By Terryl L. Givens

Released in 1997, Terryl Givens's The Viper at the Hearth was once commonly praised as a landmark work--indeed, The Wall road Journal hailed it as "one of the 5 most sensible books on Mormonism." Now, within the wake of a tidal wave of Mormon-inspired creative, literary, and political activity--ranging from the Broadway hit The e-book of Mormon, to the HBO sequence Big Love, to the political crusade of Mitt Romney--Givens provides an up to date variation that addresses the continued presence and reception of the Mormon photograph in modern tradition.

The Viper at the Hearth confirmed how 19th- and twentieth-century American writers usually solid the Mormon as a inventory villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and well known romances. If at the present time a few authors like Tom Clancy use "Mormon" as shorthand for "clean minimize and patriotic," prior writers extra frequently depicted the Mormons as a violent and perverse people--the "viper at the hearth"--who sought to violate the household sphere of the mainstream. Givens is the 1st to bare how well known fiction built a picture of the Mormon as a spiritual and social different. The checklist of authors contains either American and English writers, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes secret to Zane Grey's Riders of the pink Sage, from Robert Louis Stevenson's The Dynamiter to Jack London's Star Rover.

For this variation, Givens has accelerated the ultimate bankruptcy, laying off extra mild at the Mormon presence in modern American tradition, with insightful discussions of subject matters starting from the musical, The e-book of Mormon, to the political campaigns of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman.

By Paul Davies

By Michael Bunker

Western Society is in confusion, the commercial global is teetering on cave in, and it feels like issues may well worsen. Agrarian Blogger, historian, and "plain" preacher Michael Bunker has been residing off of the grid for a few years, and he has a few recommendation for these residing within the industrial/consumerist economic climate ...living an off off-grid existence is plausible. it's been performed for hundreds of thousands of years, and it may be performed today... it really is particularly attainable that many folks who've trusted a failing method for his or her technique of survival will very quickly locate that they have got made a mistake of historical proportions. old, simply because each significant "classical" tradition went down an identical highway our society is on at the present time. This publication is set the teachings we must always have discovered, and what you are able to do to outlive what historical past tells us needs to come next.

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By Newell Bringhurst

A number of students reexamine Fawn Brodie, her Joseph Smith biography, and its carrying on with significance to Mormon historical past.

By Usu Special Collections Special

The 1st ten lectures in Leonard J. Arrington Mormon heritage Lecture sequence are the following gathered in a single quantity for the 1st time. The sequence, validated by way of one of many twentieth-century West’s such a lot amazing historians, Leonard Arrington, has develop into a number one discussion board for fashionable historians to handle themes on the topic of Mormon historical past. the 1st lecturer was once Arrington himself. He used to be via Richard Lyman Bushman, Richard E. Bennett, Howard R. Lamar, Claudia L. Bushman, Kenneth W. Godfrey, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and F. Ross Peterson. Utah nation collage hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon background Lecture sequence. The college Libraries’ distinctive Collections and files homes the Arrington assortment. The state’s land furnish collage all started accumulating documents very early, and within the Sixties grew to become an enormous depository for Utah and Mormon files.

By Kyriacos C. Markides

An acclaimed professional in Christian mysticism travels to a monastery excessive within the Trodos Mountains of Cyprus and provides a desirable examine the Greek Orthodox method of spirituality that would entice readers of Carlos Castaneda.

In an enticing mixture of dialogues, reflections, conversations, historical past, and shuttle details, Kyriacos C. Markides keeps the exploration of a religious culture and perform little identified within the West he started in Riding with the Lion. His past e-book took readers to the remoted peninsula of Mount Athos in northern Greece and into the crowd of historical monasteries. There, in what should be known as a “Christian Tibet,” thousand priests and hermits perform the non secular arts to achieve a oneness with God. In his new booklet, Markides follows Father Maximos, one in every of Mount Athos’s priests, to the afflicted island of Cyprus. As Father Maximos establishes church buildings, convents, and monasteries during this deeply divided land, Markides is woke up anew to the significant spirituality of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Images of the land and the folks of Cyprus and info of its tragic background improve the Mountain of Silence. just like the writings of Castaneda, the ebook brilliantly inspires the confluence of an internal and outer trip. The intensity and richness of its non secular message echo the techniques and writings of Saint Francis of Assisi and different nice saints of the Church besides. the result's a impressive work–a relocating, profoundly human exam of the function and the ability of spirituality in a fancy and complicated international.

By Deidre Helen Crumbley

By John D. Zizioulas, Luke Ben Tallon

A suite of writings at the Eucharist by way of probably the most very important theological thinkers of our time. >

By Robert Romanchuk

The Kirillov Monastery at White Lake within the some distance north of the Muscovite kingdom was once domestic to the best library, and maybe the single secondary college, in all of medieval Russia. This quantity reconstructs the tutorial actions of the religious fathers and heretofore unknown lecturers of that monastery.

Drawing on broad archival examine, released files, and scholarship from a number of fields, Robert Romanchuk demonstrates how assorted conduct of analyzing and interpretation on the monastery responded to varied social priorities. He argues that 'spiritual' and 'worldly' stories have been sure to the monastery's major kinds of social association, semi-hermitic and communal. additional, Romanchuk contextualizes such cutting edge phenomena because the enhancing paintings of the monk Efrosin and the monastery's strikingly subtle library catalogue opposed to the advance of studying at Kirillov itself within the 15th century, relocating the dialogue of medieval Russian booklet tradition in a brand new direction.

The first micro-historical 'ethnology of examining' within the Early Slavic box, Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy within the Russian North will end up interesting to western medievalists, Byzantinists, Slavists, and booklet historians.

By D. Michael Quinn

Utilizing Mormonism as a case examine of the level of early America's attractiveness of same-sex intimacy, the writer examines a number of examples of long term relationships between Mormon same-sex and the surroundings within which they flourished ahead of the onset of homophobia within the past due Nineteen Fifties.