Download or read book American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism 1867 1940 written by Thomas W. Simpson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Simpson, drawing on unpublished diaries, among other materials, shows how LDS students commonly described American universities as egalitarian spaces that fostered a personally transformative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.
Download or read book American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism 1867 1940 written by Thomas Wendell Simpson and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book situates American universities as a unique egalitarian cultural and institutional space for Mormons in nineteenth-century American society. They were places where Mormons could experience a personally transformative sense of freedom and dignity, equip themselves for taking advantageous paths in American society, and explore provisional reconciliations of religious and scientific perspectives. Contributing to an understanding of the evolution of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in the context of American history, Simpson chronicles a Mormon intellectual pilgrimage made by hundreds of youth to the elite universities of the United States"--
Download or read book Making Schools American written by Cody D. Ewert and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author argues that school reformers around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States won support by highlighting the link between educational development and national success. These efforts transformed both the content of classroom lessons and perceptions of what schools could do, leaving a mixed legacy for educators and future generations of reformers"--
Download or read book Tabernacles of Clay written by Taylor G. Petrey and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Stretching the Heavens written by Terryl L. Givens and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-07-21 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eugene England (1933-2001)—one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals in modern Mormonism—lived in the crossfire between religious tradition and reform. This first serious biography, by leading historian Terryl L. Givens, shimmers with the personal tensions felt deeply by England during the turmoil of the late twentieth century. Drawing on unprecedented access to England's personal papers, Givens paints a multifaceted portrait of a devout Latter-day Saint whose precarious position on the edge of church hierarchy was instrumental to his ability to shape the study of modern Mormonism. A professor of literature at Brigham Young University, England also taught in the Church Educational System. And yet from the sixties on, he set church leaders' teeth on edge as he protested the Vietnam War, decried institutional racism and sexism, and supported Poland's Solidarity movement—all at a time when Latter-day Saints were ultra-patriotic and banned Black ordination. England could also be intemperate, proud of his own rectitude, and neglectful of political realities and relationships, and he was eventually forced from his academic position. His last days, as he suffered from brain cancer, were marked by a spiritual agony that church leaders were unable to help him resolve.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism written by R. Gordon Shepherd and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook explores contemporary Mormonism within a global context. The authors provide a nuanced picture of a historically American religion in the throes of the same kinds of global change that virtually every conservative faith tradition faces today. They explain where and how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has penetrated national and cultural boundaries in Latin America, Oceania, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as in North America beyond the borders of Mormon Utah. They also address numerous concerns within a multinational, multicultural church: What does it mean to be a Latter-day Saint in different world regions? What is the faith’s appeal to converts in these places? What are the peculiar problems for members who must manage Mormon identities in conjunction with their different national, cultural, and ethnic identities? How are leaders dealing with such issues as the status of women in a patriarchal church, the treatment of LGBTQ members, increasing disaffiliation of young people, and decreasing growth rates in North and Latin America while sustaining increasing growth in parts of Asia and Africa?
Download or read book A Documentary History of Religion in America written by Edwin Scott Gaustad and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students and scholars have long turned to the two-volume Documentary History of Religion in America for access to the most significant primary sources relating to American religious history. Published here in a single volume for the first time, the work in this fourth edition has been both updated and condensed, allowing instructors to more easily use the material in one semester. --
Download or read book Sister Saints written by Colleen McDannell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The specter of polygamy haunts Mormonism. More than a century after the practice was banned, it casts a long shadow that obscures people's perceptions of the lives of today's Latter-day Saint women. Many still see them as second-class citizens, oppressed by the church and their husbands, and forced to stay home and take care of their many children. Sister Saints offers a history of modern Mormon women that takes aim at these stereotypes, showing that their stories are much more complex than previously thought. Women in the Utah territory received the right to vote in 1870-fifty years before the nineteenth amendment-only to have it taken away by the same federal legislation that forced the end of polygamy. Progressive and politically active, Mormon women had a profound impact on public life in the first few decades of the twentieth century. They then turned inward, creating a domestic ideal that shaped Mormon culture for generations. The women's movement of the 1970s sparked a new, vigorous-and hotly contested-Mormon feminism that divided Latter-day Saint women. By the twenty-first century more than half of all Mormons lived outside the United States, and what had once been a small community of pioneer women had grown into a diverse global sisterhood. Colleen McDannell argues that we are on the verge of an era in which women are likely to play a greater role in the Mormon church. Well-educated, outspoken, and deeply committed to their faith, these women are defying labels like liberal and conservative, traditional and modern. This deeply researched and eye-opening book ranges over more than a century of history to tell the stories of extraordinary-and ordinary-Latter-day Saint women with empathy and narrative flair.
Download or read book Eternity in the Ether written by Gavin Feller and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mass media and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints evolved alongside each other, and communications technology became a fundamental part of the Church’s institutions and communities. Gavin Feller investigates the impact of radio, television, and the internet on Mormonism and what it tells us about new media’s integration into American life. The Church wrestled with the promise of new media to help implement its vision of Zion. But it also had to contend with threat that media posed to the family and other important facets of the Latter-day Saint faith. Inevitably, media technologies forced the leadership and lay alike to reconsider organizational values and ethical commitments. As Feller shows, the conflicts they faced illuminate the fundamental forces of control and compromise that enmesh an emerging medium in American social and cultural life. Intriguing and original, Eternity in the Ether blends communications history with a religious perspective to examine the crossroads where mass media met Mormonism in the twentieth century.
Download or read book A Word in Season written by Joseph M. Spencer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking look at the relationship between two sacred texts The Book of Mormon’s narrative privileges Isaiah over other sources, provocatively interpreting and at times inventively reworking the biblical text. Joseph M. Spencer sees within the Book of Mormon a programmatic investigation regarding the meaning and relevance of the Book of Isaiah in a world increasingly removed from the context of the times that produced it. Working from the crossroads of reception studies and Mormon studies, Spencer investigates and clarifies the Book of Mormon’s questions about the vitality of Isaiah’s prophetic project. Spencer’s analysis focuses on the Book of Mormon’s three interactions with the prophet: the character of Abinadi; the resurrected Jesus Christ; and the nation-founding figure of Nephi. Working from the Book of Mormon as it was dictated, Spencer details its vital and overlooked place in Isaiah’s reception while recognizing the interpretation of Isaiah as an organizing force behind the Book of Mormon.
Download or read book Arizona s Deadliest Gunfight written by Heidi J. Osselaer and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a cold winter morning, Jeff Power was lighting a fire in his remote Arizona cabin when he heard a noise, grabbed his rifle, and walked out the front door. Someone in the dark shouted, “Throw up your hands!” Shots rang out from inside and outside the cabin, and when it was all over, Jeff’s sons, Tom and John, emerged to find the sheriff and his two deputies dead, and their father mortally wounded. Arizona’s deadliest shoot-out happened not in 1881, but in 1918 as the United States plunged into World War I, and not in Tombstone, but in a remote canyon in the Galiuro Mountains northeast of Tucson. Whereas previous accounts have portrayed the gun battle as a quintessential western feud, historian Heidi J. Osselaer explodes that myth and demonstrates how the national debate over U.S. entry into the First World War divided society at its farthest edges, creating the political and social climate that lead to this tragedy. A vivid, thoroughly researched account, Arizona’s Deadliest Gunfight describes an impoverished family that wanted nothing to do with modern civilization. Jeff Power had built his cabin miles from the nearest settlement, yet he could not escape the federal government’s expanding reach. The Power men were far from violent criminals, but Jeff had openly criticized the Great War, and his sons had failed to register for the draft. To separate fact from dozens of false leads and conspiracy theories, Osselaer traced the Power family’s roots back several generations, interviewed descendants of the shoot-out’s participants, and uncovered previously unknown records. What happened to Tom and John Power afterward is as stirring and tragic a story as the gunfight itself. Weaving together a family-based local history with national themes of wartime social discord, rural poverty, and dissent, Arizona’s Deadliest Gunfight will be the authoritative account of the 1918 incident and the memorable events that unfolded in its wake.
Download or read book The Reed Smoot Hearings written by Michael Harold Paulos and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the hearings that followed Mormon apostle Reed Smoot’s 1903 election to the US Senate and the subsequent protests and petitioning efforts from mainstream Christian ministries disputing Smoot’s right to serve as a senator. Exploring how religious and political institutions adapted and shapeshifted in response to larger societal and ecclesiastical trends, The Reed Smoot Hearings offers a broader exploration of secularism during the Progressive Era and puts the Smoot hearings in context with the ongoing debate about the constitutional definition of marriage. The work adds new insights into the role religion and the secular played in the shaping of US political institutions and national policies. Chapters also look at the history of anti-polygamy laws, the persistence of post-1890 plural marriage, the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiment, the intimacies and challenges of religious privatization, the dynamic of federal power on religious reform, and the more intimate role individuals played in effecting these institutional and national developments. The Smoot hearings stand as an important case study that highlights the paradoxical history of religious liberty in America and the principles of exclusion and coercion that history is predicated on. Framed within a liberal Protestant sensibility, these principles of secular progress mapped out the relationship of religion and the nation-state for the new modern century. The Reed Smoot Hearings will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Mormon, western, American, and religious history. Publication supported, in part, by Gonzaba Medical Group. Contributors: Gary James Bergera, John Brumbaugh, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Byron W. Daynes, Kathryn M. Daynes, Kathryn Smoot Egan, D. Michael Quinn
Download or read book Saints The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days Volume 3 written by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This book was released on 2022-04-22 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of opposition, the Latter-day Saints have dedicated the Salt Lake Temple, a mighty symbol of their industry and faith. Now, with a new century on the horizon, the Saints are optimistic about the future and ready to spread the Savior’s message of peace across the globe. But the world is rapidly changing. Advances in transportation and communication allow people and information to cross vast distances in record time. And young people are venturing far from home as never before, seeking educational and professional opportunities their parents and grandparents could hardly imagine. As the Church begins to take root in Europe, South America, and Asia, the Saints rejoice in the rise of the global Church. Yet many are wary of the challenges the changing world poses to the cause of Zion. While the promise of the new century is bright, it comes with dire economic hardships, brutal global wars, and other unprecedented trials. Boldly, Nobly, and Independent is the third book in Saints, a new, four-volume narrative history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Fast-paced, meticulously researched, and written under the direction of the First Presidency, Saints recounts true stories of Latter-day Saints across the globe and answers the Lord’s call to write a history “for the good of the Church, and for the rising generations” (Doctrine and Covenants 69:8).
Download or read book The Learning of the Jews written by Gary A. Rendsburg and published by Greg Kofford Books. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is about Latter-day Saints learning from Jews and the Jewish experience. This book is unique. It is not a traditional interfaith dialogue where the goal is to learn from each other. Rather, Latter-day Saints seek to give Jews the microphone, so to speak, and let them talk about themselves on their own terms. Only then do Latter-day Saint respond, and not with the goal of establishing areas of agreement or disagreement but as an opportunity to learn from Jews. This book turns to the wisdom of Jews and Judaism to inform, inspire, and enhance the lived religious experience of Latter-day Saints. The Learning of the Jews brings together fifteen scholars, seven Jewish and eight Latter-day Saint, with a combined academic experience of over four hundred years. The volume is structured around seven major topics, two chapters on each topic. A Jewish scholar first discusses the topic broadly vis-à-vis Judaism, followed by a response from a Latter-day Saint scholar. The seven topics include scripture, authority, prayer, women and modernity, remembrance, particularity, and humor. The intention is that the reader will not only learn a great deal about Judaism and the Jewish experience while reading this volume but also use what they learn to enhance their own cultural and religious experience. Contents: Introduction - Trevan G. Hatch and Leonard J. Greenspoon 1a. Approaching Scripture: Insights from Judaism - Gary A. Rendsburg 1b. Maturing Latter-day Saint Approaches to Scripture - Ben Spackman 2a. Neither Prophet nor Priest: Authority and the Emergence of the Rabbis in Judaism - Peter Haas 2b. What’s the Church’s Official Position on Official Positions? Grappling with “Truth” and “Authority” - Trevan Hatch 3a. Approaching God: A Jewish Approach to Prayer - Peter Knobel 3b. Approaching God: Jewish and Latter-day Saint Prayer and Worship - Loren D. Marks and David C. Dollahite 4a. Women and Judaism in the Contemporary World: Tradition in Tension - Ellen Lasser LeVee 4b. Modern Mormon Women in a Patriarchal Church - Camille Fronk Olson 5a. Faith as Memory: Theologies of the Jewish Holidays - Byron L. Sherwin 5b. Memory in Ritual Life9 - Ashley Brocious 6a. Sacrality and Particularity: Jews in an Early Modern Context9 - Dean Phillip Bell 6b. Building Sacred Community: A Response to Dean Phillip Bell - Andrew C. Reed 7a. It’s Funny, But Is it Jewish? It’s Jewish, But Is It Funny? An Understated Overview of Jewish Humor - Leonard Greenspoon 7b. Why We’ll Probably Never Have Grouchos of Our Own (But Maybe a Seinfeld) - Shawn Tucker
Download or read book Race and the Making of the Mormon People written by Max Perry Mueller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Lowell L Bennion written by George B. Handley and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual and ethical achievements of the Latter-day Saint theologian Known in his lifetime for a tireless dedication to humanitarian causes, Lowell L. Bennion was also one of the most important theologians and ethicists to emerge in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century. George B. Handley’s intellectual biography delves into Bennion’s thought and extraordinary intellectual life. Rejecting the idea that individual LDS practice might be at odds with lived experience, Bennion insisted the gospel favored the growth of individuals acting and living in the present. He also focused on the need for ongoing secular learning alongside religious practice and advocated for an idea of social morality that encouraged Latter-day Saints to seek out meaningful transformations of character and put their ethical commitments into practice. Handley examines Bennion’s work against the background of a changing institution that once welcomed his common-sense articulation of LDS ideas and values but became discomfited by how his thought cast doubt on the Church’s beliefs about race and other issues.
Download or read book Utah Historical Quarterly written by J. Cecil Alter and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of charter members of the society: v. 1, p. 98-99.
