"Shipps has found a way to understand the Mormons that will truly please both believers and non-believers". ("New York Times Book Review"). "This may be the most brilliant book ever written on Mormonism. It is insightful, inspiring, and original and sure to become a landmark work on the subject". (Richard L. Bushman, author of "Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism").

Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition

Religion & Spirituality

Shipps, Jan

Christian Books & Bibles

University of Illinois Press

"Without fully and consciously realizing that they were doing so, the followers of Jesus established a new religious tradition. This book tells the story of yet another assembly of saints whose history, I believe, is in many respects analogous to the history of those early Christians who thought at first that they had found the only proper way to be Jews. Mormonism started to grow away from traditional Christianity almost immediately upon coming into existence. It began as a movement that understood itself as Christian, but. . . these nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints (as they came to be called) embarked on a path that led to developments that now distinguish their tradition from the Christian tradition as surely as early Christianity was distinguished from its Hebraic context."--From the preface

History

Americas

Over the course of four decades, Jan Shipps has become the preeminent non-Mormon interpreter of Mormonism. This important work assembles Shipps's writing about this tradition over the past thirty years, much of it published here for the first time. It also does something more. "Sojourner in the Promised Land" presents an unusual parallel history in which Shipps surrounds her professional writings about the Latter-day Saints with an ongoing personal description of her encounters with them. By combining a portrait of the dynamic evolution of contemporary Mormonism with absorbing intellectual autobiography, Shipps illuminates the Mormons and at the same time reveals her experience of being an intimate outsider in a culture that remains for her both familiar and strange. Among an array of other topics, Shipps discusses the methods she developed for researching and writing about the Mormon religion and its history. She reflects on how her circumstances made her - even as she maintained her Methodist standing - a virtual extension of the LDS public communications division. She also assesses media images of the Mormons and addresses the question of whether Mormonism is Christian. Most important, this volume reveals how, by being in the right place at the right time, Shipps was able to observe firsthand Mormonism's conversion from an provincial to a universal belief system. Her insights into this dramatic transformation reveal the implications, highly pertinent to contexts far removed from Mormonism, of dislodging a faith system from the specific cultural context of its origins and translating it into an adaptive system capable of adjusting to the conditions of many cultures. Infused with Shipps's lively curiosity, her scholarly rigor, and her contagious fascination with a significant subculture, "Sojourner in the Promised Land" stands as a major addition to Mormon scholarship.

Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons

An intellectual autobiography of her experience among the Mormons, the author combines many of her writings about them in conjunction with her fascination about this American religion that has grown and changed shape over the past 40 years.

Sojourner in the Promised Land: Fourty Years Among the Mormons

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

The most common theme in this collection of six essays is adaptation to change. Jan Shipps writes about the acculturation that took place in the 1890s as Mormons moved from living within a mythic world to accepting developments within the larger society. Dean May investigates the implications of the fact that 40 percent of the church decided not to immigrate to the Great Basin and remained in the Midwest and that the ranks of Utah settlers were augmented by foreign converts. Essays by Edward Geary and Eugene England survey self-portrayals of Latter-day Saints in literature. LaMond Tullis looks at the expansion of the church into Latin America. James Allen examines the impact of technological changes on LDS consciousness.

After 150 Years: The Latter-Day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective (Charles Redd Monographs in Western History)

May, Dean L.

Charles Redd Center for Western Studies

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shipps, Jan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shipps, Jan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shipps, Jan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition

Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition

Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons

Sojourner in the Promised Land: Fourty Years Among the Mormons

After 150 Years: The Latter-Day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective (Charles Redd Monographs in Western History)