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Missionaries

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A Missionary Farewell

Listen to the audio version of this piece here. A crowd of several thousand poured into the Provo Tabernacle. They filled the wooden pews, the kind that are never quite comfortable but perfect for keeping…

Called Not to Serve

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. My brain is slightly broken. The natural lows and highs of life are amplified by chemical imbalance into deep emotional troughs and crazed manic waves that can strike anytime…

Rare as a Five-Legged Jackrabbit Roger Terry. Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary.

“I’m Not Shaving My Legs Until We Baptize!” Angela Liscom Clayton. The Legend of Hermana Plunge.

Review: Running the (Selected) Gamut of Missionary Experiences Mike Laughead and Theric Jepsen, eds. Served: A Missionary Comics Anthology

Remarks at Chase’s Missionary Farewell

There is an apparent rule, honored in some wards as often in the breach I as in its observance, that talks given at missionary farewells are not to be devoted to eulogizing the departing missionary. I enjoy the sentimental per sonal sharing that attends eulogies and do not mind meetings that deal in personalities, but I will follow the rule and devote my remarks to gospel subjects. This is difficult to do because I am very proud of my son and have deep feelings of gratitude and joy relating to the mission experience that awaits him and his readiness for it. I hope he will sense this as I share some advice concerning missionary service. 

What You Leave Behind: Six Years at the MTC

Even now, nearly eleven years later, I can still see his face—shocked, fearful, and deeply pained. I’d been working for almost four months at the newly constructed, multi-million dollar Language Training Mission, as the Missionary…

Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century: Marketing for Miracles

In recent years social scientists have found it theoretically useful to understand church growth or decline in the context of a “religious economy.”[1] In this conceptualization each society has a “religion industry” in the same…

Mormonism in Modern Japan

“Since Japan as a nation has made such remarkable economic and technological progress, why is the church in Japan not also making comparable progress, but in fact is stagnant?” For some years now such a…

Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand

For the earliest nineteenth-century LDS missionaries in the Pacific, a strong appeal of the British Crown colony of New Zealand was the high concentration of English-speaking settlers among whom they could proselyte. Elder Addison Pratt,…

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A Missionary Farewell

Listen to the audio version of this piece here. A crowd of several thousand poured into the Provo Tabernacle. They filled the wooden pews, the kind that are never quite comfortable but perfect for keeping…

Called Not to Serve

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. My brain is slightly broken. The natural lows and highs of life are amplified by chemical imbalance into deep emotional troughs and crazed manic waves that can strike anytime…

Rare as a Five-Legged Jackrabbit Roger Terry. Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary.

“I’m Not Shaving My Legs Until We Baptize!” Angela Liscom Clayton. The Legend of Hermana Plunge.

Review: Running the (Selected) Gamut of Missionary Experiences Mike Laughead and Theric Jepsen, eds. Served: A Missionary Comics Anthology

Remarks at Chase’s Missionary Farewell

There is an apparent rule, honored in some wards as often in the breach I as in its observance, that talks given at missionary farewells are not to be devoted to eulogizing the departing missionary. I enjoy the sentimental per sonal sharing that attends eulogies and do not mind meetings that deal in personalities, but I will follow the rule and devote my remarks to gospel subjects. This is difficult to do because I am very proud of my son and have deep feelings of gratitude and joy relating to the mission experience that awaits him and his readiness for it. I hope he will sense this as I share some advice concerning missionary service. 

What You Leave Behind: Six Years at the MTC

Even now, nearly eleven years later, I can still see his face—shocked, fearful, and deeply pained. I’d been working for almost four months at the newly constructed, multi-million dollar Language Training Mission, as the Missionary…

Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century: Marketing for Miracles

In recent years social scientists have found it theoretically useful to understand church growth or decline in the context of a “religious economy.”[1] In this conceptualization each society has a “religion industry” in the same…

Mormonism in Modern Japan

“Since Japan as a nation has made such remarkable economic and technological progress, why is the church in Japan not also making comparable progress, but in fact is stagnant?” For some years now such a…

Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand

For the earliest nineteenth-century LDS missionaries in the Pacific, a strong appeal of the British Crown colony of New Zealand was the high concentration of English-speaking settlers among whom they could proselyte. Elder Addison Pratt,…

Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia

In April 1994 some sixty LDS professionals and business people from around Australia were invited to meet with the Pacific Area presidency in a Sydney conference unique to the Mormon church in this country. Quite…

Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as Harbinger of the Future?

With the assistance of her family, Marta Angelica Solizo forms and paints incredibly detailed ceramic Nativity scenes. A standard set con sists of fourteen pieces: three sheep, a bull, four donkeys laden with corn, squash,…

Mormonism in Latin America: Towards the Twenty-first Century

From the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now taking part in a revolution that is radically transforming Latin America. As a result, the church…

Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty-first-century Europe

Alongside Utrecht’s largest canal, the nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic Martinuschurch dominates the centuries-old waterfront houses. Far be neath its glistening spire, the little entrance square, with a statue of the warrior saint Martinus at the center, bristles…

Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe

As a twenty-two-year-old convert of just a few years, I was called in June 1969 to preside over a small branch of the church in Belgium. In the tiny office of the old house serving…

Science and Mormonism: Past, Present, Future

Dialogue 29.1 (Spring 1996): 80–97
Will the church be able to retain the essence of its theology in the faceof challenges from science? Will the church’s discourse on scientific topicsbe marked by fundamentalism, isolationism, or progressivism? Will the church be able to retain its large contingent of professional scientists?

Thinking About the Word of God in the Twenty-First Century

For those imbued with Mormonism, the most appropriate figure for talking about the word of God in the twenty-first century is Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, presider over doors and gateways, and…

Membership Growth, Church Activity, and Missionary Recruitment

To comprehend the potential emergence of Mormonism as a major religious force in the twenty-first century, it is essential to comprehend the missionary ideology and practices of the LDS church. For rank-and-file Latter-day Saints, this proposition seems simply axiomatic of their foundational faith in the restoration of Christ’s gospel and their divine man date to convert the world in anticipation of his second advent.

The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950-2020

More than ever before the LDS church seems to measure its milestones in terms of numbers. Almost every issue of the Church News and the En sign includes an article or a graphic that highlights…

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Who would have dared to predict in 1830 that a tiny, radical circle of religious seekers around the Joseph and Lucy Smith family would be a church of 10 million only a few generations later…

The Missionary Journal of Cectpa Haut

March 26, 1996

I am sitting in a hotel suite in Moscow. The airport lost our luggage, so we are going to stay here until they find it. Our total flight time was fifteen hours from Washington, D.C., to Moscow. Sister Akers, Elder Hadlock, and I slept most of the time to avoid the kissy movies being shown.

The Rhetoric of Hypocrisy: Virtuous and Vicious

[1]I can’t resist beginning with some crude, rude questions. As I look out at you, I see you all appearing as polite, open-minded, virtuous lovers of culture studies, or at least inquirers into what such…

The Proper Order in Which You Found It: From a Brazilian Missionary Journal

Association of Mormon Letters Conference: Beyond Missionary Stories: Voicing the Transnational Mormon Experience

A Swelling Tide: Nineteen-Year-Old Sister Missionaries in the Twenty-First Century

“It was not a self-consistent ideology but a movement—a tremor in the earth, a lift in the wind, a swelling tide . . . an exhilarating sense of discovery, a utopian hope that women might…

A Missionary Farewell

Listen to the audio version of this piece here. A crowd of several thousand poured into the Provo Tabernacle. They filled the wooden pews, the kind that are never quite comfortable but perfect for keeping…

Called Not to Serve

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. My brain is slightly broken. The natural lows and highs of life are amplified by chemical imbalance into deep emotional troughs and crazed manic waves that can strike anytime…

Rare as a Five-Legged Jackrabbit Roger Terry. Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary.

“I’m Not Shaving My Legs Until We Baptize!” Angela Liscom Clayton. The Legend of Hermana Plunge.

Review: Running the (Selected) Gamut of Missionary Experiences Mike Laughead and Theric Jepsen, eds. Served: A Missionary Comics Anthology

Remarks at Chase’s Missionary Farewell

There is an apparent rule, honored in some wards as often in the breach I as in its observance, that talks given at missionary farewells are not to be devoted to eulogizing the departing missionary. I enjoy the sentimental per sonal sharing that attends eulogies and do not mind meetings that deal in personalities, but I will follow the rule and devote my remarks to gospel subjects. This is difficult to do because I am very proud of my son and have deep feelings of gratitude and joy relating to the mission experience that awaits him and his readiness for it. I hope he will sense this as I share some advice concerning missionary service. 

What You Leave Behind: Six Years at the MTC

Even now, nearly eleven years later, I can still see his face—shocked, fearful, and deeply pained. I’d been working for almost four months at the newly constructed, multi-million dollar Language Training Mission, as the Missionary…

Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century: Marketing for Miracles

In recent years social scientists have found it theoretically useful to understand church growth or decline in the context of a “religious economy.”[1] In this conceptualization each society has a “religion industry” in the same…

Mormonism in Modern Japan

“Since Japan as a nation has made such remarkable economic and technological progress, why is the church in Japan not also making comparable progress, but in fact is stagnant?” For some years now such a…

Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in New Zealand

For the earliest nineteenth-century LDS missionaries in the Pacific, a strong appeal of the British Crown colony of New Zealand was the high concentration of English-speaking settlers among whom they could proselyte. Elder Addison Pratt,…

Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia

In April 1994 some sixty LDS professionals and business people from around Australia were invited to meet with the Pacific Area presidency in a Sydney conference unique to the Mormon church in this country. Quite…

Reinventing Mormonism: Guatemala as Harbinger of the Future?

With the assistance of her family, Marta Angelica Solizo forms and paints incredibly detailed ceramic Nativity scenes. A standard set con sists of fourteen pieces: three sheep, a bull, four donkeys laden with corn, squash,…

Mormonism in Latin America: Towards the Twenty-first Century

From the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now taking part in a revolution that is radically transforming Latin America. As a result, the church…

Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty-first-century Europe

Alongside Utrecht’s largest canal, the nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic Martinuschurch dominates the centuries-old waterfront houses. Far be neath its glistening spire, the little entrance square, with a statue of the warrior saint Martinus at the center, bristles…

Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe

As a twenty-two-year-old convert of just a few years, I was called in June 1969 to preside over a small branch of the church in Belgium. In the tiny office of the old house serving…

Science and Mormonism: Past, Present, Future

Dialogue 29.1 (Spring 1996): 80–97
Will the church be able to retain the essence of its theology in the faceof challenges from science? Will the church’s discourse on scientific topicsbe marked by fundamentalism, isolationism, or progressivism? Will the church be able to retain its large contingent of professional scientists?

Thinking About the Word of God in the Twenty-First Century

For those imbued with Mormonism, the most appropriate figure for talking about the word of God in the twenty-first century is Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, presider over doors and gateways, and…

Membership Growth, Church Activity, and Missionary Recruitment

To comprehend the potential emergence of Mormonism as a major religious force in the twenty-first century, it is essential to comprehend the missionary ideology and practices of the LDS church. For rank-and-file Latter-day Saints, this proposition seems simply axiomatic of their foundational faith in the restoration of Christ’s gospel and their divine man date to convert the world in anticipation of his second advent.

The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950-2020

More than ever before the LDS church seems to measure its milestones in terms of numbers. Almost every issue of the Church News and the En sign includes an article or a graphic that highlights…

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Who would have dared to predict in 1830 that a tiny, radical circle of religious seekers around the Joseph and Lucy Smith family would be a church of 10 million only a few generations later…

The Missionary Journal of Cectpa Haut

March 26, 1996

I am sitting in a hotel suite in Moscow. The airport lost our luggage, so we are going to stay here until they find it. Our total flight time was fifteen hours from Washington, D.C., to Moscow. Sister Akers, Elder Hadlock, and I slept most of the time to avoid the kissy movies being shown.

The Rhetoric of Hypocrisy: Virtuous and Vicious

[1]I can’t resist beginning with some crude, rude questions. As I look out at you, I see you all appearing as polite, open-minded, virtuous lovers of culture studies, or at least inquirers into what such…

The Proper Order in Which You Found It: From a Brazilian Missionary Journal

Association of Mormon Letters Conference: Beyond Missionary Stories: Voicing the Transnational Mormon Experience

A Swelling Tide: Nineteen-Year-Old Sister Missionaries in the Twenty-First Century

“It was not a self-consistent ideology but a movement—a tremor in the earth, a lift in the wind, a swelling tide . . . an exhilarating sense of discovery, a utopian hope that women might…