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Eugene England was that rarest of creatures—a liberal Mormon. He was a believer, deeply rooted in his inherited faith, and he possessed the small-l liberal virtues of openness to new ideas, a willingness to challenge received wisdom, and confidence in the ethical power of human reason. He found within Mormonism the core of a faith open to modernity in the form of scientific progress, civil rights, an expanded literary canon, and critical approaches to scripture and religious history. This strain of Mormon thought had always existed alongside a more authoritarian and fundamentalist tradition. But it was the charismatic Eugene England who braided together the more liberal strands of Mormon doctrine for a generation of young Mormons and brought them into dialogue with other twentieth-century religious thinkers. His personal essays both celebrated and embodied an important form of Mormon literature. His central intellectual techne, “proving contraries,” and his concepts of paradox and atonement became touchstones for generations of BYU students and amateur scholars of Mormonism. England’s attempts to connect the generous God of his Mormon belief with both the conservative religious culture he grew up in and the liberal academic culture he grew into yielded a body of work—and, more importantly, a life—that sketched a roadmap to what we now recognize as Mormon studies.

This book reevaluates the influence of Mormon religion and regional culture on the work of Western American novelist Vardis Fisher (1895-1968). Fisher was born and raised in an isolated Southern Idaho community established by the Mormons. He was brought up by Mormon parents and educated in Mormon schools. He rejected the Church while a college student and identified as an atheist for most of his life, but he wrote about Mormonism frequently in his work. Vardis Fisher begins with a detailed introduction to Fisher’s life and work and ends with a comprehensive bibliographical essay. Other chapters explore the influence of Mormonism on specific works. Chapter Two examines Fisher’s seven early novels set in the Antelope region of Idaho and argues that they constitute the first significant body of regional literature in the area that demographers have identified as the “Mormon Culture Region.” Chapter Three examines the writing and reception of Children of God, Fisher’s epic 1939 novel of the Mormon migration. Chapter Four explores the Mormon influence on Fisher’s Testament of Man saga, the twelve-volume series of historical novels that Fisher wrote between 1943 and 1960. In each of these chapters, the book identifies and traces aspects of Mormon history, theology, and culture that shape Fisher’s work, concluding that these patterns of influence justify categorizing much of Fisher’s work as “Mormon Literature.”

The essays in this volume probe Ezra Taft Benson’s remarkable, though controversial, career as a religious leader in the Mormon Church, political figure in the Eisenhower administration, and anti-communist leader in American presidential politics. Each essay is written by an experienced scholar of Mormon history and is informed by archival material previously underutilized or unavailable to researchers. The essays explain why Latter-day Saints loved Benson--and why they found him polarizing. An underlying theme is that Ezra Taft Benson’s intense patriotism and fierce ultraconservatism made him a controversial figure within the Mormon community.

In the 1840s, Nauvoo, Illinois, was a religious boomtown, the headquarters for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism), a controversial religion whose theology, social practices, and solidarity led to cultural conflict. By the mid-1840s, Joseph Smith, the religion’s prophet-leader, was killed, and thousands of Mormons relocated west to Utah. During the twentieth century, the Latter-day Saints returned to their former headquarters in Nauvoo, Illinois, in a dramatic way. Acquiring nearly half of the property in the city, the faith transformed the sleepy Mississippi River town into a historical re-creation of its earlier splendor. However, as it did in the nineteenth century, Mormonism’s presence in western Illinois in the twentieth century created conflict. Competing groups, including the religion’s sister faith, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ, offered a rival interpretation of Nauvoo’s past. Additionally, community members without a connection to either branch of Mormonism sought to preserve their own rich history in the city. Return to the City of Joseph: Modern Mormonism’s Contest for the Soul of Nauvoo examines the conflicts over historical memory that have developed as Mormonism returned to western Illinois. It focuses on the social history of the community, examining interactions between groups impacted by Mormonism’s touristic takeover. In a broader way, it also intersects with studies of historical tourism and pilgrimage.

The only temple completed by Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith Jr., the Kirtland Temple in Kirtland, Ohio, receives 30,000 Mormon pilgrims every year. Though the site is sacred to all Mormons, the temple's religious significance and the space itself are contested by rival Mormon denominations: its owner, the relatively liberal Community of Christ, and the larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This biography of Kirtland Temple is set against the backdrop of religious rivalry. The two sides have long contested the temple's ownership, purpose, and significance in both the courts and Mormon literature. Yet members of each denomination have occasionally cooperated to establish periods of co-worship, host joint tours, and create friendships. The book uses the temple to build a model for understanding what he calls parallel pilgrimage—the set of dynamics of disagreement and alliance by religious rivals at a shared sacred site. At the same time, it illuminates social and intellectual changes in the two main branches of Mormonism since the 1830s, providing a much-needed history of the lesser-known Community of Christ.

Many contemporary discussions of religion take an absolute, intractable approach to belief and nonbelief that privileges faith and dogmatism while treating doubt as a threat to religious values. As this book demonstrates, however, there is another way: a faith (or nonfaith) that embraces doubt and its potential for exploring both the depths and heights of spiritual reflection and speculation. Through three distinct discussions of faith, doubt, and hope, the book explores what it means to live creatively and responsibly in the everyday world as limited, imaginative, and questioning creatures. It begins with a perceptive survey of diverse faith experiences in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Protestant Christianity and then narrows the focus to Protestant Christianity and Hinduism to explore how the great thinkers of those faiths have embraced doubt in the service of spiritual transcendence. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, the book reveals a spiritual middle way, an approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.

This book explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, the book argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions it calls “regional Hoodoo clusters” and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, this book lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Throughout, the book distinguishes between “Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo” and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.