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Sojourner in the Promised Land.- Forty Years among the Mormons. By Jan Shipps. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xiv, 400 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02590-3.)
Most scholars of Mormonism are Mormon church members in good standing. Their scholarship can be thorough and thoughtful, but there are boundaries of orthodoxy they dare not cross. Certain topics are not addressed in depth; analyses and conclusions must fall within certain limits. Scholars who transgress the boundaries are silenced, or barred from use of church-owned facilities, or even excommunicated. Since Mormon scholars do not enjoy full academic freedom, their work about their own tradition, however sound in most ways, is sometimes not fully critical.
Jan Shipps, the foremost non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism (an inside-outsider, she calls herself), has been welcome among...