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 Make Yourselves Gods written by Peter Coviello and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.
Download or read book Mormon Christianity written by Stephen H. Webb and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A non-Mormon theologian explains how Mormonism is a branch of the Christian family tree that extends well beyond what most Christians have ever imagined.
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 Machines for Making Gods written by Jon Bialecki and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes. Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West. A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.
Download or read book Parley P Pratt and the Making of Mormonism written by Gregory Kent Armstrong and published by Arthur H. Clark Company. This book was released on 2011 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parley Parker Pratt, son of Jared Pratt and Charity Dickson, was born in 1807 in Burlington, New York. He married Thankful Halsey in 1827. He died in 1857 in Alma, Arkansas. Includes a collection of esays about his life.
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 A Peculiar People written by J. Spencer Fluhman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, it does not specify what counts as a religion. From its founding in the 1830s, Mormonism, a homegrown American faith, drew thousands of converts but far more critics. In "A Peculiar People", J. Spencer Fluhman offers a comprehensive history of anti-Mormon thought and the associated passionate debates about religious authenticity in nineteenth-century America. He argues that understanding anti-Mormonism provides critical insight into the American psyche because Mormonism became a potent symbol around which ideas about religion and the state took shape. Fluhman documents how Mormonism was defamed, with attacks often aimed at polygamy, and shows how the new faith supplied a social enemy for a public agitated by the popular press and wracked with social and economic instability. Taking the story to the turn of the century, Fluhman demonstrates how Mormonism's own transformations, the result of both choice and outside force, sapped the strength of the worst anti-Mormon vitriol, triggering the acceptance of Utah into the Union in 1896 and also paving the way for the dramatic, yet still grudging, acceptance of Mormonism as an American religion.
Download or read book The Saints of Zion written by Travis Kerns and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Saints of Zion is a fresh look at the history and theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although hundreds of books have been published on this topic, The Saints of Zion is an attempt to explain Latter-day Saint history and beliefs from their own perspective. Relying heavily on Latter-day Saint sources for exploration and explanation, the work’s purpose is to present Latter-day Saint theology in such a way that Latter-day Saints would see their beliefs represented fairly and accurately. After presenting a short history and exploration of beliefs, the work turns to present an effective evangelistic methodology for reaching Latter-day Saints with the gospel of the New Testament Jesus.
Download or read book Making Mormonism written by Susan O'Neal Fergeson and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mormon People written by Matthew Burton Bowman and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A religious historian explores the 180-year history of Mormonism, discussing the church's origins and development, its position as one of the fastest growing religions in the world, and its connection to American life.
Download or read book The Mormon Faith of Mitt Romney written by Andrew Jackson and published by Kudu Publishing Services. This book was released on 2012-01-18 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely book, the author uncovers the history, teachings and practices of the Latter-day Saints, compares them to evangelical Christian beliefs and challenges former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney to be open and transparent about his beliefs and its implications if he is elected president.
Download or read book The God who Weeps written by Terryl Givens and published by Shadow Mountain. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone desiring to understand more about Mormon Christianity could
Download or read book Exhibiting Mormonism written by Reid Neilson and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-12-09 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reid L. Neilson provides the first examination of Latter-day Saint participation in the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which was a watershed moment in the Mormon migration to the American mainstream and its leadership's discovery of public relations efforts, and marked the dramatic reengagement of the LDS Church with the outside, non-Mormon world after decades of isolation in America's Great Basin desert.
Download or read book Mormons and Mormonism written by Eric Alden Eliason and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideal introduction to what many historians consider the most innovative and successful religion to emerge during the spiritual ferment of antebellum America.
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 Dragonsteel written by Brandon Sanderson and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2011-05 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
