Articles

"THE BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, which I think we can consider more as symbol than boundary, was a perfect setting for the rise of Mormonism. But it was much more than that, and it did not stop influencing Mormonism in 1829 or ‘30.  My proposition now is that some of the fires of that place and of its broader culture burned more brightly-'Mormon' than earliest Mormonism itself at first, at least as Mormonism was preached to the general body of Latter-day Saints.

 

Analogies based on fire appear frequently in the religious literature of the early nineteenth century.  The phenomena presented in my samplings below spread wherever fuel and receptacles provided - kindling, illuminating or consuming - in a variety of hues and patterns as diverse and unpredictable as the most capricious flames."