Item Detail
-
17094
-
4
-
0
-
English
-
The Body of Zion : Community, Human Bodies, and Eschatological futures among the Reorganized Latter-day Saints, 1908-1934
-
University of Missouri-Kansas City
-
Master's Thesis
-
"From 1908 to 1934, members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) generated a discourse and praxis of bodies that enabled them to enter into modernity. No longer able to negatively define themselves against their LDS cousins, RLDS members recentered their faith on an attempt to build Zion, the Kingdom of God on earth. Through a process of denominational syncretism, they borrowed ideas from movements and processes such as muscular Christianity, the Social Gospel movement, and 'bio-power' practices. They incorporated these practices into their view of what I term 'the body of Zion': the body as a church, the individual body, the body as physical communities, and the imagined body. RLDS created views of the 'body of Zion' that spawned dissonances among members who in turn remade their once homogenizing discourse into a more pluralistic and fractured kingdom in the decades that followed." (author's abstract)