Peter Coviello at Seminary Co-op
January 15, 2020
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Seminary Co-op
Address
5751 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL 60637
Calendar
Download iCal FileFrom the Co-op's event page:
Peter Coviello discusses Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism. He will be joined in conversation by Kathryn Lofton. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)
About the book: From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end.
Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.
About the author: Peter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America and Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs.
About the interlocutor: Kathryn Lofton is professor of religious studies, American studies, history and divinity at Yale University.
Date posted
Jan 6, 2020
Date updated
Jan 6, 2020