The Undivided Self by Zachary Davis

To be a Mormon intellectual in 2019 can often feel like a contradiction in terms. In many contexts in contemporary LDS life and community, to be fully embraced as a Mormon requires abandoning the intellect. On the other hand, to be fully embraced as an intellectual, in a city like Cambridge or at an institution like Harvard, generally requires abandoning, or at least significantly minimizing, one’s Mormonism.

A Mormon intellectual, then, faces serious pressure to develop a divided self—one self for Mormon activity and one self for intellectual activity. 

Yet, as is true with nearly every dimension of her life, Laurel Ulrich declined to accept such confining and policed boundaries. Instead, Laurel models an undivided self. A self that is fundamentally continuous across all the domains of her life—intellectual and ecclesial, personal and public. A Mormon in the classroom and an intellectual in the pews.

I first met Laurel when my wife and I moved into the Cambridge 1st Ward in 2012, a congregation that is really unique in the Church for being particularly welcoming of heterodox ideas and people. There’s no question that a large portion of the spirit of the congregation is a result of Laurel’s long membership. In her Sunday school lessons, talks, and hallway conversations, Laurel taught an expansive, curious, bold, and beautiful version of Mormonism. Questions were cherished, platitudes squashed, and enthusiastic faith and community nurtured. I couldn’t believe that God had created a congregation just for me, but apparently, in Cambridge 1st, and with Laurel Ulrich as presiding matriarch, he had.

Most incredibly, my first job in Cambridge gave me the opportunity to work directly with Laurel to create an online version of her course on material culture called Tangible Things. Over the course of a glorious and unforgettable year, I witnessed Laurel’s pedagogical brilliance through the creation of a series of videos featuring Harvard’s stunning museum and library collections. Whether teaching about scientific racism, Native American baskets, or vintage sewing machines, I noticed how Laurel’s intellectual and historical questions were often motivated and informed by her religious heritage, values, and commitments.

One day, while waiting for one of our video shoots to begin at the Semitic Museum, we began talking about the idea of a monthly gathering for members of the Church in Boston and Cambridge to discuss, in more depth, topics of deep concern to Mormon life. What if we met Sunday evenings at my house, suggested Laurel. Yes, I replied, perhaps we could call it Second Sunday. We began that month, in May 2014. We emailed around a reading and invited people to come with food, curiosity, and good will. Amazingly, they showed up. And the potluck was filled with surprisingly good food, too! The next month, more people showed up. And they have continued to show up. Every month since then, nearly five years now, we have gathered to discuss Mormon theology, philosophy, history, art, and experience. A rich and ongoing community of Mormon intellectual life has emerged because of Laurel’s example and encouragement.

In Charles Taylor’s monumental (and monumentally long) book A Secular Age, he describes the Enlightenment-inspired rise of a certain intellectual style, exemplified by Edward Gibbon’s history writing, which encouraged scholars to adopt a cool distance to their topics, a dispassionate dryness and, in the purported pursuit of objectivity, a perspective from nowhere. We’ve all known scholars who, in some measure, exemplify this distanced approach to scholarship.

Of course, absolutely none of these tendencies can be found in Laurel’s work as a writer or teacher. The remarkable and unforgettable passion and love for her subjects I think is a result of her undivided self. She wrote on topics not for strategic reasons, but because she genuinely cared. I suspect that in many cases, such care comes from her unashamed embrace of her identity as a Mormon woman.

In my own intellectual work, I have tried to learn from Laurel’s undivided self. In my podcast on intellectual history, instead of stopping at a distanced, objective analysis, I venture just a bit further, by also including sermons informed by my inherited values as a Mormon. As with our selves, I think our work benefits from being undivided. And perhaps, through those efforts, we can take small but steady steps toward a less divided world.