New Beaman Library special collection provides insight into Mormon religion
Kim Chaudoin | 615.966.6494 |
In churches, homes and hospitals around the world every day, people of faith may be found drawing upon their beliefs when loved ones are sick or suffering.
For thousands of years, people of all religious faiths have viewed sickness and healing through their unique spiritual lenses, and have found comfort, meaning and hope.
For Glen Davidson the connection between faith and healing has been a lifelong interest that has fueled much of his career as a researcher, including his decades-long study of the Mormon faith and its view of mental health issues.
Davidson, research professor of medicine and culture at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine, recently donated volumes of documents, books, letters and other artifacts he collected through the years as part of this research to the Lipscomb University Beaman Library’s Special Collections.
“This collection is at the heart of what we are wanting to do here in the Special Collections program,” said Elizabeth Rivera, special collections librarian at Lipscomb’s Beaman Library. “To promote awareness, to provide access and to help people to be very well informed citizens about their faith and about their health. This collection fits every aspect of that in their lives.”
“When you are in those crises of life, people do ask those hard questions,” she continued. “When scholars are able to come and research and to know and then to bring those answers to the general public, you are performing the best service that any library can. And that’s to provide access and to give people information so that they can live healthy, productive lives for the glory of God.”
A native of Idaho, Davidson said throughout his childhood he had a number of friends who were Mormon. The Mormon Church is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and there is a high-concentration of Mormons in surrounding areas such as Davidson’s hometown. So, he said, he became intrigued at an early age about Mormonism.
“One of the ways the LDS (Latter-day Saints) operates is to try to encourage youth to get involved in their activities, so my friends would always invite me to their events,” recalled Davidson.
During his doctoral studies in the history and anthropology of religions at Claremont Graduate University, Davidson’s knowledge of Mormonism helped shape his research. A connection in Salt Lake City happened to mention Davidson’s research to two brothers who operated a psychiatry center in the city. They in turn engaged Davidson in a study.
“They were very interested in what I was doing at that particular point,” he said, “because so many of the young missionaries were coming up with what was at that point called juvenile schizophrenia. I wanted to find out why there seemed to be a high occurrence of the malady in that group of people. So I was able to do an unusual thing, and I’m not sure that anybody has been able to do it since, but I travelled with the Mormon missionaries in the Bay Area while I conducted my research.”
The LDS Church is known for its missions focus. According to the official Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints website (mormon.org), missionaries are members of the LDS church and generally begin serving in their late teens or early 20s and are assigned to serve a voluntary 18 month to two-year mission. During their service, missionaries are considered official representatives of the LDS church. The purpose of the missions is to proselytize and to provide community service and humanitarian aid among other tasks.
“Having me there was very upsetting to the Mormons because it is their practice to send missionaries out two-by-two, and now three were showing up,” said Davidson, a former professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Southern Illinois University. “I didn’t enter into the dialogue during the mission work. But travelling with them gave me great insight into this process.”
Through his research, Davidson discovered mental health screenings were not deemed appropriate for missionaries. So Davidson said a number of young people — mostly men at the time — came into missionary training having significant health issues, including mental health issues, which created problems for the individuals once they were in the mission field.
Davidson, along with other scholars, often found it difficult to locate or access early documents related to the Mormon Church and its history. These documents contained information about the sometimes controversial events in the early history of the church, its leaders and its rituals. He said just this past fall, the LDS made a number of documents available to the public, and it has caused a number of members to leave the church after reading the documents.
During his research he collected a number of books and papers about the history of the LDS Church, and based on his research through the years, Davidson wrote numerous articles and books on the subject. Recently he decided to donate the materials along with his research notes — which fill eight bookshelves, 19.25 linear feet— to Beaman Library.
The collection includes:
- Edgar E. Folk’s books The Mormon Monster (1901), Diaries by Hosea Stout 1844-1848, Diaries of John D. Lee 1848-1876, Female Life Among the Mormons: A Narrative of Many Years’ Personal Experience (1855) and The Book of Mormon (1888);
- an extensive collection of works edited and published by Jerald and Sandra Tanner, who have dedicated their careers to writing and studying Mormonism;
- Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought – a quarterly publication; and
- Salt Lake City Messenger, a monthly journal, among numerous other items.
“Having access to collections of documents about various religions, such as this collection about the Mormon faith, deeply enriches theological study,” said Leonard Allen, dean of Lipscomb’s College of Bible & Ministry. “Gaining an understanding of how religions have developed over time and how people come to their faith as well as the various tenets of that faith provides valuable insight to church leaders and others who want to understand religions on a deeper level.”
Davidson, who also served as the director of academic programs for the New Mexico Commission on Higher Education, is a member of Nashville’s Westminster Presbyterian Church. He chose to donate the items to Lipscomb because he believes the collection is a beneficial resource to theologians and social workers.
“I think any minister needs to understand what is still a very powerful and persuasive method of evangelism,” said Davidson. “I hope that the collection will be used by ministers as well as by social workers who play a huge role on the public health scene. It provides insight into the Mormon faith and its view of mental health issues and treatment. But it also helps us understand the role religion plays in health care issues and in how the marginalized are treated.”
He said the findings are also applicable to pharmacists as they work with patients to understand the role religion plays on what medications may or may not be acceptable. Davidson believes pharmacy, nursing and pre-medicine students and faculty can benefit from the collection.
The library faculty was also a key factor in Davidson’s decision to entrust this collection to Lipscomb.
“When I was searching for a university to house this collection,” Davidson recalled, “Lipscomb’s librarians responded. They were very interested in keeping the collection together and taking good care of it. I know they will protect it.”
The collection is available for viewing in Beaman Library’s Special Collections area by appointment. Future plans call for portions of the collection to be digitized and to be available online. For more information or to make an appointment to view the collection, contact Rivera at elizabeth.rivera [at] lipscomb.edu or 615.966.6033.
Lipscomb’s Special Collections Library includes hard copy and digital archives for the institution, manuscripts and other general and special collections acquired by the university through the years among other items. For more information, visit library.lipscomb.edu.