Hi everyone, this is Joseph Stewart from the Maxwell Institute.

We are busy planning several great interview podcast episodes for you, but while we are working on getting those produced,

we wanted to make sure that you heard Dr. Jennifer Reader's 2021 annual Neil A. Maxwell lecture,

entitled, A Hair Reef, a Bald Head, and a Usable Past, The Stuff of Discipleship.

Hope y'all enjoy.

On October 20, 1887, President Wilford Woodruff announced that the Manti Temple was near completion,

ready for upholstering, furniture, carpets, etc., which are necessary to put it in a state

of complete preparation for the sacred labors to be performed therein. He invited all to contribute

liberally that the names of every man, woman, and child would be recorded in the archives of the

temple. Local relief societies and primaries made carpet for the interior,

as did women and children from as far away as Fillmore and Emery, Utah.

Mary Jensen, a counselor in the Mante South Relief Society,

exhorted her sisters.

The Lord will turn the key.

We should prepare ourselves to do some work in the

temple. Mary Wynch created a decorative wall hanging for the temple. Intricate flowers filled a

baptismal font and formed a wreath made of the sister's hair. These items, carpets and hair art, demonstrate material discipleship. A Victorian

hair wreath may appear distasteful to our 21st century sense of fine decor. But if we refocus our

lenses with historical eyes, we can discover significant cultural ideologies in these artifacts.

Material culture includes fine folk art, relics, and the stuff of lived religion.

This stuff is defined in Webster's 1828 dictionary as a collection of substances, a heap of dust, chips, dross, or scraps of fabric

or wood, and stuff like a hair wreath can reveal much in ways text does not about lived religion,

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