Comparative Starbucks: A Case Study

For the past few weeks, I've been living in Provo, Utah. Obviously there's been a bit of culture shock, since Provo is so Mormon.

But actually, one of the weirdest things about living here has been the culture of the local Starbucks coffee shop.

Back home in Sacramento, the Starbucks employees are all very clean-cut, and the clientele are mostly senior citizens and cheery, fashionable young adults. 80% of the conversations I overhear at my local Starbucks there are evangelical Christians talking about religion. (I think there's probably a church that runs some kind of accountability ministry out of there.)

Here in Provo, because of the religious taboo against coffee, Starbucks becomes a kind of hub for rebellious youths. The employees are all sort of surly emo kids. People loiter outside the store drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. I almost never hear any religious conversation there. Today I was sitting and reading, and the people on one side of me were joking about murdering people and robbing banks, and the people on the other side of me were talking about stealing cars and doing acid. I felt like I should call the police or something.

Symposium on the Cultural History of the Gold Plates

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

and the Mormon Scholars Foundation

Invite you to the Annual Summer Symposium on Mormon Culture

THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE GOLD PLATES

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Room B037 Joseph F. Smith Building

9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The program will feature the following papers:

Morning Session:

Stephen Taysom, “Worlds of Discourse, Plates of Gold: Joseph Smith’s Plates as Cultural Catalysts”

Ben Bascom, “Guard the Gold: Didactic Fiction and the Mainstreaming of Moroni”

Jared Halverson, “Fictionalizing Faith: Popular Polemics and the Golden Plates”

Julie Frederick, “Artistic Depictions of the Gold Plates and the Material Cultural Inheritance"

Tyler Gardner, “Possessing the Plates: The Presence and Absence of the Gold Plates”

Rachael Givens, “‘Wagonloads’: The Disappearance of the Book of Mormon's Sealed Portion”

Afternoon Session:

Sarah Reed, “Fantasy, Fraud and Freud: The Uncanny Gold Plates in 19th Century Newspaper Accounts”

Elizabeth Mott, “The Forbidden Gaze: The Veiling of the Gold Plates and Joseph Smith’s Redefintion of Sacred Space”

Michael Reed, “The Notion of Ancient Metal Records in Joseph Smith’s Day”

Caroline Sorensen, “The Metallurgical Plausibility of the Gold Plates”

Christopher Smith, “Rediscovering Joseph Smith’s ‘Discovery Narrative’ in Southern Utah”

Rachel Gostenhofer, “In Consequence of Their Wickedness: The Decline and Fall of Mormon Seership, 1838-1900”