Phillip E. Hammond
In the 1980s, Rodney Stark began creating a comprehensive theory of howreligions grow. In The Churching of America the theory was appliedto Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics, then to The Rise of Christianity. Now comes The Rise of Mormonism, again illustrating the fertility of his theory in this wonderfully written book. All readers will learn from it.
Phillip E. Hammond, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of With Liberty for All: Freedom of Religion in the United States
Terryl L. Givens
Rodney Stark's notorious predictions of Mormonism as an emergent world religion have overshadowed an extensive and much more significant engagement with the LDS religion. Reid L. Neilson's assemblage of these penetrating essays establishes both Stark as a preeminent scholar of Mormonism and the value of Mormon studies as a potent paradigm for the history and sociology of religion and our understanding of successful religious movements.
Terryl L. Givens, University of Richmond, author of By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion
Richard Lyman Bushman
Rodney Stark's Mormon essays will surprise and instruct Latter-day Saints and provoke debate in everyone else. No one takes revelation more seriously than he does. He is that rare sociologist of religion who believes the world's great revelators, including Joseph Smith, were not frauds or crazy. Serious students of Mormonism must know this work.
Richard Lyman Bushman, Columbia University, author of Believing History: Latter-day Saint Essays