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SOJOURNER IN THE PROMISED LAND
By: Jan Shipps
Forty Years Among the Mormons
University of Illinois Press
December 2000
400 pages
ISBN: 0252025903
Hardcover
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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
 Media BuzzCBS Sunday Morning - December 18, 2005
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