The Women of Mormondom

The Women of Mormondom
Author: Edward William Tullidge
Publisher:
Total Pages: 576
Release: 1877
Genre: Latter Day Saint women
ISBN:

Secret Ceremonies

Secret Ceremonies
Author: Deborah Laake
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1994
Genre: Ex-church members
ISBN: 9780285631915

Audacious Women

Audacious Women
Author: Rebecca Bartholomew
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1995
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

Victorians loved to hear stories about the secret lives of Mormon women. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller, A. Conan Doyle, and others fed the public's curiosity with tale after tale. Naive Manchester shopgirls seduced by lecherous missionaries, illiterate Liverpudlian fishwives shanghaied into domestic slavery in Utah -- these were the stories that shaped public opinion. What was the truth behind such stereotypes? In fact, most female immigrants to Utah were former shopgirls, factory workers, and home pieceworkers in London and Manchester, and many were illiterate. Were they naive adventuresses? Rebecca Bartholomew fleshes out real-life profiles of these pioneering women through available letters, diaries, and public documents. They were by-and-large devout and most approached their uncertain future with eyes wide open. At minimum, they were vaguely aware of what their religious commitment entailed. If they did not fulfill Victorian fantasies of young concubines who had been abducted into desert harems, what about the romanticized icons of Mormon inspirational literature? Bartholomew: "These women made mistakes. But if they were not angels, neither were they fools. They are likable. Their lives had meaning. They demonstrated that virtue has unlikely habitats and could even sprout in (Utah)."

Mormon Enigma

Mormon Enigma
Author: Linda King Newell
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1994
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780252062919

Winner of the Evans Biography Award, the Mormon History Association Best Book Award, and the John Whitmer Association (RLDS) Best Book Award. A preface to this first paperback edition of the biography of Emma Hale Smith, Joseph Smith's wife, reviews the history of the book and its reception. Various editorial changes effected in this edition are also discussed."--back cover.

“This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology

“This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology
Author: Charles R. Harrell
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

The principal doctrines defining Mormonism today often bear little resemblance to those it started out with in the early 1830s. This book shows that these doctrines did not originate in a vacuum but were rather prompted and informed by the religious culture from which Mormonism arose. Early Mormons, like their early Christian and even earlier Israelite predecessors, brought with them their own varied culturally conditioned theological presuppositions (a process of convergence) and only later acquired a more distinctive theological outlook (a process of differentiation). In this first-of-its-kind comprehensive treatment of the development of Mormon theology, Charles Harrell traces the history of Latter-day Saint doctrines from the times of the Old Testament to the present. He describes how Mormonism has carried on the tradition of the biblical authors, early Christians, and later Protestants in reinterpreting scripture to accommodate new theological ideas while attempting to uphold the integrity and authority of the scriptures. In the process, he probes three questions: How did Mormon doctrines develop? What are the scriptural underpinnings of these doctrines? And what do critical scholars make of these same scriptures? In this enlightening study, Harrell systematically peels back the doctrinal accretions of time to provide a fresh new look at Mormon theology. “This Is My Doctrine” will provide those already versed in Mormonism’s theological tradition with a new and richer perspective of Mormon theology. Those unacquainted with Mormonism will gain an appreciation for how Mormon theology fits into the larger Jewish and Christian theological traditions.

Mormon Women’s History

Mormon Women’s History
Author: Rachel Cope
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2017-11-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1611479657

Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories. Mormon Women’s History presents women as incredibly inter-connected. Familial ties of kinship are multiplied and stretched through the practice and memory of polygamy, social ties of community are overlaid with ancestral ethnic connections and local congregational assignments, fictive ties are woven through shared interests and collective memories of violence and trauma. Conversion to a new faith community unites and exposes the differences among Native Americans, Yankees, and Scandinavians. Lived experiences of marriage, motherhood, death, mourning, and widowhood are played out within contexts of expulsion and exile, rape and violence, transnational immigration, establishing “civilization” in a wilderness, and missionizing both to new neighbors and far away peoples. Gender defines, limits, and opens opportunities for private expression, public discourse, and popular culture. Cultural prejudices collide with doctrinal imperatives against backdrops of changing social norms, emerging professional identities, and developing ritualization and sacralization of lived religion. The stories, experiences, and examples explored in Mormon Women’s History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon women’s history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.

Make Yourselves Gods

Make Yourselves Gods
Author: Peter Coviello
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2019-11-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022647447X

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.

Under the Banner of Heaven

Under the Banner of Heaven
Author: Jon Krakauer
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2004-06-08
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1400078997

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.