Two decades before official missionary work began, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pamphlets, books and other church materials began circulating in West Africa, leading to a unique “native” Mormonism. Believers crafted churches from these bare materials and doctrinal interpretations during the 1960s and 1970s.
Dr. Laurie Maffly-Kipp will present “A Marvelous Work: Reading Mormonism in West Africa” today as part of the USU University Libraries’ Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture series. The lecture will be held at the Newel & Jean Daines Concert Hall at 7 p.m. and will also be broadcast live at youtube.com/USULibraries. It is free and open to the public.
This year’s Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture is sponsored by USU University Libraries, USU Religious Studies Program and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The lecture honors former Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints historian Leonard J. Arrington, whose papers are housed in USU’s Special Collections and Archives.
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, PhD, is the Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her publications are many and include Women’s Work: From Antebellum America to the Harlem Renaissance; American Scriptures: An Anthology of Sacred Writings; and Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories. Maffly-Kipp taught for twenty-four years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Religious Studies and American Studies. She holds a PhD in American History from Yale University.
