JWHA has a triennial spring banquet in the Independence, Mo. area in conjunction with Community of Christ World Conference.

The 2016 JWHA Spring Banquet was held Friday, June 3.

6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Unity Village, Banquet & Dining Facility
1901 NW Blue Parkway
Banquet & Dining Hall
Lee’s Summit, Missouri 64065

Agenda
5:30 p.m. Registration & Networking
6:00 p.m. Business Meeting
6:30 p.m. Dinner
7:30 p.m. Speaker

Registration
$45 per person, includes dinner and speaker
Registration closes Friday, May 27th at 5:00 p.m. CST


Professor Timothy Miller
Spring Banquet Speaker

Photo of Timothy MillerTimothy Miller is professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas. He studies new religious movements in the United States with a special focus on groups in the past and present that practice communal living. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and has been teaching at Kansas since 1973. His research is based in large part on field work, and he has visited many of the communities and historic communal sites covered in this work.

Among his books in communal studies are “American Communes, 1860-1960: A Bibliography,” “The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America,” “The 60s Communes, The Encyclopedic Guide to American Intentional Communities,” and the edited volumes “America’s Alternative Religions and Spiritual and Visionary Communities: Out to Save the World.”


The Communitarian World of the Nineteenth-Century Latter Day Saints

Various United Order/communal projects, in various LDS churches, are well known to scholars of the LDS traditions. In this talk examine some broader context for the many LDS communal experiments, including a look at communal groups and ideas that may have influenced Joseph Smith in his first conceptions of the United Order as well as the flourishing communal groups during the early and middle nineteenth century that provided a social context for the early LDS projects.

I also examine some of the many communitarian undertakings in some of the post-Joseph-Smith-era new LDS movements but principal focus will be on the other dissidents and innovators of that period and the communities, religious and secular, they founded.