The earth will eventually be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory. But how will our current world ever become the heaven of our dreams? The Lord is already on it; and, as the essays in this book provocatively proposes, He's following good engineering principles. Joseph Fielding Smith said, regarding inventions in these latter days, "The inspiration of the Lord has gone out and takes hold of the minds of men, though they know it not, and they are directed by the Lord. In this manner he brings them into his service." If there is "no such thing as immaterial matter," and "all spirit is...

The life of a Mormon intellectual in the secular academic community is likely to include some contradictions between belief, scholarship, and the changing times. In his memoir, Armand L. Mauss recounts his personal and intellectual struggles-inside and outside the LDS world-from his childhood to his days as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1960s through his many years as a professor. As an important and influential observer and author in the Mormon intellectual world, Mauss has witnessed how, in attempting to suppress independent and unsponsored scholarship during the final decades of...