Mormon Studies Review
Keywords
Mormonism, religion, interdisciplinarity, identity, scholarship
Abstract
The complex, modern, US-founded but now international, social-cultural phenomenon categorized most popularly by insiders and outsiders as “Mormons,” the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” and/or simply by analysts as a provocative example of modern “religion,” is, as it should be, approached by the latter through many different disciplines and areas and fields of study and in myriad and overlapping ways. From the historical to the literary-rhetorical, from the scientific/social-scientific to the materialist, from the theological and psycho-social to the aesthetic, and from the comic-farcical to the political—whatever approach has been attempted in terms of examining historical and ongoing social phenomena that are shorthanded as “religion,” it would seem Mormons have been and continue to be so studied. T his makes much sense—a relatively new phenomenon in the world (of claimants to privileged purchase on the wisdom of antiquity) that nonetheless claims to have deep historical, even ancient, moorings, as well as authority for applications of categories and references by which it insists it be self-defined and be so defined by others, is complicated and complicating.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Wimbush, Vincent L.
(2020)
"Mormonism and the Limits of Scripture,"
Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 7:
No.
1, Article 3.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol7/iss1/3