Sojourner in the Promised Land: FORTY YEARS AMONG THE MORMONS [Paperback]

Infused with Jan Shipps’s lively curiosity, scholarly rigor, and contagious fascination with a significant subculture,Sojourner in the Promised Landpresents 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.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