Make Yourselves Gods : Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)

Coviello, Peter

University of Chicago Press（2019/11発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 304 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780226474335
• DDC分類 289.373

Full Description

From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged--socially, sexually, even racially--by the extravagances of belief they called "religion." Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century's end.

Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism--an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.