"In Make Yourselves Gods, Peter Coviello applies new lenses to our story and, using both the history of American secularism and queer studies, makes several proactive arguments; and he does so at times with a beautiful prose I have meticulously underlined."
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.
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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.
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.
Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940191449876 |
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Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
Publication date: | 07/01/2023 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |