Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons

by Jan Shipps

Overview

Infused with Jan Shipps’s lively curiosity, scholarly rigor, and contagious fascination with a significant subculture, Sojourner in the Promised Land presents a distinctive 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 shares with the reader what it has been like to be on the outside of a culture that remains both familiar and strange.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252073830
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	12/29/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jan Shipps is the president of the American Society of Church History and professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She is the author of Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition and coeditor of The Journals of William E. McLellin.

Editorial Reviews

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2002.

“Shipps, the foremost scholar of Mormonism, describes her 40-year sojourn among the Latter-day Saints in this brilliant collection that is part intellectual autobiography and part religious history. . . . In chronicling the ‘diaspora’ that has made Mormonism a global religion, and in dissecting her own experiences as a non-Mormon commentator on these transformations, Shipps offers compelling and perceptive examples of change over time.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

"For Shipps, these forty years of commentary and critical scholarship have convinced her that living with contradictions is at the heart of writing denominational history and . . . her audiences have benefited mightily from her observations and her steadfast scholarship. . . . Should find a ready audience among the general public and interested scholars."—Robert S. Fogarty, American Historical Review

"Likely to become a classic to be read over and over by both LDS Church members and serious students of LDS culture everywhere. . . . A thoroughly interesting, scholarly and eloquent treatment of a thriving American religion."—The Deseret News

From the Publisher

When evaluating online versions of print resources, reference librarians typically seek the "value added" are they getting something more for their money? The concept could well apply to collections of previously published essays, which are, more often than not, the junk heap of scholarship and usually of interest only to specialists. With Shipps's new collection, however, there is no doubt about added value. Widely acknowledged to be the premier non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, Shipps (religion and history, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis) has rethought every essay, contextualizing them in terms of historiography and her own work. The topics covered include the perception of Mormons over time, the faith's origins, and, most personally for Shipps, the case of being an "insider-outsider." When she adds sections, she strikes the exact balance between useful autobiography and scholarly revision. Academic libraries dealing with American history will want this title. David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania. Lib., Philadelphia Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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