Pioneers in the Attic

Sara M. Patterson (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

300 Seiten

2020
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-093386-9 (ISBN)

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Why do thousands of Mormons devote their summer vacations to following the Mormon Trail? Why does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Day Saints spend millions of dollars to build monuments and Visitor Centers that believers can visit to experience the history of their nineteenth-century predecessors who fled westward in search of their promised land? Why do so many Mormon teenagers dress up in Little-House-on-the-Prairie-style garb and push handcarts over the highest local hills they can find? And what exactly is a "traveling Zion"? In Pioneers in the Attic, Sara Patterson analyzes how and why Mormons are engaging their nineteenth-century past in the modern era, arguing that as the LDS community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space was transformed.

Following their exodus to Utah, nineteenth-century Mormons believed that they must gather together in Salt Lake Zion - their new center place. They believed that Zion was a place you could point to on a map, a place you should dwell in to live a righteous life. Later Mormons had to reinterpret these central theological principles as their community spread around the globe, but to say that they simply spiritualized concepts that had once been understood literally is only one piece of the puzzle. Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel these principles, so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone. They develop rituals that allow them not only to learn the history of the nineteenth-century journey west, but to engage it with all of their senses. Pioneers in the Attic reveals how modern-day Mormons have created a sense of community and felt religion through the memorialization of early Mormon pioneers of the American West, immortalizing a narrative of shared identity through an emphasis on place and collective memory.

Sara M. Patterson is Professor of Theological Studies at Hanover College. She teaches courses addressing religion in the Americas, the intersections of race and religion, as well as the intersections of religion, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Middle of Nowhere: Religion, Art, and Popular Culture at Salvation Mountain and co-editor of Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes of Encounter in the American West.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue

Introduction
Chapter 1: This Is The Place! Creating a Center Place in the Salt Lake Valley
Chapter 2: A Lineal Temple: Mapping and Marking the Mormon Trail
Chapter 3: Eyes Westward: The Smithification of the American West
Chapter 4: "The Price We Paid": A Theology of Suffering and Place at Martin's Cove
Chapter 5: The Sweetheart of the Riverton Stake: Martyrdom and Rescue in the Lives of the Saints
Chapter 6: Sesquicentennial Spectacular! Physicalizing the Pioneer Story
Chapter 7: Traveling Zions: Pilgrimage in Modern Mormonism
Chapter 8: Anxious Landscapes: Expressing Regret in an Age of Apologies
Epilogue

Erscheinungsdatum	12.06.2020
Zusatzinfo	26 illustrations
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	236 x 157 mm
Gewicht	599 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
ISBN-10	0-19-093386-0 / 0190933860
ISBN-13	978-0-19-093386-9 / 9780190933869
Zustand	Neuware