Item Detail
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19718
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2
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0
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English
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A History of Early RLDS Spirituality, 1860-1885
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University of Kansas
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Ph.D.
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"The RLDS church (Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) developed an ideal of spirituality during the years 1860 to 1885, the church's first twenty-five years of existence. This ideal was largely established in the understanding of members through reports of religious experiences published in the church's primary journal, the Saints' Herald. The reports in the Herald provided models by which readers could judge the acceptability of reporting particular experiences of their own. In turn, readers engaged in a process of self-selection as they decided which reports they would actually send to the Herald. At the time, the Herald itself did not engage in editorial censorship. The study divided 349 reports of religious experiences into several basic forms: divine intervention such as visions or healing, feelings such as ecstasy, and enhanced human powers such as assurance or instruction. The reports were also analyzed with reference to their content: those affirming the RLDS institution as exclusively valid, those affirming it as valid in a nonexclusive sense, those affirming cultural religious beliefs, and those providing assurance on personal concerns to individuals. Data for three reporting groups also were analyzed: leaders with institution-wide responsibility, lay males, and women. The ideal for RLDS spirituality which was formed from 1860 to 1885 was characterized by the predominance of forms of divine intervention and institution-affirming content in reports of religious experiences, an increase in numbers of reports affirming the exclusive validity of the RLDS church, a marked increase in reports submitted by women, the use of relatively unstructured forms which permitted the conveying of information pertinent to institutional claims, and the inclusion of doctrinal themes with mythic potential (the ability of the theme to be universalized and to be made cosmic). The study concluded that reports of religious experiences by RLDS members conformed to aspects of theories by Katz, Troeltsch, and Glock and Stark in performing the conservative function of affirming established doctrinal beliefs and policies. During this early period of the RLDS church, the published reports especially affirmed the contemporary growth of centralized authority within the organization. The study also concluded that the ideal of RLDS spirituality was largely the result of the influence of the laity rather than the leadership. The predominantly lay religious experiences reported in the Herald differed markedly from those religious experiences reported solely by the leadership which were included in the church's scriptural canon." [Author's abstract]