Download or read book The Making of a Mormon Apostle written by David S. Hoopes and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rudger Clawson (1857-1943) was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to Hiram Bradley Clawson and Margaret Gay Clawson. He grew up in a wealthy and prominent Mormon family and went on a misssion to the southern states in 1879. He was the companion of Elder Joseph Standing when he was murdered by a mob. After his mission, Rudger married first Florence Ann Dinwoodey and then Lydia Elizabeth Spencer in polygamy. In 1884 he was convicted for practicing plural marriage and spent three years in prison. In 1898 he became an apostle in the LDS Church. In 1904 he married Pearl Udall as a plural wife. He was the father of ten children.
Download or read book Watchman on the Tower written by Matthew L. Harris and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ezra Taft Benson is perhaps the most controversial apostle-president in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For nearly fifty years he delivered impassioned sermons in Utah and elsewhere, mixing religion with ultraconservative right-wing political views and conspiracy theories. His teachings inspired Mormon extremists to stockpile weapons, predict the end of the world, and commit acts of violence against their government. The First Presidency rebuked him, his fellow apostles wanted him disciplined, and grassroots Mormons called for his removal from the Quorum of the Twelve. Yet Benson was beloved by millions of Latter-day Saints, who praised him for his stances against communism, socialism, and the welfare state, and admired his service as secretary of agriculture under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Using previously restricted documents from archives across the United States, Matthew L. Harris breaks new ground as the first to evaluate why Benson embraced a radical form of conservatism, and how under his leadership Mormons became the most reliable supporters of the Republican Party of any religious group in America.
Download or read book Lying for the Lord The Paul H Dunn Stories written by Lynn Kenneth Packer and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-12-18 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul H. Dunn's meteoric rise in the leadership ranks of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) was propelled by stories he told about his World War II combat experiences and professional baseball career. Stories like the one about his Army buddy dying in his arms during the invasion of Okinawa, or how he won the first game he pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals at the outset of a five-year pro career. The stories Dunn told, however, were not born out of his actual experiences, but out of his vivid imagination. They were complete fabrications that were repeated over and over, from the pulpit, in books, and on audiocassettes. Dunn's self-generated stardom placed him in the circle of Mormondom's rich and famous. He hobnobbed with the likes of the singing Osmonds and authored their official biography. In the sports world he associated with pro quarterbacks Steve Young and Danny White, NBA player and team president Danny Ainge, and with baseball stars such as Wally Joyner, Vernon Law, and Dale Murphy. Dunn also counted Utah Senator Orrin Hatch as one of his close friends. As these orbits joined, a few observers irreverently called Dunn the Mormon Church's "general authority to the stars." Dunn did not end his self-promotion with the sales of books and tapes. He also lent his name to help promote failing, even fraudulent business ventures run by a variety of Mormon swindlers and con artists. This is the story behind the debunking of Dunn's stories and efforts by Dunn and fellow Mormon Church leaders to quash any news accounts about Dunn's perfidy.
Download or read book Matthew Cowley written by Henry A. Smith and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mormon People written by Matthew Bowman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “From one of the brightest of the new generation of Mormon-studies scholars comes a crisp, engaging account of the religion’s history.”—The Wall Street Journal With Mormonism on the nation’s radar as never before, religious historian Matthew Bowman has written an essential book that pulls back the curtain on more than 180 years of Mormon history and doctrine. He recounts the church’s origins and explains how the Mormon vision has evolved—and with it the esteem in which Mormons have been held in the eyes of their countrymen. Admired on the one hand as hardworking paragons of family values, Mormons have also been derided as oddballs and persecuted as polygamists, heretics, and zealots. The place of Mormonism in public life continues to generate heated debate, yet the faith has never been more popular. One of the fastest-growing religions in the world, it retains an uneasy sense of its relationship with the main line of American culture. Mormons will surely play an even greater role in American civic life in the years ahead. The Mormon People comes as a vital addition to the corpus of American religious history—a frank and balanced demystification of a faith that remains a mystery for many. With a new afterword by the author. “Fascinating and fair-minded . . . a sweeping soup-to-nuts primer on Mormonism.”—The Boston Globe “A cogent, judicious, and important account of a faith that has been an important element in American history but remained surprisingly misunderstood.”—Michael Beschloss “A thorough, stimulating rendering of the Mormon past and present.”—Kirkus Reviews “[A] smart, lucid history.”—Tom Brokaw
Download or read book The Pearl of Greatest Price written by Terryl Givens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pearl of Greatest Price narrates the history of Mormonism's fourth volume of scripture, canonized in 1880. The authors track its predecessors, describe its several components, and assess their theological significance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Four principal sections are discussed, along with attendant controversies associated with each. The Book of Moses purports to be a Mosaic narrative missing from the biblical version of Genesis. Too little treated in the scholarship on Mormonism, these chapters, produced only months after the Book of Mormon was published, actually contain the theological nucleus of Latter-day Saint doctrines as well as a virtual template for the Restoration Joseph Smith was to effect. In The Pearl of Greatest Price, the author covers three principal parts that are the focus of many of the controversies engulfing Mormonism today. These parts are The Book of Abraham, The Book of Moses, and The Joseph Smith History. Most controversial of all is the Book of Abraham, a production that arose out of a group of papyri Smith acquired, along with four mummies, in 1835. Most of the papyri disappeared in the great Chicago Fire, but surviving fragments have been identified as Egyptian funerary documents. This has created one of the most serious challenges to Smith's prophetic claims the LDS church has faced. LDS scholars, however, have developed several frameworks for vindicating the inspiration of the resulting narrative and Smith's calling as a prophet. The author attempts to make sense of Smith's several, at times divergent, accounts of his First Vision, one of which is canonized as scripture. He also assesses the creedal nature of Smith's "Articles of Faith," in the context of his professed anti-creedalism. In sum, this study chronicles the volume's historical legacy and theological indispensability to the Latter-day Saint tradition, as well as the reasons for its resilience and future prospects in the face of daunting challenges.
Download or read book Visions in a Seer Stone written by William L. Davis and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary work, William L. Davis examines Joseph Smith's 1829 creation of the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Positioning the text in the history of early American oratorical techniques, sermon culture, educational practices, and the passion for self-improvement, Davis elucidates both the fascinating cultural context for the creation of the Book of Mormon and the central role of oral culture in early nineteenth-century America. Drawing on performance studies, religious studies, literary culture, and the history of early American education, Davis analyzes Smith's process of oral composition. How did he produce a history spanning a period of 1,000 years, filled with hundreds of distinct characters and episodes, all cohesively tied together in an overarching narrative? Eyewitnesses claimed that Smith never looked at notes, manuscripts, or books—he simply spoke the words of this American religious epic into existence. Judging the truth of this process is not Davis's interest. Rather, he reveals a kaleidoscope of practices and styles that converged around Smith's creation, with an emphasis on the evangelical preaching styles popularized by the renowned George Whitefield and John Wesley.
Download or read book Visions of Glory written by John M. Pontius and published by CFI. This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 David O McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism written by Gregory A. Prince and published by University of Utah Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Under the Banner of Heaven written by Jon Krakauer and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2004-06-08 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. • Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU. “Fantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.” —San Francisco Chronicle Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
Download or read book An Insider s View of Mormon Origins written by Grant H. Palmer and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quote: 'Why would God reveal to Joseph Smith a faulty [mistranslated] KJV text?' Chap 4: (Evangelical Protestantism in the Book of Mormon) concludes that numerous theological issues addressed in the Book of Mormon probably derived from Smith's Upstate New York religious environment than from the claimed ancient gold plates. Chap 5: (Moroni and the Golden Pot) examines a long list of parallels between a published story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Smith's account of the angel Moroni's visits. The chapter concludes, 'It would stretch credulity to believe that this [long list of parallels between Hoffmann's Golden Pot story and Smith's Moroni story] could be a coincidence, and I therefore think that a debt is owed to E.T.A. Hoffmann and the European traditions ... ' Chap.
Download or read book Paul and Jesus written by James D. Tabor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “compulsively readable exploration of the tangled world of Christian origins” (Publishers Weekly), religious historian James Tabor illuminates the earliest years of Jesus’ teachings before Paul shaped them into the religion we know today. This fascinating examination of the earliest years of Christianity reveals how the man we call St. Paul shaped Christianity as we know it today. Historians know almost nothing about the two decades following the crucifixion of Jesus, when his followers regrouped and began to spread his message. During this time Paul joined the movement and began to preach to the gentiles. Using the oldest Christian documents that we have—the letters of Paul—as well as other early Christian sources, historian and scholar James Tabor reconstructs the origins of Christianity. Tabor shows how Paul separated himself from Peter and James to introduce his own version of Christianity, which would continue to develop independently of the message that Jesus, James, and Peter preached. Paul and Jesus illuminates the fascinating period of history when Christianity was born out of Judaism.
Download or read book A Christmas Parable written by Boyd K. Packer and published by Bookcraft, Incorporated. This book was released on 1993 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thunder from the Right written by Matthew L Harris and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-03-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ezra Taft Benson's ultra-conservative vision made him one of the most polarizing leaders in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His willingness to mix religion with extreme right-wing politics troubled many. Yet his fierce defense of the traditional family, unabashed love of country, and deep knowledge of the faith endeared him to millions. In Thunder from the Right, a group of veteran Mormon scholars probe aspects of Benson's extraordinary life. Topics include: how Benson's views influenced his actions as Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower Administration; his dedication to the conservative movement, from alliances with Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society to his condemnation of the civil rights movement as a communist front; how his concept of the principal of free agency became central to Mormon theology; his advocacy of traditional gender roles as a counterbalance to liberalism; and the events and implications of Benson's term as Church president. Contributors: Gary James Bergera, Matthew Bowman, Newell G. Bringhurst, Brian Q. Cannon, Robert A. Goldberg, Matthew L. Harris, J. B. Haws, and Andrea G. Radke-Moss
Download or read book Joseph Smith written by Dan Vogel and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychological biography of Joseph Smith presents a comprehensive account of his life, set against a backdrop of theology, local and national politics, Smith family dynamics, organizational issues, and interpersonal relations.
Download or read book Danish Apostle written by Anthon H. Lund and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time Anthon Lund was born in Denmark in 1844, Soren Kierkegaard was already producing his ideas on existentialism and Hans Christian Andersen had just penned the tales that would make him world-famous. In this environment, Anthon--who was raised by his father and grandmother after his mother's death--became a voracious reader by the age of six. He converted to Mormonism, immigrated to the United States, and became an apostle and later counselor to the LDS church president--also Salt Lake temple president and Church Historian. His diaries cover the tensions between Apostle Moses Thatcher and his colleagues; the rejection by the U.S. House of Representatives of Utah's Congressman, B.H. Roberts; the stormy hearings over whether to seat LDS apostle Reed Smoot in the U.S. Senate; and publication of The History of the Church. Lund's accounts of the inner workings of the church hierarchy are at times formal but otherwise chatty, the latter quality making him a favorite diarist among historians.
