As the 8th feature of our Mormon Stories Book Club series, we feature Craig Harline and his book Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, accompanied by podcast host Heather Olson Beal and readers Kimberly Brinkerhoff, Hannah Pritchett, Daniel Rawson, and Natasha Helfer Parker. Please support Mormon Stories by purchasing Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, through this link.
A small amount of the proceeds go to help support Mormon Stories.
Craig Harline, a native of California, is a cultural historian and a professor of history at BYU. He teaches courses on the Reformation, the history of civilization, film, and Christianity. He has also taught seminars on miracles and toleration and persecution.
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Title: Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America
Author: Craig Harline
Publisher: Yale University Press
Genre: Non-fiction
Year: 2011
Pages: 320
Binding: Hardback, Paperback, Kindle
ISBN-13: 978-0300167016
Price: $20.90 (hardcover); $17.94 (paperback); $15.12 (Kindle)
Book Description from www.amazon.com:
This powerful and innovative work by a gifted cultural historian explores the effects of religious conversion on family relationships, showing how the challenges of the Reformation can offer insight to families facing similarly divisive situations today.
Craig Harline begins with the story of young Jacob Rolandus, the son of a Dutch Reformed preacher, who converted to Catholicism in 1654 and ran away from home, causing his family to disown him. In the companion story, Michael Sunbloom, a young American, leaves his family’s religion in 1973 to convert to Mormonism, similarly upsetting his distraught parents. The modern twist to Michael’s story is his realization that he is gay, causing him to leave his new church, and upsetting his parents again—but this time the family reconciles.
Recounting these stories in short, alternating chapters, Harline underscores the parallel aspects of the two far-flung families. Despite different outcomes and forms, their situations involve nearly identical dynamics and heart-wrenching choices. Through the author’s deeply informed imagination, the experiences of a seventeenth-century European family are transformed into immediately recognizable terms.
Book Club Resources:
1. Click here[H2] to listen to the Mormon Stories Podcast with author Craig Harline and readers Heather Olson Beal, Hannah Pritchett, Natasha Helfer Parker, Daniel Rawson, and Kimberly Brinkerhoff.
2. Reviews of Conversions
https://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=9780300167016
https://affirmation.org/books/craig_harline_conversions.shtml
https://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/content/117/5/1549.extract
https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8779562
https://yalepress.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/a-novel-narration-of-religious-conversion/
3. New Books in Politics Podcast: https://newbooksinpolitics.com/2012/10/15/craig-harline-conversions-two-family-stories-from-the-reformation-and-modern-america-yale-up-2011
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