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.

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 Simpson, drawing on unpublished diaries, among other materials, shows how LDS students commonly described American universities as egalitarian spaces that fostered a personally transformative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.

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.

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.

Twenty-one women and men discuss what it is about Mormonism that keeps them part of the fold. Their deep, unique experiences make their individual travels even more compelling. Kimberly Applewhite Teitter, growing up in the South as a Black Latter-day Saint, often encountered well-meaning Latter-day Saints whose words messaged the idea that she was at some level an outsider or perhaps not as authentically Mormon as others in her congregation. Thus, she writes, "At the end of the day I'm still Black--still have felt the weight of proving that I represent the church I've fought so hard for my entire life." Yet the very episodes that could have driven her from the church became lessons on the meaning of discipleship.

Outlines the history and teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; describes Mormon religious and family life; and discusses missionaries, genealogy, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other issues, and Salt Lake City.