What is it like to be a Mormon in America today? Melvyn Hammarberg attempts to answer this question in The Mormon Quest for Glory by offering an ethnography of contemporary Mormons.

Explaining Mormonism is a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of the Mormon belief system. Unlike previous surveys of Latter-day Saint beliefs, Explaining Mormonism not only outlines Mormon doctrines but provides an in-depth exploration of some of their most distinctive doctrines regarding the nature of God, the purpose of life, the value of suffering, and even human sexuality. The author himself is a self-described “skeptic both by nature and by nurture,” who nevertheless converted to Mormonism as a young man. He takes the reader on an exciting journey through one of the world’s most controversial and perplexing religions. For Latter-day Saint readers, Explaining Mormonism will aid in strengthening their faith through its in-depth examination of the compelling logic behind the Mormon world view. For the skeptical outsider, it situates Mormon beliefs in a broad context of history, theology, philosophy, and social science and demonstrates Mormonism’s ability to provide bold and compelling answers to the most fundamental questions of human existence. And for the serious student of Mormonism, it furnishes insights that only an insider can bring to some of the Latter-day Saints’ most peculiar teachings.

"This book is about how American religious parents approach the handing on of their religious practices and beliefs to their children. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission and factors that influence its effectiveness. But we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves when it comes to the intergenerational transmission of religious faith and practice"--

A groundbreaking new theory of religion Religion remains an important influence in the world today, yet the social sciences are still not adequately equipped to understand and explain it. This book advances an innovative theory of religion that goes beyond the problematic theoretical paradigms of the past. Drawing on the philosophy of critical realism and personalist social theory, Christian Smith explores why humans are religious in the first place—uniquely so as a species—and offers an account of secularization and religious innovation and persistence that breaks the logjam in which religious scholarship has been stuck for so long. Certain to stimulate debate and inspire promising new avenues of scholarship, Religion features a wealth of illustrations and examples that help to make its concepts accessible to readers. This superbly written book brings sound theoretical thinking to a perennially thorny subject, and a new vitality and focus to its study.

Many Latter-day Saints in Utah report visits from spirits-both the benevolent spirits of kin and threatening evil spirits-and understand these encounters with reference to key Latter-day teachings. In The Devil Sat on My Bed, Erin E. Stiles draws on interviews with members of Utah's Mormon community to explore their accounts of interactions with spirits and how they understand them.

"Through careful analysis of the best empirical data, this book helps make sense of one of the most important questions regarding social change in the United States in recent decades-how and why are so many people leaving religion, and what does (and will) this mean for American society"--

Revisits the life and work of Thomas F. O'Dea, author of a landmark social science treatment of Mormon society and culture, offering new insights about the LDS Church and its members.

2014 Best International Book Award, Mormon History Association For the first century of their church’s existence, Mormon observers of international events studied and cheered global revolutions as a religious exercise. As believers in divine-human co-agency, many prominent Mormons saw global revolutions as providential precursors to the imminent establishment of the terrestrial kingdom of God. French Revolutionary symbolism, socialist critiques of industrialism, American Indian nationalism, and Wilsonian internationalism all became the raw materials of Mormon millennial theologies which were sometimes barely distinguishable from secular utopianism. Many Mormon thinkers accepted secular revolutionary arguments that the old world order needed to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to clear the way for the new. In From Above and Below, author Craig Livingston tells the story of Mormon commentary on global revolutions from the European revolutions of 1848 to the collapse of Mormon faith in progress in the 1930s when revolutionary communist and fascist regimes exposed themselves as violent and repressive. As the Church bureaucratized and assimilated to mainstream American and capitalist values, Mormons became champions of the conservative view of political and social development for which they are known today. The first Mormon converts in Mexico and France, both political radicals, would scarcely recognize the arch-conservative twenty-first century Church.