Purchase
Sojourner in the Promised Land
Jan Shipps
Forty Years Among the Mormons
University of Illinois Press
December 2000
400 pages ISBN: 0252025903 Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
Over the course of four decades, Jan Shipps has become the
preeminent non-Mormon interpreter of Mormonism. This
important work assembles writings about this tradition by
Shipps during the past thirty years, much of it published
here for the first time. Sojourner in the Promised Land also 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. 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. By being in the right place at the right time, Shipps was
able to observe firsthand Mormonism's conversion from a
provincial to a universal belief system, a dramatic
transformation highly pertinent to contexts far removed
from Mormonism. 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. "There are a handful of other scholars of Mormonism whose
minds are in the same league as Shipps's, but few or none
surpass her clarity, gracefulness, and lack of pretense." --
Philip Barlow, author of Mormons and the Bible: The Place
of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|