Review
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Title: Perspectives on Latter-day Saint Names and Naming: Names, Identity, and Belief
Editors: Dallin D. Oaks, Paul Baltes, and Kent Minson
Publisher: London and New York: Routledge
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: ix + 307. ISBN
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-032-35043-1
Price: US $160.00
Reviewed by Sam Mitchell for the Association for Mormon Letters
My wife was interested in modern Utah baby naming trends, and in an effort to support her research, I decided to see if and what scholarship had been written about the topic. It was during this that I discovered Perspectives on Latter-day Saint Names and Naming, a collection that offers insight on not only Utah baby names (spoilers: they’re unique, but not as unique as one might think) but also on Intermountain Latter-day Saint naming trends and several doctrinal topics. This collection of essays seeks to take seriously the oft-overlooked role of names in Latter-day Saint theology and praxis.
In Perspectives’ “Introduction” (pp. 1–18), Dallin D. Oaks offers a succinct summary of the book’s objectives and divisions: “Our book is divided into two major parts. The first part has chapters treating historical and cultural dimensions of LDS naming. … The second part of the book contains chapters about names and naming in relation to Church doctrine and apologetics” (5). It is potentially helpful (though perhaps overly simplistic) to conceive of the first half of Perspectives as one geared more towards praxis (including, for instance, essays on Utah toponyms, Latter-day Saint “nameways,” and modern Utah baby names) while the second half is more interested in theology and apologetics (i.e., the doctrinal import of names in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its sacred history, the role of names in the Book of Mormon, and whether Book of Mormon names can be proven to be fictional through linguistic means).
As one can tell from this cursory summary, Perspectives (at least for its first part) is focused on American, Intermountain West Latter-day Saint names and naming trends. It does not seek in this present volume to address other forms of Latter-day Saint naming culture, nor naming practices in other branches of Joseph Smith’s Restoration movement. Oaks explains:
We are well aware of the fact that in recent years … the Church population outside the United States and Canada has actually exceeded the numbers within the United States and Canada, but those populations outside the US and Canada have not in most cases had extended periods of time in large enough communities of Latter-day Saints in concentrated numbers to allow for some of the kinds of phenomena that we can observe in the North American LDS communities. No doubt some distinctive localized LDS naming practices are developing in foreign countries as the Church continues to grow in those other settings. … [This] initial effort [in Perspectives] to address this topic [of “LDS naming patterns and issues”] will begin largely with the society and culture in which the Church began, and for the longest period of time has had the largest number of adherents, the United States. (5)
Following Oaks’s “Introduction,” which summarizes not only Perspectives’ essays but also the broader themes that echo throughout its entries on Latter-day Saint onomastic practices, comes “Part I: Cultural and Historical Perspectives” (pp. 19–165). This section contains the following essays, whose names offer fair summaries of their contents:
- “Place Names of the Mormon West: Religion, Heritage, and Idiosyncrasy” (pp. 3–41), by Richard H. Jackson
- “Scandinavian Influences on Anthroponyms and Toponyms in Utah” (pp. 42–69), by Lynn Henrichsen, George Bailey, Timothy Wright, and Jacob Huckaby
- “Nameways in Latter-day Saint History, Custom, and Folklore” (pp. 70–100), by Eric A. Eliason
- “Composite LDS Given Names” (pp. 101–110), by Don E. Norton
- “Contemporary Latter-day Saint Naming” (pp. 111–160), by Cleveland K. Evans
- “Early Latter-day Saint Code-Names” (pp. 161–165), by John A. Tvedtnes
Tvedtnes’s essay bridges the subject matter of the volume’s two sections, turning from the role of names and naming in Latter-day Saint culture to the roles of names and naming in Latter-day Saint scriptures. While Tvedtnes’s article focuses on the codenames of various Church leaders and sites in early editions of the Doctrine and Covenants, a majority of the essays in “Part II: Doctrinal and Scriptural Perspectives” (pp. 167–299) deals with names found in the Book of Mormon. For instance, John Gee’s “Book of Mormon Names: Beyond Etymology” (pp. 217–227) briefly addresses different ways to academically study the names in the Book of Mormon. Matthew L. Bowen investigates the contextual connections between Book of Mormon names and their stories of origin (with some of his examples more convincing than others) in “Striking While the Irony Is Hot: Hebrew Onomastics and Their Function within the Book of Mormon Text” (pp. 228–249). The final essay in the volume is co-authored by Brad Wilcox, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Sharon Black, and Bruce L. Bowen. Entitled “Book of Mormon Names: A Collection that Defies Expectation” (pp. 268–299). This last entry uses linguistic methodologies to determine how likely it is that the character names of Book of Mormon persons were invented by Joseph Smith.
There are several other essays in this second section that include but do not dwell primarily on the Book of Mormon. These include the sweeping doctrinal essay by Dallin D. Oaks on “Onomastics and Latter-day Saint Belief” (pp. 169–200); a theology of names in conjunction with important salvific-historical events in Joseph Fielding McConkie’s “The Doctrine of Names in the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ” (pp. 201 – 216); and the liturgical and ritual roles of names in ancient cultures (particularly but not exclusively Egyptian ones) in Stephen D. Ricks’s “‘Like a Shadow that Accompanies the Body’: Names and Naming in the Ancient World” (pp. 250–267).
Like any other anthology or collection, some essays in Perspectives will speak more to certain readers than others. I found myself particularly impressed by two of (what I believe are) the volume’s stronger entries: Oaks’s “Onomastics and Latter-day Saint Belief” and Eliason’s “Nameways in Latter-day Saint History, Custom, and Folklore.” Eliason’s entry, full of wit and focused on folklore, examines the proliferation of influences on Latter-day Saint naming trends from a cultural and historical perspective. Oaks reviews the theological import of names in Latter-day Saint salvation history, offering a wide-ranging analysis of traditional doctrines and their connections to names.
Perspectives is a helpful resource for those interested in the linguistic history and culture of Intermountain Latter-day Saints. Not only does it offer various examinations of Utah baby names and Book of Mormon characters (which, in good scholarly fashion, occasionally overlap in material but diverge in opinion), but it also provides “perspectives” on these issues from believing Latter-day Saints, who already understand and can articulate some of the massive weight behind historical Mormon personal and place names. Perspectives offers a chance (to both its authors and to its audience) for internal reflection on one’s own origins and the ways in which theology, praxis, history, and culture intertwine. In doing so, this volume occasionally touches upon additional topics of importance in modern Mormon studies, including issues of Latter-day Saint identity and Book of Mormon historicity.
There are, as noted earlier, some essays that will speak to some more than others. Several essays deal singularly with doctrinal content, while others are focused more on linguistic phenomena or cataloguing. Regardless of which entries are more impactful to a given individual, I think it is fair to say that Perspectives is an important contribution in that it helps to uncover the roots and roles of names and naming in modern Intermountain American Latter-day Saint culture. This volume shows that names are not created ex nihilo (in spite of several rather inventive Utah names you might find on Instagram)—rather, all things come from something else, and they carry with them worlds of meaning.