This book is an exploration of the Mormon cultural identity that Joseph Smith and, to a lesser extent, Brigham Young founded. At the heart of their thinking were a number of dynamic tensions, or paradoxes, that give Mormon cultural expression much of its vitality. Arguing that culture can be viewed as the result of a people's efforts to accommodate such irresolvable tensions, Givens looks at the Mormon “habit of mind”, and forms of artistic expression to trace consistent themes and ideas that constitute, or contribute to the formation of a distinct cultural community. This study begins by exam ... More

This book is an exploration of the Mormon cultural identity that Joseph Smith and, to a lesser extent, Brigham Young founded. At the heart of their thinking were a number of dynamic tensions, or paradoxes, that give Mormon cultural expression much of its vitality. Arguing that culture can be viewed as the result of a people's efforts to accommodate such irresolvable tensions, Givens looks at the Mormon “habit of mind”, and forms of artistic expression to trace consistent themes and ideas that constitute, or contribute to the formation of a distinct cultural community. This study begins by examining four especially rich and fertile tensions, or thematic pairings in Mormon thought, that have inspired recurrent and sustained engagement on the part of writers, artists, and thinkers in the Mormon community. The safety and strictures of centralized authority, the rhetoric and promise of theological certainty, the collapse of the sacred into the banal, and the retreat into chosen isolation all find their opposite temptation in the allure of radical individualism, the endless and endlessly deferred nature of saving knowledge, the yearning for a theology of transcendence, and the angst of alienation. As Mormonism continues its evolution from American denomination to a new religious tradition and world-wide faith, this study represents a timely look at the role of cultural achievement and self-representation in that process. Genres treated include education, intellectual life, architecture, music and dance, theater (drama) film, literature, and visual art.