A Diasporan Mormon's Life

A Diasporan Mormon's Life PDF Author: Robert S. Jordan
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595626742
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
Offering a glimpse into the lives of upwardly mobile Mormon professionals, this series of personal essays by author Dr. Robert S. Jordan describes his odyssey as a third-generation Mormon of polygamous descent whose family ascended from rural pioneer poverty to upper middle-class social and economic success. A Diasporan Mormons Life chronicles the life of Jordan, a child of the Mormon Diasporans who left the social and cultural isolation of Utah for a more secular, modern America. This memoir describes his struggle to find his personal identity from the tensions created between his religious heritage and his secular upbringing. Jordans life is remarkably varied. He studied at East Coast and California high schools, state universities such as UCLA and the University of Utah, and institutions such as Princeton and Oxford. He witnessed World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and survived Hurricane Katrina. He lived in large urban centers and locations on the global periphery. He engaged in academic research and teaching, university administration, and government service. A searching, informative, and entertaining memoir enhanced with numerous photos, this memoir distills and clarifies the experiences of his generation and contributes to the history and sociology of twentieth-century Mormonism.

A Diasporan Mormon's Life

A Diasporan Mormon's Life PDF Author: Robert S. Jordan
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595626742
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 509

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering a glimpse into the lives of upwardly mobile Mormon professionals, this series of personal essays by author Dr. Robert S. Jordan describes his odyssey as a third-generation Mormon of polygamous descent whose family ascended from rural pioneer poverty to upper middle-class social and economic success. A Diasporan Mormons Life chronicles the life of Jordan, a child of the Mormon Diasporans who left the social and cultural isolation of Utah for a more secular, modern America. This memoir describes his struggle to find his personal identity from the tensions created between his religious heritage and his secular upbringing. Jordans life is remarkably varied. He studied at East Coast and California high schools, state universities such as UCLA and the University of Utah, and institutions such as Princeton and Oxford. He witnessed World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and survived Hurricane Katrina. He lived in large urban centers and locations on the global periphery. He engaged in academic research and teaching, university administration, and government service. A searching, informative, and entertaining memoir enhanced with numerous photos, this memoir distills and clarifies the experiences of his generation and contributes to the history and sociology of twentieth-century Mormonism.

The Next Mormons

The Next Mormons PDF Author: Jana Riess
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019088522X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
American Millennials--the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s--have been leaving organized religion in unprecedented numbers. For a long time, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was an exception: nearly three-quarters of people who grew up Mormon stayed that way into adulthood. In The Next Mormons, Jana Riess demonstrates that things are starting to change. Drawing on a large-scale national study of four generations of current and former Mormons as well as dozens of in-depth personal interviews, Riess explores the religious beliefs and behaviors of young adult Mormons, finding that while their levels of belief remain strong, their institutional loyalties are less certain than their parents' and grandparents'. For a growing number of Millennials, the tensions between the Church's conservative ideals and their generation's commitment to individualism and pluralism prove too high, causing them to leave the faith-often experiencing deep personal anguish in the process. Those who remain within the fold are attempting to carefully balance the Church's strong emphasis on the traditional family with their generation's more inclusive definition that celebrates same-sex couples and women's equality. Mormon families are changing too. More Mormons are remaining single, parents are having fewer children, and more women are working outside the home than a generation ago. The Next Mormons offers a portrait of a generation navigating between traditional religion and a rapidly changing culture.

Your Sister in the Gospel

Your Sister in the Gospel PDF Author: Quincy D. Newell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199338671
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
"Dear Brother," Jane Manning James wrote to Joseph F. Smith in 1903, "I take this opportunity of writing to ask you if I can get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead.... Your sister in the Gospel, Jane E. James." A faithful Latter-day Saint since her conversion sixty years earlier, James had made this request several times before, to no avail, and this time she would be just as unsuccessful, even though most Latter-day Saints were allowed to participate in the endowment ritual in the temple as a matter of course. James, unlike most Mormons, was black. For that reason, she was barred from performing the temple rituals that Latter-day Saints believe are necessary to reach the highest degrees of glory after death. A free black woman from Connecticut, James positioned herself at the center of LDS history with uncanny precision. After her conversion, she traveled with her family and other converts from the region to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the LDS church was then based. There, she took a job as a servant in the home of Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of the LDS church. When Smith was killed in 1844, Jane found employment as a servant in Brigham Young's home. These positions placed Jane in proximity to Mormonism's most powerful figures, but did not protect her from the church's racially discriminatory policies. Nevertheless, she remained a faithful member until her death in 1908. Your Sister in the Gospel is the first scholarly biography of Jane Manning James or, for that matter, any black Mormon. Quincy D. Newell chronicles the life of this remarkable yet largely unknown figure and reveals why James's story changes our understanding of American history.

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley PDF Author: Melvin C. Johnson
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781589587656
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
John Pierce Hawley's forty-year odyssey in the American interior was in pursuit of his dream to find a true Mormon restoration faith. The story describes John Pierce Hawley and Mormonism, particularly the Latter-day Saints and the Wightites, and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Mormon Feminism

Mormon Feminism PDF Author: Joanna Brooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190248033
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This is the first-ever collection of classic writings and speeches from four decades of the modern Mormon feminist movement. A definitive and essential guide for anyone who wants to understand the unique and often controversial history of gender in Mormonism, Mormon Feminism makes available in one place, for the first time, the groundbreaking essays, speeches, and poems of the Mormon feminist movement.

A House Full of Females

A House Full of Females PDF Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101947977
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination. A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon "plural marriage," whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their "sex radicalism"--the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.

Eugene England

Eugene England PDF Author: Kristine L. Haglund
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052862
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Eugene England championed an optimistic Mormon faith open to liberalizing ideas from American culture. At the same time, he remained devoted to a conservative Mormonism that he saw as a vehicle for progress even as it narrowed the range of acceptable belief. Kristine L. Haglund views England’s writing through the tensions produced by his often-opposed intellectual and spiritual commitments. Though labeled a liberal, England had a traditional Latter-day Saint background and always sought to address fundamental questions in Mormon terms. His intellectually adventurous essays sometimes put him at odds with Church authorities and fellow believers. But he also influenced a generation of thinkers and cofounded Dialogue, a Mormon academic and literary journal acclaimed for the broad range of its thought. A fascinating portrait of a Mormon intellectual and his times, Eugene England reveals a believing scholar who emerged from the lived experiences of his faith to engage with the changes roiling Mormonism in the twentieth century.

Sojourner in the Promised Land

Sojourner in the Promised Land PDF Author: Jan Shipps
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252025907
Category : Latter Day Saint churches
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Sojourner in the Promised Land presents an unusual parallel history in which Shipps surrounds her professional writings about the Latter-day Saints with an ongoing personal description of her encounters with them. By combining a portrait of the dynamic evolution of contemporary Mormonism with absorbing intellectual autobiography, Shipps illuminates the Mormons and at the same time shares with the reader what it has been like to be an intimate outsider in a culture that remains for her both familiar and strange.

Mormonism and American Politics

Mormonism and American Politics PDF Author: Randall Balmer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540892
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
When Joseph Smith ran for president as a radical protest candidate in 1844, Mormons were a deeply distrusted group in American society, and their efforts to enter public life were met with derision. When Mitt Romney ran for president as a Republican in 2008 and 2012, the public had come to regard Mormons as consummate Americans: patriotic, family-oriented, and conservative. How did this shift occur? In this collection, prominent scholars of Mormonism, including Claudia L. Bushman, Richard Lyman Bushman, Jan Shipps, and Philip L. Barlow, follow the religion's quest for legitimacy in the United States and its intersection with American politics. From Brigham Young's skirmishes with the federal government over polygamy to the Mormon involvement in California's Proposition 8, contributors combine sociology, political science, race and gender studies, and popular culture to track Mormonism's rapid integration into American life. The book takes a broad view of the religion's history, considering its treatment of women and African Americans and its portrayal in popular culture and the media. With essays from both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, this anthology tells a big-picture story of a small sect that became a major player in American politics.

Secrets and Wives

Secrets and Wives PDF Author: Sanjiv Bhattacharya
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593765746
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
What do we really know about modern practicing polygamists--not fictional ones like the Henrickson family on HBO's Big Love? We've seen the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the news, the underage brides in pioneer dresses on a Texas ranch. But the FLDS is just one of many groups that have broken with mainstream Mormonism to follow those parts of Joseph Smith's doctrine disavowed by the LDS Church. Gaining unprecedented access to these communities, journalist Sanjiv Bhattacharya reveals a shadow country teeming with small town messiahs, dark secrets, and stories both heartbreaking and strange. Polygamy's dark side--incest, forced marriages, and physical abuse--is laid bare. But Bhattacharya also finds warmth in the fundamentalist diaspora and even finds himself taking an ideological stand for polygamy's legalization. More than just an expose of Mormon polygamy, Secrets and Wives is the personal journey of a foreign atheist and liberal, a stranger in a strange land who grapples with hard questions about marriage, monogamy, and the very nature of faith.