The purpose of this thesis is to discover those experimental theatre techniques which can best express a Mormon theme: that one must become as a child to enter the kingdom of God. This thesis concludes from the resultant production, An Afternoon's Work, that certain theatrical techniques are powerful tools for the expression of any theme; that the work of the Open Theatre can be used for Mormon ends as long as the actor and director know exactly what they want to say and refine the techniques for that purpose.The ideology behind experimental theatres such as the Open Theatre is discussed and compared with Mormon ideology. The creation of the production is analyzed in an effort to provide future aspirants with guidelines to the possible contributions of the actors, directors, techniques, and refinement process. A descriptive list of exercises and a script for An Afternoon's Work are included.

The LDS history of Bridger Valley, Wyoming is the name chosen for this project of research into the history of Bridger Valley, Uinta County, Wyoming. This history is intended to cover the settlements in the area.

Music is an important yet relatively unnoticed part of the everyday world almost all of us take for granted. Whether in the car, watching television, shopping, at work or at home, even waking up in the morning or going to sleep at night, and so forth, music surrounds us, soothes us, disturbs us, and occasionally goes so far as to persuade us. Although music plays a significant role in many areas of life, its relationship to society is especially evident in the religious sphere. Therefore, the religious sphere is an ideal place to examine what music does and what it means to the culture of a religious organization. Mormonism is one such religious culture in which music plays an important role. This study of music and mormon culture further analyzed by gender is my contribution to the cause of examining music's relationship to society.

Questions regarding the conditions of the origin of Mormonism have been asked repeatedly since Joseph Smith first made his claims public regarding his religious experiences. The same questions have been asked by both proponents and opponents of Smith's story: "How did Mormonism begin?", "Who was Joseph Smith?", "What was Joseph Smith?", "What did he do?" If it could be shown that Joseph Smith was an honest, upright, and sincere person, then the religion he produced was more likely to be reliable and truthful. If it could be shown that Joseph Smith was a fraud and a deceiver, then presumably, the religion could have been revealed as a fake and a great hoax. For many years the issues were wrapped up in the polarization of these extreme points of view. Not until the 1940's did the emotional content of these questions abate to the degree that a more objective examination of the evidence was possible.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University, Dept. of Graduate Studies in Religious Instruction.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University, Dept. of Graduate Studies in Religious Instruction, 1968. / "Reprinted 1997." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-90).

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University, Dept. of Graduate Studies in Religious Instruction. / Electronic thesis. Also available in print ed.

The evidence presented in this thesis advocates an increased level of scholarly interest in English working-class Mormon converts. To illustrate who these people were, and what their roles were as part of Mormon story, this regional study introduces and makes available over twelve hundred Staffordshire Mormons, and asks questions of the collected statistical information. The conservative Staffordshire Mormons clearly assisted the establishment, and continuation, off a Zion in the American West. Much of the data confirms previous scholarship; however, those with “differing visions” of Mormonism (for example, the RLDS Church) attracted Staffordshire converts in larger numbers than previously suggested. The findings suggest a careful re-examination of the early British RLDS membership may reveal similar findings. If so, a reappraisal of RLDS-LDS history not only would be desirable, but also necessary.

The few studies of Mormon home literature that have been published to date dismiss it as inferior artistry, an embarrassing if necessary step in the progression towards true Mormon literature. These studies are inadequate, however, because they divorce the texts from their context, holding them up to standards that did not exist for their original audience. Jane Tompkins' theory of texts as cultural work provides a more satisfactory way of looking at these narratives. Home literature is thoroughly enmeshed in the cultural discourse of its day. Beneath the surface, these didactic stories about young Mormons finding love with their foreordained mates performed important cultural work by helping Mormons to think about their personal and collective identities, by co-opting mainstream fictional forms and giving them safe expression, and by reconceptualizing marriage in the wake of polygamy's demise. The stories of Susa Young Gates illustrate these functions well. Gates was a prominent youth leader and prolific home author during the 1890s. Her stories extend and enact Mormon cultural discourse of the time and point up the connections between Mormon fiction and mainstream models. The last decade of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of Mormonism's transition from an isolated separatist movement to a thoroughly assimilated and modem mainstream religion. As Mormons shifted away from the defining practices of polygamy, communal economics, and ecclesiastical dominance of politics, they sought for new ways to define themselves that would retain their sense of distinctness from a world they still viewed as sinful. The result was new emphasis on formerly dormant or relatively unemphasized practices such as the Word of Wisdom and the law of tithing. This emphasis shows up in the story "Donald's Boy" which repeatedly focuses on the necessity for Mormon youth to shun the corruptions of the world. "Seven Times," which ran in the 1893-94 volume of the Young Woman's Journal, shows Gates's debt to mainstream fiction in its extensive adoption of popular conventions, reworking such devices as the heroine's development, the divine child, the lecherous villain, and the sick bed ordeal into a Mormon conversion narrative. As in popular American fiction, the role of the narrator is central to the didactic intentions of the story. The narrator becomes the dominant personality of the text as she both creates and controls the emotion necessary to the formal and ideological demands of the narrative. Gates claimed to consider popular didactic fiction inconsequential, but her own comments and her wholesale use of its conventions suggests that her relationship with these novels was much more complex than she acknowledged. "John Stevens' Courtship" is Gates's most popular and ambitious work. Its setting in the early years of Mormon settlement in Utah at the time of the first large-scale influx of "outsiders" into Mormon society constructs an idealized view of early Mormon culture that contrasts with the diminished faithfulness Gates perceived in her day. Gates's artistic ambitions show up most clearly in her intense descriptions of her characters. These character descriptions draw on popular conventions to inscribe idealized gender constructs that interacted with Mormon ideology to remain in force in Mormon society long after they had faded elsewhere. Finally, Gates's emphasis on the idea of a foreordained mate replaces polygamy as the essential doctrine of marriage, an important shift in post-Manifesto Mormondom.

This dissertation studies a small American religious group that survived unscathed during the Third Reich. Some fifteen thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, lived under National Socialism. Unlike persecuted Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses, and other small American-based sects that suffered severe restrictions, the Mormons worshiped freely under Hitler's regime. They survived by stressing congruence between church doctrine and Nazi dogma. Mormons emphasized their interest in genealogical research and sports, sent their husbands into the Wehrmacht and their sons into the Hitler Youth, and prayed for a Nazi victory in wartime. Mormon leaders purged all Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans and liturgical practices, and shunned their few Jewish converts. They resurrected a doctrinal edict that required deference to civil authority, which the Mormons had not always obeyed. Some Mormons imagined fanciful connections with Nazism, to the point that a few believed Hitler admired their church, copied its welfare program, and organized the Nazi party along Mormon lines. This dissertation builds upon Christine Elizabeth King's theory of a common Weltanschauung between Mormons and Nazis, and Steven Carter's description of the Mormons' "accommodation" with National Socialism. Instead of a passive approach, however, the Mormons pursued aggressive and shameless "ingratiation" with the Nazi state. This work also examines memory. Mormons later tried to forget their pandering to the Nazis, especially when large numbers of Germans immigrated to Utah in the post-war period. When the story of a martyred Mormon resister, Helmuth Hubener, emerged in the 1970s, church officials interfered with the research of scholars at Brigham Young University. They feared that Hubener's example would incite Mormon youth to rebel against dictators abroad, hurt the church's relations with communist East Germany, and would offend recent German Mormon immigrants in Utah. A few Mormons shunned and harassed Hubener's surviving coconspirators. In recent years, Hubener?excommunicated for rebellion against the Nazis but later restored to full church membership?has been rehabilitated as a recognized hero of Mormonism. A new collective memory has been forged, one of wartime courage and suffering, while the inconvenient past is being conveniently discarded.