Item Detail
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19690
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3
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0
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English
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Verbal Performance in Mormon Worship Services
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University of Pennsylvania
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Ph.D.
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"Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) learn to give extemporaneous prayers and testimonies as very young children and continue throughout their lives to perfect their performances. Praying is taught in terms of kinesics, structure and vocabulary and children learn by repeating verbatim what parents and teachers say. By eight or nine years a child has mastered the structure: address, gratitude, petition, closing, and can innovate the content. Adult prayers are much longer elaborations on this structure. Although prayers are directed to God, fellow worshippers do evaluate the performance. Fluency, mastery of form, poetic devices are appreciated but humility and sincerity are greater signs of competency. Testimonies are extemporaneous expressions of belief or experience given at a Fast and Testimony meeting the first Sunday of the month. No one is obliged to testify, and only fifty percent of the active members ever do. Testimonies have eight elements of structure: the "straight testimony," gratitude, personal experience narratives, sermon, tribute, prayer, apology, and joke. None of these elements is obligatory, but a testimony consists of at least two elements. The fact that a Mormon says something in the context of the "testimony bearing" segment of the service labels his/her remarks as testimony. Mormons are more likely to evaluate testimonies than prayers, but the testifier will receive only approving remarks. Mormons value brevity, coherence, relevance, spontaneity, personal but not intimate stories and genuineness. No prestige, position or performance rights accrue to a competent performer because the audience values a saint-like life more than saint-like words. This research is based on twelve years of study in Eugene, Oregon. The appendices include thirty-eight prayers and sixty-nine testimonies." [Author's abstract]