Author: Marie Cornwall
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252069598
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
Contemporary Mormonism is the first collection of sociological essays to focus exclusively on Mormons. Featuring the work of the major scholars conducting social science research on Mormons today, this volume offers refreshing new perspectives not only on Mormonism but also on the nature of successful religious movements, secularization and assimilation, church growth, patriarchy and gender roles, and other topics. This first paperback edition includes a new introduction assessing the current state of Mormon scholarship and the effect of the globalization of the LDS Church on scholarly research about Mormonism.
Author: Thomas W. Simpson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469628643
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, college-age Latter-day Saints began undertaking a remarkable intellectual pilgrimage to the nation's elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, and Stanford. Thomas W. Simpson chronicles the academic migration of hundreds of LDS students from the 1860s through the late 1930s, when church authority J. Reuben Clark Jr., himself a product of the Columbia University Law School, gave a reactionary speech about young Mormons' search for intellectual cultivation. Clark's leadership helped to set conservative parameters that in large part came to characterize Mormon intellectual life. At the outset, Mormon women and men were purposefully dispatched to such universities to "gather the world's knowledge to Zion." Simpson, drawing on unpublished diaries, among other materials, shows how LDS students commonly described American universities as egalitarian spaces that fostered a personally transformative sense of freedom to explore provisional reconciliations of Mormon and American identities and religious and scientific perspectives. On campus, Simpson argues, Mormon separatism died and a new, modern Mormonism was born: a Mormonism at home in the United States but at odds with itself. Fierce battles among Mormon scholars and church leaders ensued over scientific thought, progressivism, and the historicity of Mormonism's sacred past. The scars and controversy, Simpson concludes, linger.
Author: Gregory A. Prince
Publisher: University of Utah Press
ISBN: 0874808227
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
Focuses primarily on the years of McKay's presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during some of the most turbulent times in American and world history.
Author: Claudia L. Bushman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313064199
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Much misunderstood, Mormonism had a colorful beginning in the 19th century, as a visionary named Joseph Smith founded and built a community of believers with their own unique faith. In the late-20th century, the church had to come to terms with its own growth and organization, as well as with the increasing pervasiveness of globalization, secularization, and cultural changes. Today Mormonism is one of the major religions in America, and continues to grow internationally. However, though the church itself remains strong, it is elusive to those of other faiths. Here, a seasoned author and third-generation Mormon sheds light on the everyday lives and practices of faithful Mormons. Bushman's readers will come away with a more thorough appreciation of what it means to be Mormon in the modern world. Much misunderstood, Mormonism had a colorful beginning in the 19th century, as a visionary named Joseph Smith founded and built a community of believers with their own unique faith. In the late-20th century, the church had to come to terms with its own growth and organization, as well as with the increasing pervasiveness of globalization, secularization, and cultural changes. Today Mormonism is one of the major religions in America, and one that continues to grow internationally. However, though the church itself remains strong, it is elusive to those of other faiths. Here, a seasoned author and third-generation Mormon sheds light on the everyday lives and practices of faithful Mormons. Bushman's readers will come away with a more thorough appreciation of what it means to be Mormon in the modern world. Following Brigham Young into the Great Basin and founding communities that have endured for over 100 years, Mormons have forged a rich history in this country even as they built communities around the world. But the origins of this faith and those who adhere to it remain mysterious to many in the United States. Bushman allows readers a vivid glimpse into the lives of Mormons—their beliefs, rituals, and practices, as well as their views on race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual orientation. The voices of actual Mormons reveal much about their inspiration, devotion, patriotism, individualism, and conservatism. With its mythical history and unlikely success, many wonder what has made this religion endure through the years. Here, readers will find answers to their questions about what it means to be Mormon in contemporary America.
Author: Mark P. Leone
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674430792
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
Mark Leone comes to new conclusions about the evolution of Mormonism, both as a self-sufficient religious sect and as a movement within the broader context of American history. Applying the tools of anthropology for the first time to this subject, he identifies the features that have allowed an outcast utopia of the nineteenth century to achieve worldwide success in the twentieth. The author explores the ways in which a minority survives in a hostile environment, both physical and cultural. He focuses especially on the Mormon settlements of eastern Arizona, whose rich records reveal in microcosm the workings of a modern theocracy. The early Mormon radicalism emerges as an appropriate response to contemporary conditions. With the shift of Mormonism from independence to colonial status at the turn of the century, Mormon ideas begin their transformation to conservatism, again illustrating the flexibility that is a key to the religion's stunning success. Leone's broad range of sources, including diaries, native histories, judicial records, and correspondence, gives a full picture of Mormon life and history. He has also done extensive ethnographic field work in the Mormon settlements along the Little Colorado River, so as to be able to describe the movement in its own terms.
Author: Taylor G. Petrey
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146965623X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Taylor G. Petrey's trenchant history takes a landmark step forward in documenting and theorizing about Latter-day Saints (LDS) teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage. Drawing on deep archival research, Petrey situates LDS doctrines in gender theory and American religious history since World War II. His challenging conclusion is that Mormonism is conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of sexuality in modernity itself. As Petrey details, LDS leaders have embraced the idea of fixed identities representing a natural and divine order, but their teachings also acknowledge that sexual difference is persistently contingent and unstable. While queer theorists have built an ethics and politics based on celebrating such sexual fluidity, LDS leaders view it as a source of anxiety and a tool for the shaping of a heterosexual social order. Through public preaching and teaching, the deployment of psychological approaches to "cure" homosexuality, and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders hoped to manage sexuality and faith for those who have strayed from heteronormativity.
Author: David Lamont Paulsen
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780881460834
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 584
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Book Description
This volume brings together, for the first time, a broad range of scholars from Mormon and other Christian traditions. Replacing polemics and apologetics with dialogue, these exchanges show how the full spectrum of contemporary theologies can be informed by uniquely Mormon ideas, and correlatively, how Mormon thought can be illuminated through the study of key ideas of the foremost theologians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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.
Author: Max Perry Mueller
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469633760
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three "original" American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, Mueller threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. He finds that the Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God's design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.
Author: William Mulder
Publisher: New York, Knopf
ISBN: 9780394415123
Category : Mormon Church History Sources
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
