Description

A Book of Mormons: Latter-day Saints on a Modern-day Zion not only provides a fascinating glimpse into a religion that has taken center stage in the last presidential election, but will prompt insights into what living an encompassing religion means both individually and for the community trying to understand exactly “What does it mean to be a Mormon today?”

Mormonism is at a crossroads, having been under the microscopic lens of the media for the past five years, even as Mormons young and old grapple with the openness and accessibility of The Information Age. Both the institutional church and its lay members are working to better define the faith for outsiders as well as within.

This collection of essays from a broad swath of Mormons—some who live their faith quietly, others who wrestle with how it colors their professional endeavors—is an attempt to broaden perspectives about Mormons and demystify stereotypes.

EDITORS

Emily W. Jensen & Tracy McKay-Lamb

FOREWORD BY Janan Graham-Russell

REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS

“A Book of Mormons shows that the Mormon collective talent for first-person experience narratives and personal essays is alive and flourishing. A kind of literary step up from the ‘I’m a Mormon videos,’ this volume features diversity of a less visible sort as a range of thinkers describe-achingly, beautifully, and comically by turns-their dreams, labors, pains, and joys in building Zion.” – John Durham Peters, A. Craig Baird professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa

“In this wonderfully diverse collection, Jensen and McKay-Lamb capture a lovely paradox of Christian (and Mormon) theology: that it is in fact our differences which forge us into the perfect whole that Mormons call Zion and Paul calls the body of Christ. The stories they gather manage to evade both the rancor of ideological combat and the mushy impulse to pretend that disagreement doesn’t matter. What emerges instead is tough, genuine, beautiful community.” – Matthew Bowman, author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith

“A Book of Mormons is a refreshing collection of brief essays from people of various stripes who relate their present or former encounters with Mormonism (and, in one instance, its sister tradition), not as it is preached from the pulpit or written in manuals and books, but as it is lived in the mundane world that most of us populate. Written neither to convert nor defend, and void of the truth claims that largely monopolized the first century-and-a-half of Mormon literature, the essays take us on a gentle journey that explores the simple, and yet increasingly relevant mantra of the modern Latter-day Saint: ‘If it works, I stay.’” – Gregory Prince, scholar and author of David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism