriage a legal and contested matter disappears, while what made it a household remains, so that “my family” stands in for the diarist’s own words. I argue that at least three hands shaped the printed text, Forscutt’s, Faunce’s, and the Herald editors’, and that genre governed their choices. The household’s record reached the public only after passing through the institution the household had competed with.

I am preparing a documentary edition of the Journals of Mark Hill Forscutt, drawing on manuscripts held in multiple repositories and private collections. Forscutt’s writings span his early conversion in England, his missionary service, his involvement with the Morrisite movement, his ordination and ministry in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and his later life in the American Midwest. The edition reconstructs the full textual record, situates each entry within its historical context, and provides annotations that clarify people, places, doctrinal references, and institutional developments. This project builds on my earlier scholarship on Forscutt and expands it by presenting his own words in a reliable, accessible scholarly format.

I am also preparing a documentary edition of Sketch of Joseph Morris, an important narrative source for understanding the origins, theology, and internal dynamics of the Church of the Firstborn (Morrisite). The edition brings together the surviving manuscript versions, establishes a clear textual history, and provides annotations that illuminate Morris’s revelations, leadership style, and the social and religious conditions that shaped the movement. By presenting this text with scholarly apparatus and historical framing, the project contributes to a fuller understanding of Morrisite identity, authority, and the broader landscape of nineteenth-century Restoration traditions.

Latter-day Saint religious education has been studied systematically for more than a century. In this article, I review 615 publicly accessible works on religious education in the Church Educational System and its direct institutional predecessors, published from 1922 through 2026. I argue that producing a study is only one stage in making research cumulative. It must also be preserved, made accessible, connected to later inquiry, and developed through subsequent scholarship. An exploratory analysis of research lineages identifies several mechanisms through which that continuity has occurred, and I consider how the existing research tradition might become more cumulative.

In this article, I trace how two borrowed theories of institutional survival entered the Church Educational System between 2005 and 2026. Disruptive innovation, set out in The Innovative University (2011), arrived as an organizational template. James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light (1998) arrived as a vocabulary for a worry about institutional drift that Church leaders had already voiced. Both reached the commissionership of church education through men drawn from the BYU–Idaho presidency. I show how church education came to hold both at once, although one counsels opening an institution to those it does not yet serve and the other counsels tightening its ties to its sponsor.

In this article, my co-authors and I ask how information systems reshaped institutional knowledge in Seminaries and Institutes of Religion (S&I) as reporting moved from paper to integrated digital platforms. Drawing on 28 oral history interviews, institutional documents, and our own insider experience, we follow that history from the decentralized paper reports of the 1970s to the Worldwide Institute and Seminary Enrollment (WISE) platform. We argue that the change was more than administrative modernization. It altered how the institution knew itself, giving quantitative metrics new authority and letting measurable participation stand in for spiritual and intellectual growth that is harder to capture.

Beginning in 2014, the seminary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave standardized learning assessments to hundreds of thousands of students each year. In this article, I reconstruct the program’s development, implementation, and withdrawal, drawing on official publications, policy documents, an oral history interview with one of the assessments’ developers, and my experience as a former manager of the S&I Office of Research. I argue that the program joined a credit requirement to a measurement instrument whose histories then diverged, so that a graduation requirement once tied to a scored examination outlasted the measurement behind it by four years.

For two decades, scholars of religious education in other traditions have studied Latter-day Saint youth, often admiringly, yet their findings rarely reach seminary and institute classrooms. In this article, I introduce that wider field to Latter-day Saint religious educators through three questions every teacher faces: why some youth keep their faith, how instruction and formation are related, and how we know a program works. For each, I show what Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and Seventh-day Adventist educators have learned and how they learned it, through research designs that separate what religious education does from what families and communities do. I also consider habits of mind that can limit listening and suggest ways teachers, researchers, and institutions might join the conversation.

A free, independent web tool I’m building to help people learn where they stand in their understanding of Latter-day Saint teachings and scripture. It’s for members, former members, people of other faiths or none, and the curious. Rather than testing memorized facts or references, the questions ask learners to explain, apply, and interpret teachings and passages. Results show strengths and topics to explore, along with suggested readings, but never give away answers, so the profile can be retaken as learning grows. The project treats measurement openly: question development follows a published protocol, scoring uses established psychometric models, and technical documentation will be public. A later research phase will add optional measures of belief, practice, and relationship to the Church, and will publish anonymous group profiles. The site is noncommercial and not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Launch is planned for 2027 at latterdaysaintlearning.org.