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Former Faculty Member “Flunks” Retirement | Sociology News | Washingt Former faculty member “flunks” retirement | Sociology News | Washingt... https://soc.wsu.edu/socnews/former-faculty-member-flunks-retirement/ Former faculty member “flunks” retirement by Don Dillman When professors retire after years of writing, teaching, and grading on deadlines, it is not unusual for them to leave that lifestyle behind and choose retirement activities that involve no such expectations. That might mean picking up on old, neglected hobbies, or developing new ones to pursue in a leisurely way. Armand Mauss, who joined the WSU sociology faculty in 1969, during a period of rapid departmental growth, and retired in 1999, clearly does not fit that mold. He describes the 16 “retirement” years leading up to his 87th birthday as the most productive of his career, with two books and a couple dozen articles. That also includes several years of teaching graduate classes in religious studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. While at WSU, Armand’s teaching, research, and publication often focused on deviant behavior and social problems, including the origin and prevention of alcohol and drug abuse, and he guided the work of many graduate students in those areas of study. However, the sociology of social movements, especially religious movements, remained a major career interest. For several years, he was editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the major journal examining religion from a social science perspective. Last year editor Jodi O’Brien interviewed Armand for Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association. This article, which we include with their permission, shows how sociological theories and concepts help with the practical understanding of religious organizations, including the Mormon Church, which he has studied throughout his pre- and post-retirement careers. Recently, when we asked Armand about the continuation of his prolific research and 1 of 10 2/19/2019, 4:30 PM Former faculty member “flunks” retirement | Sociology News | Washingt... https://soc.wsu.edu/socnews/former-faculty-member-flunks-retirement/ writing, he passed on the assessment of a grandchild who wryly observed, “Well, Grandpa, it looks to me like maybe you have flunked retirement.” We consider it a huge success for the rest of us that Armand has not left sociology and continues to apply his sociological perspective to helping us understand the world in which we live nearly a half century after joining the WSU Sociology faculty. O’Brien, J., Mauss, A. (2014). Beyond Critics and Apologists. Contexts Vol. 13 (2) pp.8-11. Copyright © 2014 by American Sociological Association. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Inc. http://ctx.sagepub.com/content /13/2/8.abstract Until recently, most literature on Mormons has been either apologetic or hostile. Armand Mauss has devoted his career to cultivating a scholarship that counters the reputation of Mormons as a “kind of cult with sheep-like members” and demonstrates that “believing Mormons can extricate themselves from religious apologetics and consider issues and quandaries on the same basis as other academics do.” A self-described insider-outsider, Mauss is both a believer and a questioner of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or, more commonly, Mormon) history and doctrine. He was born in 1928 into a devout Mormon family and grew up in Oakland, California. In his late teens he served the traditional two-year Mormon mission, and then attended college at Sophia University (Jesuit) in Japan, where he remained for several more years. Following his return to the United States in the 1950s he joined the graduate program at UC Berkeley where he completed a PhD in sociology under the supervision of race and religion scholar Charles Y. Glock. Throughout his career as a professor of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University and since, Mauss has written prolifically on the Mormon religion. His book The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation, is a study of the unique Mormon trend of alternately assimilating into and retreating from American culture at various historical moments. All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage chronicles the shift in Mormon beliefs and policies about race. Since the launch in 1965 of the independent Mormon publication Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Mauss has been actively involved as a frequent author and governing board member. In his recently published memoir, Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport, he describes Dialogue as a “borderlands where earnest thinkers have been able to gather and share their ideas…their struggles between faith and doubt, or even their disillusionment and anger over troubling encounters with the Church’s history, doctrines, [or] leaders.” 2 of 10 2/19/2019, 4:30 PM Former faculty member “flunks” retirement | Sociology News | Washingt... https://soc.wsu.edu/socnews/former-faculty-member-flunks-retirement/ Although well into his retirement at age 86, Mauss continues to work at bridging the chasm between religious apologists and academics through his involvement with the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Religion. For this interview he sat down with Contexts co-editor Jodi O’Brien at his home in Irvine, California to discuss the “intellectual borderlands” of his career as a Mormon academic. Jodi O’Brien: The LDS Church hasn’t always been a comfortable place for intellectuals. You describe your experiences in a “borderlands” where you’ve had to negotiate your “tattered passport” in both Mormon and academic circles. How has it been on the church side? Armand Mauss: Well, even as a graduate student at Berkeley, I began to question publicly the restrictive race policy of the Church while working on my doctoral dissertation (which much later became All Abraham’s Children). Soon my Mormon “passport” was increasingly questioned and tattered as I kept getting summoned by church leaders to explain myself. They showed some reluctance to give me leadership positions, because they didn’t see me as a model church leader, which frankly I was not, partly because of my tendency to pose sensitive questions in public ways—thus the occasional summons. JO: And how about your experience as a sociologist? AM: Almost nobody in the discipline thought that religion was important. Furthermore, I found among some of my colleagues, a personal animus toward religion generally and toward Mormonism in particular. One colleague simply told me, flat-out, that he never had liked Mormons, so he didn’t like me. It was a rather surprising thing for a person to say directly. So, I had trouble breaking into what you might call “the fraternity of mainstream sociologists,” as long as I was interested in religion. I had to prove myself by studying other topics, such as deviant behavior or social movements. Nevertheless, with the backing of my department, I did serve for several years as editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the principal religion journal for social scientists. JO: In your memoir you describe a strain of “adventurous thinking,” by Mormon scholars who are doing “unsponsored projects” (i. e. research not sponsored by the Church). AM: One of the rather adventurous things that’s been happening among [Mormon] scholars is finding different ways to understand and explain the Book of Mormon and where it came from without relying on the official story. There’s quite a bit of 3 of 10 2/19/2019, 4:30 PM Former faculty member “flunks” retirement | Sociology News | Washingt... https://soc.wsu.edu/socnews/former-faculty-member-flunks-retirement/ research going on to analyze the significance of the Book of Mormon in ways that don’t depend on the claim of supernatural origin. And the origin itself, at the hands of Joseph Smith, a semiliterate youth, is hard to explain. I mean, it’s 500 pages of small print, and it’s not easy to read, so, what is it? Where did it come from? And until somebody comes up with proof of plagiarism, which, surprisingly, so far has never been done, all the theories I’ve heard about the origin of the Book of Mormon are just as hard to believe as Smith’s angel story. Literature critic Harold Bloom, in writing about Mormonism and the Book of Mormon in The American Religion described Smith as a “religious genius” (maybe something like Mozart in music). Well, that was a very helpful idea to Mormon apologists. It’s not exactly divine inspiration, but it’s close enough, you know. Calling him a genius is fine with me. JO: One of your central contributions to the study of social movements in general, and religion in particular is your theory of assimilation and retrenchment. You write about this in your study of Mormon vacillation between assimilation and rejection of American culture in your book, The Angel and the Beehive. AM: My interest in this arose in the 1970s as all kinds of new religious movements were emerging. For the first time, my colleagues elsewhere in sociology were willing to tolerate my interest in [religion], because it could be studied as part of social movement theory. I got really interested in a couple of [these new religious movements]. I even went on a couple of expense-paid conference jaunts that the Moonies offered. The interest in new religious movements was something that Rodney Stark, in particular, jumped on with some of his students, starting with his time at the University of Washington, when he worked with Bill Bainbridge. Their important discovery was a kind of macro-cosmic view of not just the Moonies or groups like that, but the whole new rise of religious conversion and devotion as an unintended consequence of secularization; thus secularization contains the seeds of its own destruction by nourishing the rise of new religious movements.
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