The Great Tradition of Mormon Oratory (feat. Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards)

The Latter-day Saint tradition features a prodigious number of eloquent speakers and famous speeches — from Brigham Young's sermons to Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" address. But how does this tradition, especially with its lack of formal homiletical training, boast such a rich, deeply ingrained, and democratic culture of public address?

On today's episode of Scholars & Saints, host Nicholas Shrum probes these questions with Professor Richard Benjamin Crosby and PhD Student Isaac James Richards, editors of Latter-Day Eloquence: Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory (University of Illinois Press, 2026). Crosby and Richards discuss the oratorical culture in which Latter-day Saints are raised, as well as the different rhetorical topics commonly employed in public addresses, such as rhetorics of exaltation, Zion, and peculiarity. They also examine the adaptation of Mormon rhetoric and public image in response to cultural assimilation, as well as the impacts of the digital age on Latter-day Saint oratory and communication.

Richard Benjamin Crosby is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University, where he studies and teaches rhetorical theory and practice, with an interest in political and religious communication.

Isaac James Richards is a PhD Student in Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He studies the history and theory of writing, rhetoric, media, and communication, with particular attention to the intersection of memory, religion, and democracy.

Transcript

00;00;02;02 - 00;00;32;03

Nicholas Shrum

You're listening to Scholars and Saints. The UVA Mormon Studies podcast. I'm your host, Nicholas Shrum, a PhD candidate in American religions at the University of Virginia. On this podcast, we dive into the academic study of Mormonism. We engage recent and classic scholarship, interview prominent and up and coming thinkers in the field, and reflect on Mormonism relevance to the broader study of religion, scholars, and saints is brought to you by support from the Richard Lyman Bushman Endowed Professorship of Mormon Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

00;00;32;09 - 00;01;00;07

Nicholas Shrum

The podcast goal is to discuss some of the most pressing issues in cutting edge methods in Mormon studies, and put them in conversation with scholarship from the discipline of religious studies. While the podcast content explores Mormonism, the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any organizations they represent or study, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and the University of Virginia.

00;01;04;22 - 00;01;28;18

Nicholas Shrum

Today on the podcast, I'm joined by scholars Professor Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards, Coeditors of the fascinating new anthology Latter Day Eloquence Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory, published with the University of Illinois Press. Despite having no professionally trained paid local clergy, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints possesses a deeply ingrained, democratic and ubiquitous culture of public address.

00;01;28;19 - 00;01;50;11

Nicholas Shrum

As our guests point out, members of the faith are shaped as oratorical creatures from a very young age, preaching and teaching everywhere from Children's Sunday School to missions across the globe to capture the flow of this great story. Crosby and Richards have compiled 55 speeches spanning the two centuries between 1820 and 2020, moving far beyond traditional devotional sermon collections.

00;01;50;13 - 00;02;13;08

Nicholas Shrum

This volume features a rich diversity of speakers, including women, people of color, politicians, and even excommunicants and dissidents to explore the paradoxes, struggles, and other characteristics of Latter-day Saint eloquence that the coeditors describe as “Driven by a sense that a whole sounded communication really can achieve a kind of godly perfection, both in the individual and in the community.”

00;02;13;09 - 00;02;28;10

Nicholas Shrum

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Professor Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richard.

00;02;28;12 - 00;03;10;23

Nicholas Shrum

Welcome to another episode of Scholars and Saints, the University of Virginia mormon studies podcast. I'm very excited today to today to have two editors of a recent volume published at the University of Illinois Press called Latter Day Eloquence Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory. This is a really exciting and groundbreaking volume edited collection of speeches and latter day Saint oratory talks and speeches, addresses that have been contextualized and theorized by a variety of different authors scholars within Mormon studies that help us to understand this really important facet of the Mormon experience.

00;03;10;23 - 00;03;34;22

Nicholas Shrum

How latter day Saints talk and speak and address others in ways that are comparative to how other religious traditions, and specifically Christian denominations, have done. The two editors that we're going to be speaking with today are first, Professor Richard Benjamin Crosby, who is a professor of English at Brigham Young University in Provo, along with Isaac James. Richard who?

00;03;34;23 - 00;03;54;20

Nicholas Shrum

Richards. Excuse me, who is a PhD student at Penn State University in Communications, who's also received a university graduate fellowship at that institution and teaches public speaking. Really excited and honored to have these two authors and editors on the podcast today. So please welcome me and joining them. Welcome. Thank you. Nicholas.

00;03;54;20 - 00;03;56;10

Richard Benjamin Crosby

It's our pleasure to be here.

00;03;56;13 - 00;04;14;24

Nicholas Shrum

To start off, I would love to have both of you kind of speak a little bit to your by your biography. Right. I would love to hear about your backgrounds and education, your research interests, and kind of how those things lead into. We'll ask you about how you both got into this project, but where are you both coming from?

00;04;14;24 - 00;04;17;21

Nicholas Shrum

And maybe we could start with with you, Ben?

00;04;17;24 - 00;04;47;23

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Yes. Happy to do so. I was an English major in college. As an undergraduate. I studied English literature and developed a real interest in in close reading, close textual analysis, deep appreciation of texts and so forth. But at the same time, I was competing in speech and debate, and I loved that as well. I didn't realize it at the time, but these two paths have a kind of common origin.

00;04;47;25 - 00;05;16;22

Richard Benjamin Crosby

They're both grounded in the tradition of rhetoric. So although I didn't realize it at the time, when I got my master's degree, also in English literature, I also found myself studying composition and rhetoric because they teach you how to teach writing to young students. And they they give you this framework of rhetoric as a means of teaching writing.

00;05;16;24 - 00;05;53;18

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Long story short, I realized that rhetoric was probably where I wanted to devote most of my interest. So although I love literature, I love studying literature, I love studying texts. I realize that in pursuing rhetoric, I can still study great texts, but they are mostly rhetorical texts, including oratory, which is the original literature. I loved giving speeches, I loved competing, I loved arguing, but studying great public address became sort of my primary love as an academic.

00;05;53;19 - 00;06;04;15

Richard Benjamin Crosby

So I pursued a PhD in rhetoric through a communication department at the University of Washington. That's my background. That's why I'm interested in the topic we're discussing today.

00;06;04;17 - 00;06;07;06

Nicholas Shrum

Excellent. Thank you. Ben. What about yourself? Isaac?

00;06;07;08 - 00;06;34;01

Isaac James Richards

Yeah. So, I did my undergraduate in communications at Brigham Young University. And the classes, they were very practice focused, and I found that I enjoyed. I was taking a minor in professional writing and rhetoric in my rhetoric classes. There I realized I enjoyed the theory and the philosophy and the study of communication almost as much, if not more, than I enjoyed practicing communication.

00;06;34;01 - 00;06;58;17

Isaac James Richards

So that led me to get a master's degree in English at BYU, where I studied with Ben. Ben was my master's thesis advisor. I took classes from him and we studied the history of rhetoric together. That's kind of how our relationship evolved. And so yeah, now I'm doing my PhD in communication arts and sciences at Penn State. I study broadly relationship between rhetoric, religion, memory and democracy.

00;06;58;17 - 00;07;04;19

Isaac James Richards

So even though I'm not getting a degree in religious studies, definitely an important part of my disciplinary interest.

00;07;04;20 - 00;07;30;20

Nicholas Shrum

Absolutely. And I think that, you know, the study of rhetoric and and literature communication weaves right into the interdisciplinary study of religion quite seamlessly. So this I think this is really exciting to have you both on the podcast to talk about this study, which is, as I mentioned in the introduction, pretty groundbreaking in Mormon studies as far as what kind of works have been done in this, this realm, in this field before.

00;07;30;23 - 00;07;53;27

Nicholas Shrum

So I'd love to hear you speak about what led you. You mentioned that there's already a relationship between the two of you that that developed at BYU, but, you know, how did you both decide on a project that would kind of take on this new approach to Mormon studies, looking at oratory and rhetoric? How did that originate?

00;07;53;29 - 00;08;16;20

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I think I'd like to take this one at at the beginning, because I'd like to talk about Isaac's involvement and how that came to be. So this is a project that's been in my head for many years. In fact, it goes back to my PhD studies when I thought, you know, no one's really studied Mormon rhetoric or Mormon oratory in any deeper, comprehensive way.

00;08;16;20 - 00;08;40;13

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if there was just an anthology of great Mormon public address? People have done sort of niche anthologies of Mormon public address like speeches by general authorities or devotional speeches or speeches by women. But I thought, wouldn't it be cool to just have a sort of greatest hits, you know, of of latter day Saints speeches?

00;08;40;20 - 00;09;04;02

Richard Benjamin Crosby

It was kind of a passive idea. It was almost a casual idea. And I mentioned it in passing to Isaac one day. And what you probably don't know about Isaac is he's a phenom in terms of, well, in many ways, but he's a phenom when it comes to logistics. And if you give him an idea, he will he will take it and carry it over the finish line.

00;09;04;02 - 00;09;21;15

Richard Benjamin Crosby

He will get it to where it needs to be. So he said once he heard the idea, he said, let's do it. And I was like, oh, I don't know. I've got these other projects I'm interested in. I, you know, we're doing this. Isaac and I have coauthored on other projects, though, so I sort of listened. I sort of perked up when he said, let's do it.

00;09;21;17 - 00;09;42;16

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And I think he sort of convinced me, you know, he used his own eloquence. He was like, no, no, no, no, we can get this done. Here's how we can get it done. And I was like, all right, let's do this. And it's been a pleasure to to do it. The whole process, from working with Isaac to the University of Illinois to our contributors, we have over 60 contributors to this volume.

00;09;42;16 - 00;09;52;21

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Everyone's been amazing. Everyone's been so efficient and timely. It's been a pleasure. So I'll let Isaac kind of share his own perspective on the background of this project.

00;09;52;24 - 00;10;22;03

Isaac James Richards

You know, that's quite right. Two things I would add is I was in a history of rhetoric class, graduate class that Ben was teaching, and there's a textbook that's very common to use. It's an anthology called The Rhetorical Tradition. And it's just this massive, massive textbook of rhetorical theory, rhetorical history. And so, Ben, I was in Ben's class, and I remember saying something like, why don't we have one of these latter day Saint speeches, why don't we have the collection?

00;10;22;03 - 00;10;43;14

Isaac James Richards

And Ben says, well, I've always thought of doing something like that. And then I was like, yeah, let's, let's do it. Now I have to say, it has been a pleasure and it has been a smooth process. And that's an anomaly for edited collections of this size. I was reading just today. There was a post, you know, that common blog the professor is in and she's mocking.

00;10;43;14 - 00;11;02;14

Isaac James Richards

There's a Q&A. Should I do an edited collection? No. What if it's just a collection of conference papers from a recent conference? Should I do it then? No. What if I know? All the contributors know. And her point is basically do not do an edited collection. We just got our copies. No one will be able to see this, but it is a massive, enormous book.

00;11;02;16 - 00;11;19;09

Isaac James Richards

You know, 700 pages, 55 chapters, 60 plus contributors. And I think it's a testament to the the latter day Saint pioneer work ethic and industriousness that this whole thing team came together in just about three years, which is so it has been exciting.

00;11;19;12 - 00;11;40;02

Nicholas Shrum

That's that's a really impressive timeline from start to finish three years, especially of a project of this magnitude. So that's that's really impressive. Thank you for sharing some of the origins of the project. I wanted to to jump into some of the specifics here, and maybe we can start with if this is an appropriate question you feel like you can answer.

00;11;40;02 - 00;12;02;03

Nicholas Shrum

But what what kind of questions were you hoping to uncover or were you asking of the contributors? Right, because you didn't just set all of these authors loose to say, here's your, you know, bring your favorite speech in latter day Saint history and just say whatever you want about it, necessarily. There were some parameters, some kind of questions you wanted them to have in mind.

00;12;02;05 - 00;12;09;28

Nicholas Shrum

What kinds of things did you want each of these authors to, to bring out of their analysis of these these oratories?

00;12;10;03 - 00;12;13;21

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Isaac, I think I think you've got this one right.

00;12;13;24 - 00;12;32;22

Isaac James Richards

Sure. Yeah. We can jump in. So the question they were to say a sequence of questions. So the first question that Ben and I had was, what are the great speeches in the latter day Saint? We had to do some research. Where what are they? And then the second question, obviously for religious studies is what do they reveal about Mormonism.

00;12;32;22 - 00;12;49;24

Isaac James Richards

So the speech has become a lens. So that was one question we were posing to the contributors. What does your speech say about Mormonism? What and what ways can it be considered a mormon speech or a mormon rhetoric? So those are two of the the central questions. I think we already touched on this as we described the project.

00;12;49;24 - 00;13;12;17

Isaac James Richards

But again, latter day Saints have collected speeches in the past, you know, in the Journal of Discourses, right, in the General Conference archives. But they tend to be very specific, was we wanted to capture the diversity, breadth, range and depth of the tradition. So the other questions we were asking was, what role does oratory play in the faith as a whole?

00;13;12;17 - 00;13;29;09

Isaac James Richards

What does that chorus of different voices look like and sound like? And can that conversation as a whole be considered eloquent? So not just individual speeches, but the dynamism of the tradition as a whole. We're also trying to speak to that question.

00;13;29;11 - 00;13;31;16

Nicholas Shrum

Anything you would add, Ben?

00;13;31;18 - 00;13;55;02

Richard Benjamin Crosby

No, I don't I don't think there's anything real substantive that I'd add, but I'd reinforce a point there. We didn't know ourselves whether or not the latter day Saint tradition was eloquent, whether or not it had a tradition of eloquence, we figured it did. You know, we felt it. Did we both come from that tradition? And so there's like a sort of confirmation bias.

00;13;55;04 - 00;14;21;19

Richard Benjamin Crosby

But we wanted to test that feeling a little bit and just examine what the what the field of Mormonism or the Latter day Saint tradition could provide in terms of artifacts of eloquence. You know what's out there, which is why asking for an edited volume or proposing an edit a volume, and asking for contributions from a wide variety of diversity of contributors made sense.

00;14;21;19 - 00;14;54;26

Richard Benjamin Crosby

We wanted to see what other people really felt was was eloquent. And what you find with the volume is that those opinions, those perspectives on Mormon eloquence, are so diverse. So you're going to be exposed to speeches in this volume that really call for orthodoxy, that call for that, you know, that traditional Mormon doctrinal approach to practice and belief.

00;14;54;27 - 00;15;22;17

Richard Benjamin Crosby

You're going to find speeches on the other end of the spectrum that challenge orthodoxy in strident ways. And I think that kind of diversity is an important finding. I think one of the key assumptions that people make when they think of Mormonism or the Latter day Saint tradition is that it's mono vocal, that it has a kind of a single voice, it has a single identity.

00;15;22;18 - 00;15;48;17

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And one thing this volume will really make clear is that there is a chorus of voices, and they, and many of them, sound different from one another. And our hope is that once you read this volume, or once you get a sense of this volume, that you can feel a sense of harmony among those voices, and that to us would would signify the presence of an eloquence.

00;15;48;19 - 00;16;08;27

Nicholas Shrum

Now, thank you both for for sharing that. I will say that and this is kind of an anecdote that hopefully can lead into my my first substantive question about about this project. But as soon as I opened up this book to read and I read the title Latter Day Eloquence, the first thing that came my mind. And some listeners may be familiar with this many won't, but perhaps the two of you will.

00;16;08;28 - 00;16;33;12

Nicholas Shrum

There's a, a church history video that I remember encountering where it's Brigham Young discussing his conversion in front of a whole bunch of members of the church in, like, the 1850s or 60s. Right? And the thing that he points out is that the person whose testimony of Mormonism of the Book of Mormon came from a man without eloquence.

00;16;33;12 - 00;17;07;18

Nicholas Shrum

And so one of my initial reaction to open this up was, well, Brigham Young said in that video that there, you know, there is no eloquence in, in Mormonism oratory, except for, of course, Brigham Young's kind of eloquence that, you know, he exemplified in many of his speeches. But this kind of gets to this first question that I have for you in the in the introduction, you point out that despite having no professionally trained clergy and some listeners that aren't latter day Saints are familiar with the tradition.

00;17;07;25 - 00;17;35;00

Nicholas Shrum

This might be, you know, new information and there is no professionally trained clergy. You know, people don't go to divinity schools or seminaries to be ordained. This is something that's a very lay tradition that, despite that latter day Saint tradition, is saturated with public speaking, starting from children in primary classes to teenagers and seminary missionaries that are proselytize, proselytizing on the streets worldwide.

00;17;35;01 - 00;17;44;21

Nicholas Shrum

So my question is, how does this reliance on a lay ministry fundamentally shape the style and substance of Mormon oratory compared to other Christian traditions?

00;17;44;24 - 00;18;13;00

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Yeah, thank you for that question, Nicholas, because that was also one of the question marks we had when we approached this project. We didn't have a kind of hypothesis or a argument to make about what the unique Mormon eloquence might look like, given that we don't have a tradition of homiletics, what other traditions call homiletics, which is the theory and practice of preaching.

00;18;13;07 - 00;18;40;16

Richard Benjamin Crosby

We don't have seminaries where bishops go and learn how to give a sermon or a talk, as you point out. And we also have this tradition that you have alluded to and that Brigham Young captures in that famous quote, which I believe Isaac has committed to memory. So I'll see if he will test him later. All of this raises a very important question about whether or not Mormons are interested in eloquence.

00;18;40;18 - 00;19;12;19

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I think what makes one among the things that makes the Mormon tradition of eloquence unique, given that it does not have a formal tradition of homiletics, is that we have to rely on watching each other communicate, so no one's training us to do it. Therefore, we find ourselves imitating each other. And I think that's why we have a really kind of formulaic approach to sacrament talks, which I'm not saying is good or bad.

00;19;12;20 - 00;19;48;21

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I think that's why we have a kind of formulaic approach to General Conference addresses, because we rely so heavily on imitating the models. Interestingly, that's one of the key pedagogical principles of rhetoric going all the way back to the classical tradition. You can look at Isocrates, you can look at Aristotle, you can look at Cicero, and they'll all say that the primary means of achieving eloquence is to find a model and to imitate that model, that you can only learn so much in a formal way in an academic setting, the best way is to find a model and imitate it.

00;19;48;27 - 00;20;14;06

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Mormons do that really well, so I think that's one of the key characteristics that makes us unique. Maybe not totally unique, but it's characteristic of our tradition. And another principle that I think is characteristic of our tradition. Again, it's this commitment to plainness. Going back to that quotation you mentioned by Brigham Young, we believe in a very stripped down what I might call an exhausted, plain style.

00;20;14;09 - 00;20;48;20

Richard Benjamin Crosby

So it's dignified. It's, it's it's ambitious, it's aspirational. And yet it is stripped down in style. That, again, is not unique to our tradition, but I think it's very characteristic of our tradition because, again, we don't have this formal training. We rely on plain what some of the classical theories would call low style. And that means we are trying to achieve a certain clarity, a certain clarity of emotion, a certain clarity of message, a certain simplicity in the way we address each other and the world.

00;20;48;20 - 00;20;55;21

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I think those are some key elements that make our tradition unique or identifiable.

00;20;55;23 - 00;20;58;12

Nicholas Shrum

That's really helpful. Isaac, do you have something you'd like to add?

00;20;58;13 - 00;21;19;28

Isaac James Richards

Well, yeah, just briefly, I think Ben nailed this, this democratic impulse. Right. That comes from a lay court clergy. So there is no preacher and audience, right? It's everyone can sermon, everyone is getting up to speak. And so you get that kind of a little bit of a lowest common denominator. Right. And so you're kind of settling there.

00;21;19;28 - 00;21;37;18

Isaac James Richards

But it is interesting that you brought up that video of Brigham Young. It actually underscores a point really quite empirically. So the quote I don't have a memorize, but I do have it before me and are kind of talking points for podcast because I think it's quite influential. So I'll share the quote and then I'll share why I think it's so important.

00;21;37;19 - 00;21;57;16

Isaac James Richards

Yeah. He said, when I saw a man without eloquence or talents for public speaking who could only say, I know by the power of the Holy Ghost, but the Book of Mormon is true, that Joe Smith is a prophet of the Lord. The Holy Ghost, proceeding from that individual illuminated my understanding and light. Glory and immortality were before me.

00;21;57;16 - 00;22;19;02

Isaac James Richards

So this is historic. We have this actual quote from Brigham Young, and then it circulates widely in the discourse. It's in videos like the one you watch. It's in the manuals for teachers, almost as a kind of consolation. Oh, you've been called to be a teacher in the church. But don't worry, you don't have to be eloquent. You just have to, you know, have the spirit with you.

00;22;19;02 - 00;22;40;22

Isaac James Richards

And so this this is part of the latter day Saint voices, this kind of reliance on testimony and personal experience and witness and almost, I would say, even a little bit of disdain for eloquence, a sort of skepticism of that using the arts of language that's, you know, of the devil or something. But at the same time, we all love when a beloved speaker is really eloquent.

00;22;40;22 - 00;22;50;28

Isaac James Richards

We have our favorites, right, Jeffrey? Holland. You know, so that those, those anomalies stand out because they are eloquent and they. So yeah, there's a few additional thoughts there.

00;22;51;02 - 00;23;18;26

Nicholas Shrum

This is really helpful. And I love that, you know, kind of starting from this point of this interesting characteristic part of the Latter Day Saint tradition, oratory tradition, right, that there's kind of either a disdain or a move away, or that there's almost a privileging of this more like raw, personal kind of testimony. Don't rely upon the the reason and logic that's prevalent in classical rhetoric.

00;23;18;27 - 00;23;42;12

Nicholas Shrum

Right. That that actually itself becomes what I believe you you to define as latter day eloquence itself. So you you define as something that goes beyond mere stylistic fluency. And instead of link it to something that is and this is a quote from your introduction, quote driven by a sense that a whole sold communication really can achieve a kind of godly perfection, both in the individual and in the community.

00;23;42;12 - 00;24;08;22

Nicholas Shrum

End quote. So I wanted to ask if you could explain how this theological pursuit of perfection or exaltation, this is actually one of the the rhetorical categorizations that you theorize, right? Is this rhetoric of exaltation. How does it manifest itself in the actual rhetoric of everyday church members? And then in the speeches in this volume, how does how does this kind of rhetoric manifest itself?

00;24;08;24 - 00;24;49;13

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Yeah, I think that this notion of this particular notion of eloquence as being tied to exaltation is a key characteristic of what we would call a latter day eloquence. And I would also say it ties back to, in some ways, the classical tradition of eloquence. So maybe the pagans of the classical area didn't believe in exaltation the way we do, but they did believe that eloquence, when practiced right, could lead to a kind of perfection not only of the individual character of the individual person, but of the community.

00;24;49;14 - 00;25;32;25

Richard Benjamin Crosby

They believed in a notion called pedia, which I like to think is similar to our notion of Zion. Idea in the in the ancient Greek world was this notion that with the right rhetorical training, with the right education, we can create an ideal culture. But that starts with creating ideal citizens. So we teach eloquence so that the individual can develop the skills to become both in terms of the way they communicate and in the virtues that they cultivate in themselves and others can become citizens and leaders of citizens, so that that virtue will spread out and permeate the whole culture.

00;25;32;26 - 00;26;02;11

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I think that's very similar to our notion of Zion. We believe that if we can cultivate citizens of Zion who are virtuous and skilled, then we can achieve that. That kind of ideal community, which I think is in many ways unique to us for for latter day Saints, it's not just about the individual developing a close relationship with the savior.

00;26;02;11 - 00;26;39;20

Richard Benjamin Crosby

That's part of it. That's key. That's essential, obviously, but it's also about the way that individual interacts with influences, persuades the people around them, and how that interaction then spreads out to a whole larger community that can be perfected. We believe that Zion is the notion of a perfect community, right? A pure in heart that is unique, that is characteristic of the individual and the world they inhabit.

00;26;39;22 - 00;27;06;07

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I think eloquence is a key part of that. The ancients believe that eloquence was, sure technically a stylistic quality of speech. It was technical proficiency in speaking. But right from the very beginning, going back to we can go back to Cicero easily, and before him we can go to Isocrates. Eloquence was tied to bigger questions of virtue. You couldn't be truly eloquent if you weren't a virtuous person, because people aren't going to trust you.

00;27;06;07 - 00;27;33;12

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And so you have to cultivate virtues of character in addition to skills in communication. If you want to be the ideal orator, and if you want to cultivate the ideal community. So that level of technical proficiency up to personal character, up to communal perfection or social perfection, I think is unique both to the classical tradition and is echoed in many key ways in our own tradition.

00;27;33;14 - 00;27;35;27

Nicholas Shrum

Isaac, is there anything you'd like to add to that?

00;27;36;00 - 00;28;00;28

Isaac James Richards

That's a really eloquent articulation of that there. But yes, the the apotheosis of, you know, rhetoric as not just a good speech, but being a good person and then not just a good person, but a good community. I think that's what I would underscore there. There's a quote in the introduction we talked about. Right. Augustine says, you know, our are not only our sermons but our life and become a sort of eloquent speech of its own right.

00;28;00;29 - 00;28;14;07

Isaac James Richards

And we hear this in the cliche, right, you know, preach the gospel when necessary, use words so the sense that our life is an example and that our people miss were an example of a kind of aspirational community. All of that is exactly what we're pointing to here.

00;28;14;09 - 00;28;53;07

Nicholas Shrum

Oh, excellent. Thank you. I we were now alluded to it and referred to these different categorizations. Right. And one of those is this rhetoric of exaltation. The speeches in the volume are categorized into ten distinct rhetorical types. I can just list them off really quick, because I think listeners will will appreciate hearing the variety. There's rhetorics of continuing revelation, rhetorics of intelligence, rhetorics of testimony, rhetorics of exaltation, rhetorics of peculiarity, rhetorics of Zion, rhetorics of agency, rhetorics of priesthood authority, rhetorics of sisterhood, and rhetorics of slash in exile.

00;28;53;13 - 00;29;36;09

Nicholas Shrum

And I think that that's a really fascinating, interesting way to categorize latter saint oratory. One of them that I'm particularly interested in, in my own work at the University of Virginia, is this rhetoric of peculiarity. This is really helpful for me, and I'm wondering if you could speak about that a little bit more. How have more orators historically navigated this tension between which this become a theme on the podcast and many of the the works that we've discussed, but this tension between assimilating into broader American culture, but then also maintaining an identity as a peculiar people, kind of this Mormon peculiarity or distinctiveness or even exceptionalism.

00;29;36;09 - 00;29;39;29

Nicholas Shrum

I'm wondering if, if either of you or both of you could speak to that.

00;29;40;01 - 00;30;03;21

Isaac James Richards

Yeah, I can at least start. So, Nicholas, you're probably familiar with the kind of classic famous study here is almond mouse, right? The Angel and the beehive. So there's this sense that a religious tradition has to be different enough from the broader culture to offer benefits to its community. But it also has to be, you know, if it's too different, right, then it's outside the mainstream.

00;30;03;22 - 00;30;26;28

Isaac James Richards

And the kind of classic history of Mormonism or the Latter Day Saint tradition is kind of usually written as, oh, they gradually assimilated more and more. They went from, you know, very weird to, you know, passable, I guess we could say. And Ben Crosby is actually written about this in some of the communication journals in our field. He called it liminal whiteness, right?

00;30;26;29 - 00;30;57;01

Isaac James Richards

Where we're wide enough and rich enough to have people like Mitt Romney running for president. Right. That seems clearly to be. Oh, they are assimilated into the kind of general normative, whatever you would call it, a white Christian kind of demographic, at least in the United States. However, as we know from the media, right, latter day Saints become this constant kind of touchstone of difference, uniqueness.

00;30;57;04 - 00;31;19;24

Isaac James Richards

So what I would say that rhetoric and oratory can offer, particularly to this question that maybe other disciplines can't get at, is sometimes latter day Saints are speaking to themselves, they're speaking to their community, and sometimes they're speaking with the broader world. They're trying to speak to the broader world. So if you look at the speeches in the volume, you can get a sense of how they're navigating that identity.

00;31;19;26 - 00;31;39;09

Isaac James Richards

A lot of times based on the rhetorical situation. And when you're speaking to the tribe, you have a different set of rhetorical resources. You can lean into that identity more fully when you're speaking to the larger audience. When you're speaking on a bigger stage, a bigger platform, you'll see those rhetorical navigation of tensions just like you were talking about.

00;31;39;11 - 00;31;41;11

Nicholas Shrum

That's helpful. Thanks, Ben. Anything to add?

00;31;41;12 - 00;32;10;14

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Only that there are a few specific chapters in the volume that I think will scratch that itch for you, and I'm going to forget a whole bunch of them. But the first one that comes to mind is Mitt Romney's Faith in America address. I think this balance that latter day Saints have tried to strike between distinctiveness and assimilation is one of the most interesting rhetorical problems that that the tradition faces.

00;32;10;15 - 00;32;36;20

Richard Benjamin Crosby

It's an opportunity and a problem. I think the evidence lately, especially lately, would suggest we're not doing it very well that we haven't we haven't been striking that balance very well. I just read a a poll and I haven't I haven't seen it this low before. Mormonism is always very low on the popularity scale relative to other religions.

00;32;36;20 - 00;33;03;11

Richard Benjamin Crosby

This is the lowest I've seen it, and unfortunately I'm not going to be able to cite the source because I don't have it committed to memory. But it was 15%, so it was below atheists, below Muslims. This is what in rhetoric we call an exigency, a problem marked by urgency that calls for a rhetorical response. And what we see in the latter day Saint tradition of rhetoric is an effort to neutralize that exigency.

00;33;03;11 - 00;33;30;24

Richard Benjamin Crosby

But time and again, a kind of failure to neutralize that exigency, we have achieved a certain level of whiteness. But and, of course, Paul Reef does a great job in his book on on whiteness and Mormonism. But rhetorically, my interest in this question is, did we overachieve whiteness? Are we now Uber white? Are we so white that we're conspicuously white that we've othered ourselves yet again?

00;33;30;27 - 00;33;46;23

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Because we've we've aired on in the opposite direction? I don't know the answer to that question. I would just reinforce that. It's a very interesting question. This this tension between peculiarity and assimilation that we've been struggling with for 200 years.

00;33;46;25 - 00;34;10;01

Nicholas Shrum

Thank you both. And and perhaps I can ask a kind of unprepared question, because this discussion is, has brought a lot of thoughts in my mind about kind of the position of latter day Saints, especially in the United States. But I think that this lens of rhetoric and communication is a really interesting way to look at this. And maybe I would love your thoughts.

00;34;10;01 - 00;34;50;23

Nicholas Shrum

And it's totally fine if there aren't a lot of them. But you citing that poll of public opinion of latter day Saints in the United States being very, very low. And I know that Pew and others have have frequently cited, especially Muslims and Mormons being pretty close over the last couple of decades. I'm curious how latter day Saint oratory, the rhetoric of kind of we've seen in recent years, especially since President Russell Nelson had been president in 2018, kind of this effort to make latter day Saints a little bit more approachable, more, more mainstream Christian.

00;34;50;24 - 00;35;21;19

Nicholas Shrum

Right. So we see that the emphasis on the church's full name, we see the Christus statue being the new logo, kind of this falling away of Moroni and this, this kind of and the various speeches, right, that have done that. I'm curious why maybe that rhetoric isn't matching up to the on the ground reality of like, how latter day Saints are being received is the rhetoric not matching up to what maybe the mainstream expectation of acceptance should look like?

00;35;21;20 - 00;35;25;24

Nicholas Shrum

I'm just curious of anybody's thoughts on that. And no worries if.

00;35;25;26 - 00;35;50;12

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I'll start here, Isaac, and I'd love to know if you have some thoughts on this too, because it's a question that we don't really address in the volume. We haven't studied it in any great detail, but it's one that I think we're both very interested in. I think the first problem with the way the church has approached its public perception is to try really hard to fix the public perception.

00;35;50;15 - 00;36;19;09

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Once you are obviously making an effort and overt effort, you become quote unquote, a TriHard, and that's going to marginalize you faster and further than anything else that you might do. So the PR campaigns over the years haven't seemed to work. If we're looking at these polls, they don't seem to have worked. And as you very correctly point out, Nicolas, we're wondering why why?

00;36;19;11 - 00;36;41;16

Richard Benjamin Crosby

You know, what's going on there. So one of one of my initial thoughts is that I may perhaps we're trying to hard so hard that we've become conspicuous. And this again goes back to our effort to assimilate over the centuries, which is a very difficult thing to do. I'm not even criticizing the church here. The church is in a position that is really complicated.

00;36;41;19 - 00;37;09;22

Richard Benjamin Crosby

We weren't white enough. We you know, we were too different. We were too marginalized. In our initial decades, we made a decision to assimilate. And in many respects, we overcompensated. We tried to hard. We assimilated too far. We became too conspicuous in our effort to become, quote unquote, normal. Where's that middle ground? I don't know, that's not that's so I don't I'm not giving I'm not giving you a satisfactory answer.

00;37;09;25 - 00;37;19;29

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I'm only saying that it's certainly top of our mind as well. And the essence of that question, the essence of that problem is, in my view, and I think Isaac would agree. Rhetorical.

00;37;20;02 - 00;37;53;26

Isaac James Richards

Yeah. There's a long tradition of scholarship about latter day Saint reception in the public eye. And we, you know, cite awareness of that in this volume. But that's that's not the purpose of the volume. So it is an interesting literature that you could really spend a lot of time on. I think one, two things that come to mind is one of my professors of rhetoric here at Penn State once said, the louder that a president of the United States where claims that they're unified, the more fractured the nation is right there.

00;37;53;26 - 00;38;16;17

Isaac James Richards

So rhetoric is interesting. There's a methodological problem there. And all historians know this. When you examine any historical document, right, is much as in the Old Testament, prohibition against this, prohibition against this. Okay. Well, we have to assume that was going on, right, because they kept telling him not to do it. And so I think there's a sense that the more that latter day Saints tried to appear normal, there's a more sense that they don't feel normal.

00;38;16;19 - 00;38;41;13

Isaac James Richards

Right, or that it's not working exactly like Ben said. And then the second one I'd say is this is always very contingent on circumstance or rhetorical task. There are rhetorical affordances to leaning into difference in certain spheres, and that something has to be, especially in an age of kind of identity politics. You know, I have a professor here at Penn State who's an expert in, you know, Amish and Mennonite literature and poetry.

00;38;41;14 - 00;38;56;01

Isaac James Richards

And she'll often say, well, I was being raised in the 80s when journals wanted to publish unique American subcultures. And so there's there's always a constraint and affordance there. But, yeah, we're both out of our depth as we try to speculate, speculate on that perennial problem.

00;38;56;03 - 00;39;31;08

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I'll add this one other thing, Nicholas, I've worked with. I have a close friend and coauthor colleague, Jamie Motion, who is a rhetorician of Jewish discourses. He's a he's a he's a Jewish studies scholar and a rhetorician. He and I have coauthored some work, and we've both asked questions about the rhetoric of assimilation and how complicated it is, because where it would appear that latter day Saints have overachieved a certain level of whiteness, and again, we could get into what that term means, and we probably don't have time to do that in this podcast.

00;39;31;08 - 00;40;04;28

Richard Benjamin Crosby

But we've overachieved a certain appearance or costume of normality that we've become conspicuous. He professor motion would, I think, say that Jewish people had the same exigency in the 19th century and have struggled because they have in many ways underachieved it. So we, we had an accident that was shared between us, you know, certain marginalized religious groups. Mormons shot too far one direction.

00;40;04;28 - 00;40;30;29

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And we're trying to navigate where we're coming back. That middle ground is that sweet spot Jewish people have, perhaps undershot it. They're still considered ethnic and othered. As a result of that, they're still struggling to find that sweet spot. So again, I would just underscore how difficult, perhaps even impossible, this rhetorical complexity is for marginalized groups.

00;40;30;29 - 00;41;04;03

Nicholas Shrum

I appreciate both of you indulging me on this question. I just it's it it is so fascinating to me that to be able to kind of dive into these, these lenses on Mormon size of rhetoric and these are the kinds of questions that I think it can spark. And so for when readers pick this up, I think they'll be surprised at how often, when they read one of the author's kind of contextualization and introductions to a speech, how quickly they're going to recognize some things that they were maybe, perhaps previously unaware of that, that have such a long staying power.

00;41;04;03 - 00;41;55;01

Nicholas Shrum

And one example that I'll just speak to really quick, that I one of the chapters that I've read was Will Peress chapter on J. Reuben Clark's The Charted Course speech. Right. This famous or infamous or however one might want to to to to talk about it this you know, contextualize in modernity versus fundamentalism, higher education and secularism that is such a great example of a particular leader using this rhetoric of peculiarity, right in and and against, you know, a trends in higher education in the 1930s, that wasn't just for then, that is still being talked about now that that that rhetoric of assimilation or peculiarity can rise again.

00;41;55;01 - 00;42;28;12

Nicholas Shrum

And it's still being discussed and taught at BYU, to my understanding that that in fact, I believe that undergraduates are are encouraged or even required to to read this text along with others like the the second century President Kimball's talk from the 1970s. That kind of how how do we as a people, as latter day Saints approach this thing called education, with all these things going on around us, and how do we think of ourselves as peculiar, but how do we take the best of what we see around us, but, you know, separate ourselves from these other things?

00;42;28;12 - 00;42;55;08

Nicholas Shrum

So again, I appreciate that. The other thing I'll just add really quick that I really appreciate it, is that last summer I was part of a discussion on pastor Mark Driscoll's comments about latter day Saints. And one of the things that that really stuck out to me in one of his videos about latter day Saints, is that he called the rebranding right of the church to emphasize the proper full name of the church a PR move.

00;42;55;10 - 00;43;19;01

Nicholas Shrum

Right? And I just find that so interesting because even, you know, critics can can see that there is like a tradition or there's at least a, a process or a discipline of rhetoric that the church and Mormons have always been engaged in. And that can be very authentic and can have lots of important reasons for doing that. But still, some people will either they'll see right through it or interpret it in a certain way.

00;43;19;01 - 00;43;43;25

Nicholas Shrum

And so I just found that really fascinating that that a prominent critic of the church has a very large venue, a large audience categorize the church's efforts as a PR move. Really interesting. I wanted to move on just because of time to one of the I think really and, and important parts of this project is and the ways that it differs from previous examples.

00;43;43;25 - 00;44;07;24

Nicholas Shrum

I'm thinking of you, Isaac. You had mentioned journal discourses. I'm thinking of other projects, kind of like at the pulpit that have been published with the church history department. They're devotional compilations, right? But this anthology includes voices of quote unquote exile, people that have been communicated or dissidents or critics of the church, people like John Dillon, Sonia Johnson, Byron Marchant.

00;44;07;27 - 00;44;36;15

Nicholas Shrum

Why did you think it was essential to include these kinds of voices to capture what you call the the Mormon, the quote, great story of Mormonism. What did those speeches reveal about community building impulses of the faith? And how do you even. I think this is one of the interesting things to me. How do even those that separate themselves from the community, or truth claims or those kinds of things, how do they still incorporate themselves or use that tradition towards their own ends?

00;44;36;17 - 00;45;00;23

Richard Benjamin Crosby

We write in the introduction. I think I remember the line that there is no exile where there is no tribe. So the very presence of latter day Saint exiles reinforces the fact that we are a tight knit community, that there is a kind of tribal identity to who we are. That's something that's very characteristic and important about Mormonism, I believe.

00;45;00;23 - 00;45;07;20

Richard Benjamin Crosby

So we wanted to include those voices for one reason.

00;45;07;22 - 00;45;46;20

Richard Benjamin Crosby

That exiles prove the people of the tradition. Two, we only selected people who are dissidents or excommunications or simply critics, because no compilation of oratory or any artifacts, discursive artifacts would be complete without including that community's critics. I mean, imagine a collection of great American speeches that that doesn't include Frederick Douglass, you know, or that doesn't include even Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.

00;45;46;22 - 00;46;20;21

Richard Benjamin Crosby

You need the voice of the critic in order to demonstrate the breadth and the full arc of that community story. And then three, I would just add this, these inclusions of people who are still interested in building that community. So notably, there is no anti-Mormon rhetoric in this volume. We didn't include any artifacts that were just, you know, people who hated the church and were, you know, coming to burn the church down.

00;46;20;23 - 00;46;43;26

Richard Benjamin Crosby

We included only those people who still in some way identify as Mormon. Maybe they're culturally Mormon, or they claim their Mormonism in subtle ways. And had they the choice, they would build that community, right? They would perfect that community. So we think for all those reasons, those voices needed to be included in this volume.

00;46;43;28 - 00;46;45;23

Nicholas Shrum

Anything you would add, Isaac?

00;46;45;26 - 00;47;11;02

Isaac James Richards

Just two brief things. Whenever you see critics arguing that something should be changed about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, the obviously implicit assumption is that that argument is worth making. So therefore the tradition matters. That's one of the paradoxes, right? So again, if if someone really cared not a whit, but the latter day Saint tradition, they would vanish off the scene right as soon as they.

00;47;11;03 - 00;47;35;06

Isaac James Richards

But but this kind of constant desire to change it. Right. Whether it is, you know, Kate Kelly arguing for ordaining women or whatever of these people, these speeches that we've included here, they care about changing or improving the tradition, which in some ways they've they've ceded the importance of the community and that that they are remained to some extent, at least in dialog and conversation, but the tradition and community.

00;47;35;08 - 00;48;01;16

Isaac James Richards

So I think that's important. And second, in the previous question, when we talked about assimilation, that type of conversation has the potential to very quickly generalize the whole tradition as we're talking about how Mormons are perceived by outsiders. As soon as you come down to the individual level, one of the whole points of this anthology was to shatter any conception of, like, a unity across the board of what latter day Saints are like or what their voices are like.

00;48;01;16 - 00;48;16;10

Isaac James Richards

And so I think that's important when we include these different types of voices. It shows on an individual level. The people speaking from this place of a latter day Saint identity are very diverse, very different, and not perceived as one particular thing by the nation at large.

00;48;16;16 - 00;48;53;28

Nicholas Shrum

I appreciate both of those thoughts and again, I'll repeat it. I think this is a very admirable part of this project because especially from a religious studies perspective, right? We religious religious scholars will always joke about that. You know, the whole point of the study of religion is to debate what religion is. Right. And and one of the things that I think has been important to me in my work is oftentimes I'm looking at individuals that that part of their religious expression or the things that are important to them, are them saying what it should be, which is, in essence, what a lot of religious voices have done.

00;48;53;28 - 00;49;14;21

Nicholas Shrum

Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, people in the church's hierarchy today and and leadership, a lot of the time, it's very similar. The things that they're saying is that this is how we feel it should be. This is our impulse of what would make this a good thing or a thing worth while doing. And, and even, you know, critics and dissidents, communicants are doing similar things.

00;49;14;21 - 00;49;37;03

Nicholas Shrum

And I think the inclusion of those is an important thing. Nearing the end of kind of this discussion of kind of the specifics and the meat of of your project, one thing I wanted to to address was in the forward. The person who wrote the foreword, Gideon Burton, notes that as communication evolves in the digital age, Mormon oral practices are morphing into new hybrid forms.

00;49;37;03 - 00;50;02;10

Nicholas Shrum

So I'm wondering how you see the digital sphere and the internet shifting the way that latter day Saints practice things like rhetorics of testimony? One of the things that this, you know, listeners might connect this to is Rosemary arvensis, book mediated Mormons. Right. This is a really important thing for, for scholars and and non scholars to consider what the internet and the digital age is doing to religion.

00;50;02;10 - 00;50;08;04

Nicholas Shrum

What is it doing to oratory. For for latter day Saints.

00;50;08;07 - 00;50;32;09

Isaac James Richards

Yeah. So the artificial constraint and limitation that we imposed on this volume because it was how do you stop when you're considering all the communication and speech that you could include. So we stay very narrowly focused on orally delivered speeches to live audiences for this particular volume, because you need to start there. We have two centuries, 200 years of this type of mode.

00;50;32;09 - 00;51;00;19

Isaac James Richards

But as we head into digital age artificial intelligence, we're going to see differences. But what I would say, and there's a consensus among some rhetoric scholars even about this, and I'll speak to this just as someone who has taught writing as a graduate student and who is taught public speaking as a as a graduate student. Right. We all know that ChatGPT can generate an essay in a matter of seconds, and it can even generate a speech transcript for you.

00;51;00;19 - 00;51;23;18

Isaac James Richards

But as soon as you're required to stand up and give that speech in front of an audience, it becomes very clear whether you're a good public speaker, whether you're relying on texts that you didn't create. So when I'm grading public speeches, and I think a lot of scholars have pointed to this, the proliferation of words written and recorded discourse and meet in, in the internet, in some ways we might see a return to orality.

00;51;23;19 - 00;51;52;03

Isaac James Richards

People will again value even more interpersonal communications in person gathering. I mean, we all know that the Covid 19 pandemic and zoom made zoom a possibility. And even as much as we still do things on zoom, many people prefer or are going to continue this other mode. So I don't think the mode of orally given speeches to live audience is going anywhere any day soon, but we will see that uniqueness coming in ways that we probably can't completely anticipate.

00;51;52;05 - 00;52;24;03

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Yeah, I would just add that we all and I maybe I'm putting words in Isaac's mouth, but I'm sure he'll agree with me. We have a a nostalgia, a fondness, a soft spot for public address for the spoken mode of discourse. We are rhetoricians were somewhat traditional as rhetoricians in that we like a good speech. So we wanted to build an anthology that captured that particular mode of discourse.

00;52;24;05 - 00;53;07;24

Richard Benjamin Crosby

One reason we're so fond of it is because, as Isaac said, this is not we're it. We're in some way returning to the foundations of discourse. Literature was originally spoken. Religion was itself established and promulgated orally, culture was established and and it spread orally. So this particular mode, we think there's something special about it. And you can look at the scriptures in order to find that that profound kind of origin of human life.

00;53;07;29 - 00;53;51;02

Richard Benjamin Crosby

You know, in the beginning was the word, you know, by by the breath of his mouth did God create the heavens? So we have a profound reverence for this kind of discourse. So before we all, you know, run headlong into the digital age, and we see all these new forms of, of oral discourse take shape. I think Isaac and I just wanted to capture that, that original, you know, the OG rhetoric, the spoken word, you know, in the original, even when Homer was writing and rap songs were traveling and preachers were preaching, that's how humans really developed.

00;53;51;02 - 00;54;05;00

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I think their traditions of rhetoric and literature and even religion and politics. So our reverence for that process, I think, is, is evidenced in our choices for this volume.

00;54;05;03 - 00;54;36;28

Nicholas Shrum

Well, thank you both so much for for those responses. The last question and maybe I'll ask before we get to our concluding questions, which I don't know, we'll spend too much time on because you've both been so reflective on kind of what the importance of this project to, to the study of religion and to scholarship generally. The last question I'll ask about the project I love your thoughts on is in your introduction, as you near the end, you know that the volume is a quote imperfect task and notes some gaps, such as the lack of international voices.

00;54;36;28 - 00;54;57;03

Nicholas Shrum

Despite the church's massive global growth, especially in the latter part of the 20th century. So if you were to compile a sequel to this, right, looking for it, and you've already alluded to this of like, maybe what this would look like, how do you think that the inclusion of more international and multicultural voices would alter our understanding of latter day oratory?

00;54;57;05 - 00;54;59;03

Nicholas Shrum

Isaac, do you want to start with that one?

00;54;59;06 - 00;55;22;07

Isaac James Richards

Sure. Yeah. So methodologically speaking, Ben and I did not pick all of the speeches that would be included in this volume. So we solicited scholars to nominate speeches and to make an argument for why they thought it should be included. And then we did screen those. But one thing that stood out to us is, you know, scholarship is often slow to catch up with the phenomenon of study.

00;55;22;07 - 00;55;50;06

Isaac James Richards

So even though there have been more latter day Saints outside of the United States for the past several decades, there are not a large number. Most of the scholars doing Latter Day Saint studies or Latter Day Saint history tend to come from North America. And so I think as we see more scholars from international community's studying, you know, their their home countries, their home areas, what is what is it going to do to the volume?

00;55;50;06 - 00;56;22;19

Isaac James Richards

It's going to shatter a little bit the provincialism of those conversations we have about a US national Mormon identity and discourse. Because on the global scale. Right. Well, what is Mormon perception look like in different countries? What is it? How does it absorb or interact with local cultures? That will be interesting. But we also say in the introduction that no matter where you are in the world, you go to any congregation of the latter day Saints, lay people, stand up and speak, children stand up and bear testimony.

00;56;22;19 - 00;56;35;26

Isaac James Richards

And so this in that sense, the latter day tradition of public speaking is, you know, consistent in many ways, but of course, will also be very different on the international scene.

00;56;35;29 - 00;56;37;22

Nicholas Shrum

Anything you'd like to add then?

00;56;37;25 - 00;57;11;05

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I'll just add that we would love to, you know, find these, these anti-aging drugs and, and live another 200 years, Isaac and I, so that we could compile the next volume. And in that next volume, we would love to see a lot of international voices anthologized there, just not there are so few of them in this volume, and we'd love to see what technology is going to do to this tradition.

00;57;11;08 - 00;57;41;00

Richard Benjamin Crosby

But we hope, as Isaac pointed out, that certain things will remain consistent across the centuries for latter day Saint rhetoric, and that is that regular people will have the courage to stand up and speak to the community, both to preach the doctrines and to challenge the orthodoxies at times and to talk to the world. And hopefully, hopefully within the next two centuries, maybe we'll solve this problem that we've been talking about.

00;57;41;02 - 00;58;07;23

Nicholas Shrum

Well, thank you both so much for for answering these questions about the project. And I just encourage listeners to check it out. There are a wide variety of, as we mentioned, these categories of latter day Saint rhetoric, ones pertaining to I think are especially important pertaining to, to to gender and to race. Again, the ones that are just super interesting to me are these rhetorics of exile and peculiarity.

00;58;07;25 - 00;58;42;10

Nicholas Shrum

And there's something in there for for anybody and for everyone. I usually end the podcast by discussing three questions, and the first one I think we can skip. We can just reiterate that people that aren't necessarily interested in Mormon studies should read this, because it is. I think it's a great exploration into bringing a rhetoric and communications lens to a religious tradition that shows this kind of angle when so much religious studies is focused on things like ritual or things like that.

00;58;42;11 - 00;59;10;20

Nicholas Shrum

Right? Rhetoric has its own place that that is important. But I would love to hear especially your insights or you know, your thoughts on the question I always ask, which is if you could come on on how the project influenced or confirmed your own approach to the study of religion in general, for instance, like how do you see religion operating or just generally, you know, if this is kind of it sounds like both of you have done quite a bit of work in, in religion adjacent kind of study spaces.

00;59;10;20 - 00;59;19;01

Nicholas Shrum

But how did this particular project change or evolve your thinking about that? The study of religion?

00;59;19;03 - 00;59;45;01

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I'll start on this. I it didn't necessarily evolve or change, but it certainly reaffirmed for me that religion is essentially a rhetorical enterprise, and people are going to hear that and think, oh, that sounds cynical, or that sounds like there's a lack of faith. And I would I would stridently challenge that notion. Again, I think rhetoric is what God practiced in the very beginning.

00;59;45;04 - 01;00;09;15

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And I think that's clear in the scriptures. I defy you, Nibley, who whom I love and who is also anthologized in the volume, but who hated the rhetoricians and sophists, you know, and I think when people comment on rhetoric as this evil notion or as BS or as manipulative speech or something like that, they're missing the larger point, and that is that we cannot escape rhetoric.

01;00;09;15 - 01;00;31;13

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Rhetoric is a gift that God gave us the power of the logos, and that is the word that is used in the New Testament when it says, in the beginning was the word right, in the beginning in Lagos it was it was the logos. That gift of speech is something that God gave us. We should practice it with reverence.

01;00;31;13 - 01;00;50;25

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And and to me, this project is reaffirmed that rhetoric is at the heart of our faith. It's not the only thing that's at the heart of our faith, but it's how we spread it. It's how we experience it. Prayer is a form of rhetoric. It's how we listen to God. It's how we talk to God. It's how we talk to each other and listen to each other.

01;00;50;26 - 01;00;55;04

Richard Benjamin Crosby

And for me, that's reaffirmed. That's been reaffirmed in this project.

01;00;55;06 - 01;01;17;29

Isaac James Richards

Yeah, we know that at least the latter day Saint God admits to using rhetoric. So in the Doctrine and Covenants, right. When he says almost cheekily, it is not written that there will be no end to this torment. I said, endless torment, right? But I said that so it would work more expressly on the hearts of of people.

01;01;17;29 - 01;01;47;21

Isaac James Richards

So we have the sense that God and the Latter day Saint tradition uses language to persuade his children. And and we as, as members of his community, use language to better ourselves and our community. So I do think that the volume has things to offer a non latter day Saint scholars, especially even if they're just interested in 19th century American religion, second Great Awakening, you know, this kind of vibrant tradition of oratory and public speaking.

01;01;47;24 - 01;02;10;12

Isaac James Richards

A similar anthology like this could be done with any religious tradition, right? Great speeches from the Jewish tradition or, you know, different, different communities. But I will say that oratory and rhetoric, they are unique way to study religion because they invite a unique set of questions. They have a unique lens between the relationship between speaker and audience and context.

01;02;10;12 - 01;02;34;07

Isaac James Richards

And what I love about it. I would I would say this would be what I love about studying religion through rhetorical lens is it honors both the individual and a community in a way that can't. Maybe by other disciplines, or if you study only the classic canonical texts, you'll get the hierarchical or elitist perspective. If you're only an anthropologist or sociologist, you're going to get the mass phenomenon.

01;02;34;07 - 01;02;47;15

Isaac James Richards

But when you study rhetoric, you get the many and the one, the individual and the community, the speaker and the audience. And I think interesting ways that maybe other methodologies do not. So I think that's one way why it's fascinating way to study religion.

01;02;47;19 - 01;03;08;20

Nicholas Shrum

Yeah, I really appreciate those thoughts. I'll add my own that I think that's just something that I've encountered and kind of wrestle with in my own work as a historian, primarily by methodology. Right? Oftentimes people will look at a source and and they'll say, you know, that's really interesting, but kind of what was the impact or how did this influence a broader thing, kind of what you're speaking about?

01;03;08;20 - 01;03;33;20

Nicholas Shrum

Isaac. And to me, it's just so interesting to even consider the, you know, the creativity, the the pressures within the individual that is, that is pushing them to frame things in a certain way because it says something about humans, right? Like that's beyond, you know, just how just how impactful, right, was Jay Rubin Clark's talk? Well, we know it was quite impactful.

01;03;33;20 - 01;03;57;20

Nicholas Shrum

But at the same time, like, it's worth considering on its own without necessarily seeing the the impact beyond the rhetoric itself. There's something about the way that they they crafted their message in consideration of their audience and their context. That is is absolutely worthwhile and should be a central part of the study of religion. And and I think that this is a great contribution to that.

01;03;57;21 - 01;04;05;04

Nicholas Shrum

The last question I'll ask of both of you is, is before we close is what projects are you working on next? If Ben, maybe we could start with you.

01;04;05;07 - 01;04;41;20

Richard Benjamin Crosby

I'm an academic, which means I have no shortage of unfinished, inchoate, rejected, and and abandoned projects. So I have a whole list that I could that I could provide. But I think my central interest right now is the notion of civil religion. I published on civil religion before. I'm interested in the way, particularly republics or are maintained with religious rhetoric.

01;04;41;20 - 01;05;11;00

Richard Benjamin Crosby

So so you have a nation state that doesn't have a, say, a state religion or a clear religious tradition. How do they draw on religious elements, including rhetorical elements, in order to maintain a democratic or Republican populace? So my next project is is a study of the role of the rhetoric of religion in the maintenance of republics, ancient and modern.

01;05;11;00 - 01;05;26;13

Richard Benjamin Crosby

So going from Greece all the way through to the United States. And then there are other. I'm writing a speech on Barack Obama's farewell address. Right now. I'm interested in presidential rhetoric as as an expression of silver religion. That's kind of where I am.

01;05;26;15 - 01;05;28;26

Nicholas Shrum

Excellent. Isaac, what about yourself?

01;05;28;29 - 01;05;54;09

Isaac James Richards

Well, my comprehensive exams and my dissertation will keep me busy, but I am writing a the book. This book latter day. It's dedicated to Wayne Booth, who was a 20th century Chicago critic, longtime rhetorician at the University of Chicago. And I'm writing a one of those. I'm writing a short introduction to his thought for the University of Illinois presses Introductions to Mormon Thought series.

01;05;54;09 - 01;06;09;20

Isaac James Richards

So I'm sticking pretty hard with the Mormon rhetoric lens. He was a frequent speaker, I gave lots of public addresses, and he studied rhetoric and kind of exploring how his Mormon upbringing in American Fork, Utah, influenced all of his later work.

01;06;09;26 - 01;06;36;14

Nicholas Shrum

Very interesting and looking forward to to seeing both of these, these projects and the trajectories of both of your your interests in your careers continue. So thank you both again. For listeners, this has been Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards talking about the recent edited volume, Latter Day Eloquence Two Centuries of Mormon Oratory, again published with the University of Illinois Press this year in 2026.

01;06;36;17 - 01;06;40;26

Nicholas Shrum

And so, again, thank you both for for being on the podcast to talk about this work.

01;06;40;26 - 01;06;42;15

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Thank you. Nicholas, it's been a pleasure.

01;06;42;16 - 01;06;45;17

Isaac James Richards

Yeah. Thank you so much.

01;06;45;20 - 01;07;02;11

Nicholas Shrum

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Scholars and Saints. Please be sure to come back to hear more conversations soon. A special thank you to Harrison Stewart for production, editing, and to Ben Allington for providing music for this episode. To hear more, visit Mormon Guitar. Thank you for listening.