Patrick Q. Mason | |
---|---|
Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture Utah State University | |
Assumed office July 2019 | |
Preceded by | Philip Barlow |
Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies Claremont Graduate University | |
In office 2011–2019 | |
Preceded by | Richard Bushman |
Personal details | |
Born | 1976 (age 47–48) Sandy,Utah,U.S. |
Education | Brigham Young University (BA) University of Notre Dame (MA,PhD) |
Profession | Historian |
Known for | Mormon Studies |
Patrick Q. Mason (born 1976) is an American historian specializing in the study of the Latter-day Saint movement. Since 2019,he has held the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Mason earned a BA in history from Brigham Young University in 1999,an MA in history from the University of Notre Dame in 2003 and a second MA there in International Peace Studies,also in 2003. In 2005 he was awarded a PhD in history,also from the University of Notre Dame. [2]
As a graduate student,he took a summer seminary at Brigham Young University in Latter-day Saint history run by Richard L. Bushman. [5]
Mason was the Howard W. Hunter Chair in Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University from 2011–2018. [6] [7] [8] He previously held positions at American University in Cairo and the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has been interviewed and cited as an expert on Mormonism by outlets such as the Los Angeles Times,NPR, [9] The Salt Lake Tribune, [10] [11] Religion Dispatches Magazine, [12] [13] and KPCC public radio in Pasadena,California. [14]
In January 2012,Mason published an opinion piece in The Washington Post regarding diversity within Latter Day Saints thought. [15] He was featured on New England Cable News in May 2012 regarding the "Mormon movement" in Arkansas, [16] and has been quoted in both the New York Times [17] and the Los Angeles Times [18] on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Mason is also the author of The Mormon Menace:Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South which received positive reviews in the Journal of American History [19] and the Journal of Southern Religion. [20] He has authored a number of articles and book chapters on Mormonism and American religion history. [21]
Mason's research projects as of 2006 included a biography of Ezra Taft Benson,a former president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,and a book on Mormon theology and ethic of peace. [21]
In 2016,Mason advocated for what he described as a more embracing LDS church. [22] Mason participated in a short-lived joint blog in a current-issues/events debate format,at the non-partisan religion website Patheos.com,with psychologist John P. Dehlin,who has often been critical of the LDS Church. [23]
Books
Articles and chapters
Mormons are a religious and cultural group related to Mormonism, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement started by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s. After Smith's death in 1844, the movement split into several groups following different leaders; the majority followed Brigham Young, while smaller groups followed Joseph Smith III, Sidney Rigdon, and James Strang. Most of these smaller groups eventually merged into the Community of Christ, and the term Mormon typically refers to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as today, this branch is far larger than all the others combined. People who identify as Mormons may also be independently religious, secular, and non-practicing or belong to other denominations. Since 2018, the LDS Church has emphasized a desire for its members be referred to as "members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", or more simply as "Latter-day Saints".
Leonard James Arrington was an American author, academic and the founder of the Mormon History Association. He is known as the "Dean of Mormon History" and "the Father of Mormon History" because of his many influential contributions to the field. Since 1842, he was the first non-general authority Church Historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from 1972 to 1982, and was director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History from 1982 until 1986.
Brigham Henry Roberts was a historian, politician, and leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He edited the seven-volume History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and independently wrote the six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Roberts also wrote Studies of the Book of Mormon—published posthumously—which discussed the validity of the Book of Mormon as an ancient record. Roberts was denied a seat as a member of United States Congress because of his practice of polygamy.
Anti-Mormonism is often used to describe people or literature that are critical of their adherents, institutions, or beliefs, or involve physical attacks against specific Mormons, or the Latter Day Saint movement as a whole. It can take the form of discrimination, persecution, hostility, or prejudice directed against the Latter Day Saint movement, particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Mormon colonies in Mexico are settlements located near the Sierra Madre mountains in northern Mexico which were established by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints beginning in 1885. The colonists came to Mexico due to federal attempts to curb and prosecute polygamy in the United States. Plural marriage, as polygamous relationships were called by church members, was an important tenet of the church—although it was never practiced by a majority of the membership.
Philip Layton Barlow is a Harvard-trained scholar who specializes in American religious history, religious geography, and Mormonism. In 2019, Barlow was appointed associate director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Barlow was the first full-time professor of Mormon studies at a secular university as the inaugural Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University (USU), from 2007 to 2018.
Terryl Lynn Givens is a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University (BYU). Until 2019, he was a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond, where he held the James A. Bostwick Chair in English.
Armand Lind Mauss was an American sociologist specializing in the sociology of religion. He was Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Religious Studies at Washington State University and was the most frequently published author of Sociology works on Mormons during his long career. A special conference on his work in Mormon studies was held in 2013 at California's Claremont Graduate University (CGU), the papers from which were subsequently published by the University of Utah Press in the format of a Festschrift, where he was honored as "one of the most prominent Mormon intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."
The Story of the Latter-day Saints is a single-volume history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, first published in 1976.
James Brown Allen is an American historian of Mormonism and was an official Assistant Church Historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1972 to 1979. While working as Assistant Church Historian, he co-authored The Story of the Latter-day Saints with Glen Leonard. After Ezra Taft Benson dismissed the book as secular new history, other events led to the dissolution of the LDS Church History department in 1982. Allen resigned as Assistant Church Historian in 1979, returning to work at Brigham Young University (BYU) full-time.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Georgia refers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members in Georgia. The first branch in Georgia was organized in 1876. It has since grown to 89,285 members in 164 congregations.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had a presence in Mexico since 1874. Mexico has the largest body of LDS Church members outside of the United States. Membership grew nearly 15% between 2011 and 2021. In the 2010 Mexican census, 314,932 individuals self-identified most closely to the LDS Church.
Grant Revon Underwood is a historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU). He is also the author of The Millennial World of Early Mormonism and the editor of Voyages of Faith: Explorations in Mormon Pacific History.
Gilbert Woodrow Scharffs was a Latter-day Saint religious educator and author.
Mormon studies is the interdisciplinary academic study of the beliefs, practices, history and culture of individuals and denominations belonging to the Latter Day Saint movement, a religious movement associated with the Book of Mormon, though not all churches and members of the Latter Day Saint movement identify with the terms Mormon or Mormonism. Denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by far the largest, as well as the Community of Christ (CoC) and other smaller groups, include some categorized under the umbrella term Mormon fundamentalism.
Kathleen Flake is an American historian, writer, and attorney and is currently the Richard Lyman Bushman chair of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia.
Early in its history, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a series of negative encounters with the federal government of the United States. This led to decades of mistrust, armed conflict, and the eventual disincorporation of the church by an act of the United States Congress. The relationship between the church and the government eventually improved, and in recent times LDS Church members have served in leadership positions in Congress and held other important political offices. The LDS Church becomes involved in political matters if it perceives that there is a moral issue at stake and wields considerable influence on a national level with over a dozen members of Congress having membership in the church in the early 2000s, and about 80% of Utah state lawmakers identifying as LDS.
This is a bibliography of works on the Latter Day Saint movement.