John L. Sorenson
JOHN L. SORENSON is emeritus professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University. He founded the teaching of anthropology at BYU in 1958 and administered that field for 14 years before retiring in 1986. He and his wife Helen Lance Christianson are parents to 18 children, grandparents to 45, and great-grandparents to 5. They reside in Provo.
Some Voices from the Dust | Ross T. Christensen, ed., Papers of the Fifteenth Annual Symposium on the Archaeology of the Scriptures
Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 1
Any volume with “fifteenth annual” in its title requires placement in historical and sociological context before it can be evaluated properly. Sponsor of this symposium is the 800-member University Archaeological Society. (The name was changed…
Read moreProblems and Answers | Sidney B. Sperry, Answers to Book of Mormon Questions
Articles/Essays – Volume 03, No. 1
Doctor Sidney Sperry has revised somewhat his 1964 book, Problems of the Book of Mormon, and Bookcraft here offers the new version under a new title. The author was probably the first Latter-day Saint to…
Read moreAncient America and the Book of Mormon Revisited
Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 2
Dialogue 4.2 (Summer 1971): 82–85
Secular scholarship and L.D.S. studies of archaeology and the Book of Mormon have had a discordant dialogue for some time. The scripture asserts, for example, that the civilizations it describes in ancient America had their fundamental inspiration in migrations from the Near East.
Toward a History of Ancient America
Articles/Essays – Volume 04, No. 2
Dialogue 4.2 (Summer 1971): 65–68
If there is no history of ancient Antarctica, there is a valid reason for it. Stone Age man penetrated every continent except Antarctica, and until modern times, Antarctica was unexplored
Mormon World View and American Culture
Articles/Essays – Volume 08, No. 2
Neither the scholars nor the Mormons themselves have been able to come to agreement about the relationship between the life of the LDS people in this country and American lifeways. The views of outside observers…
Read moreNotes on the Margin | Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone, eds., Religious Movements in Contemporary America
Articles/Essays – Volume 09, No. 4
Religious Movements in Contemporary America is a collection of 27 papers, mainly based on field work, on “marginal religious movements in the United States”—such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Pentecostals, Spiritualists, Satanists, Hare Krishna, Scientology, and…
Read moreThe “Brass Plates” and Biblical Scholarship
Articles/Essays – Volume 10, No. 4
One of the notable intellectual activities of the 19th and early 20th centuries was development of the view that the Old Testament was a composite of ancient documents of varied age and source. Although the…
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