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Home > LDS Perspectives Podcast > Episode 108: The Latter-day Saint’s and Zion with Matthew C. Godfrey
Podcast: LDS Perspectives Podcast
Episode:

Episode 108: The Latter-day Saint’s and Zion with Matthew C. Godfrey
Category: Religion & Spirituality
Duration: 00:52:56
Publish Date: 2019-06-12 01:58:25
Description: The Interview: Historian Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey recently co-edited a collection of essays on Latter-day Saint environmental history entitled The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden. In the volume, contributors explore the relationship between members of the church and the places they settled. Editor Matthew Godfrey has written extensively about the early years of the church and lends additional light on how these connections were both physical and theological. In this episode, join us for Matthew Godfrey’s perspective on the early Latter-day Saint quest to obtain and redeem a promised land. About Our Guest: Matthew C. Godfrey is a general editor and the managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers. He is also a member of the Church History Department Editorial Board. Matthew holds a PhD in American and public history from Washington State University. Before joining the project, he was president of Historical Research Associates, a historical and archeological consulting firm headquartered in Missoula, Montana. The Transcript: Download PDF. ____ Latter-day Saint Perspectives Podcast Episode 108: The Latter-day Saints and Zion with Matthew C. Godfrey   Released June 12, 2019   This is not a verbatim transcript. Some wording has been modified for clarity.   Laura Harris Hales:             Historian Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey recently co-edited a collection of essays on Latter-day Saint environmental history entitled The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden. In the volume, contributors explore the relationship between members of the church and the places they settled. Editor Matthew Godfrey has written extensively about the early years of the church and lends additional light on how these connections were both physical and theological. In this episode, join us for Matthew Godfrey’s perspective on the early Latter-day Saint quest to obtain and redeem a promised land.   Laura Harris Hales:             Hello, this is Laura Harris Hales, and I am here today with Matthew Godfrey from the Church History Department. Matthew, we have spoken before. In fact, it was one of my favorite podcasts to research. It was about the Utah–Idaho Sugar Company. But to those who may not have listened to that episode yet, can you remind us about your educational experience and what you do professionally? Matthew C. Godfrey:           Sure. I have a PhD in history from Washington State University where I studied American and public history, and I’m currently the managing historian and a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers Project with the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Laura Harris Hales:             We are going to talk today about something that we don’t talk about very often. It’s a little off the trodden path. We’re going to talk about the Latter-day Saint relationship with the environment. How did you become interested in this topic? Matthew C. Godfrey:           Before I was working at the Joseph Smith Papers, I was a historical consultant in Missoula, Montana, and I did several projects for the federal government that touched on environmental history. I did studies for the National Parks Service and the Army Corps of Engineers and got interested in environmental history that way. Then a few years ago, in 2012, I think, one of the renowned environmental historians in the United States, Mark Fiege, published a book that’s called The Republic of Nature where he took several events in American history and looked at them through the lens of environmental history. He was taking events such as Brown vs. Board of Education and the building of the transcontinental railroad and looking at what we can learn, what insights we can gain, from these things if we look at the human interactions with nature surrounding these events. It was a nontraditional approach to some of these topics in American history, and it just fascinated me.
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