Dave
Numerical Growth of the Mormon Church
Every April I get excited when at conference they announce the statistics for the previous year. Maybe it’s self-serving in a way to learn how the church has grown, and that it continues to grow. I have wondered what would happen if one year they reported a decline in membership. I imagine Latter-day Saints would [...]
Potential Avenues in Mormon Mission History
Yesterday a friend of mine expressed frustration (maybe not total frustration, but perhaps an inner ambiguity) over exactly how to determine a dissertation topic or a life-long track of study. He knows that he definitely wants to work on 19th century American religious history, particularly Mormon history. But from there… what? I imagine part of [...]
Restoration Inclusivism as Missiology
Reid L. Neilson recently published a paper in his edited volume Joseph Smith Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries entitled Joseph Smith and Nineteenth-Century Mormon Mappings of Asian Religions. Neilson weighs the question of how Latter-day Saints have made sense of Asian religions and proffers a new “theoretical plank” for contextualizing Mormons’ self-identity relative to (especially) [...]
Tangled Up in Mission Theology
One of the most striking features of contemporary missiology is that most practitioners of the discipline unabashedly involve their theology in the academic discourse. Strict academicians frown on involving faith-based claims, favoring instead more objective and reason-based approaches of analysis. On the one hand, missiologists have been tagged as theologians of mission; on the other, [...]
“Unto Every Nation” and Mormon Missions
David Whittaker provided probably the best work for Mormon missiology in recent years in his introduction to the sources. He wrote this in 2000, and up to that point “no one-volume study of the Mormon missionary experience” had been written. A couple of years later, Donald Cannon, et al., published “Unto Every Nation: Gospel Light [...]
10 Ways to Get Started in Missiology
A few years ago, I wanted to learn more about missiology/mission studies. I had the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU at my disposal and spent hours scouring through its collections trying to figure out the discipline. All I really knew was that there was such a thing as the scholarly study of mission and [...]
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