The Book of Mormon Girl, is a memoir about the life of the protagonist, Joanna Brooks. Brooks gives us an insight into one of America's most captivating yet misunderstood religious traditions. From early on in her life, Joanna Brooks always understood that being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made her different form others. She knew that she was different but not in a bad way but rather in a special. Joanna brook’s memoir traces her faith journey beginning with her childhood in a secure and idealistically orthodox LDS family in Southern California to an adult woman. The pious LDS home that she grew up in was a loving place that made service a priority. Joanna felt loved by the community which was important to both …show more content…
It was all a reflection of newly found joy in her tradition. However, as she got older, Joanna started to struggle with some tenets of her religion, like where the Church stood when it came to women's rights and homosexuality. Joanna’s adolescent and early adulthood faith was not challenged by a calculated act of revelation of trickery, but rather by a sudden shift in her awareness and priority coming into clash with an inflexible system. It is her ideal dream school of BYU that Brooks sees punishing her favorite professor, Cecilia Konchar Farr, for the feminist views that had started to open new possibilities for Brooks. When the Church excluded a group of feminists because they spoke out about a church controversy, it brought up emotions in Brooks that made her question her own stance. It was while she was in college at BYU when Joanna brook’s faith took an enormous …show more content…
It does not preach or defend or attack. There is no shortage of deep and sincere affection for the Mormon doctrines and traditions that she grew up loving and finding security in. However, I feel like there is perhaps a little bit of holding back on the anguish of the faith crisis that led her out of the church, and on the difficulty of factors that brought her back. I found her memoir to be a bit vague. The book was written by an smart woman who felt like she had something to say and then spent half of the book refusing to say it. If someone is a Mormon and feminist, I want to know what it means to them. What does feminism mean in the context of Mormonism? She mentioned that when she was growing up in the Mormon church, twelve-year-old boys got the priesthood and girls got a Marie Osmond beauty manual. She mentioned the fact that men get the power of the priesthood while women have "the gift of motherhood." She claimed that Mormon married women are never supposed to work outside the home however, I have known a few who do and see no contradiction between paid employment and their faith. I wanted to know what all that mean to her. She talked about what the church told girls about sex and sexuality, and she even hinted at flashbacks of sexual abuse. Then she talks about meeting a great Jewish man and marrying him. That's it? I wonder if she found it
In this chapter, Betty Friedan urges a reversal of the notion that femininity must be protected at all costs, and advocates for turning away from the immaturity of femininity in order to become fully human. To depict this notion, Friedan makes use of several rhetorical devices such as parallelism, when she talks about how she got ‘Married, had children, lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife,’一yet, she could find no purpose in her life, and the idea of salvation, that she thought of achieving through maternity and domestic life further imprisoned her. Moreover, she makes use of hyperbole when she talks about how the love of her life decided to end things between them just because she had ‘won a fellowship’ as to him,
Mormonism has too many strict rules about what a female can and cannot do and should not be followed. Hardy struggles with the stress from the Mormon church and her sexuality throughout her story. She feels that there was something wrong with herself, “Perhaps the failure was mine — I’m sure many church members see it that way. I was too weak to endure.”
A seventh grade teacher, David Wilson, told a Mormon student about the “non-Christian, cult-like nature of Mormonism, and its general evils”. Imagine being in seventh grade and have a teacher completely disrespect your beliefs. No person especially a child should have to be verbally abused about what they believe. David Wilson had to give an apology to the girl but that didn't stop the harassment. The girl was harassed mentally and physically by the other students saying “She was in a cult” and “She was going to hell”.
As Janie ages, she has been going through different stages of loves and misloves, which gradually introduced her to reveal her feminnity. In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston depictures Janie’s feminism through her growth of life from an innocent and vulnerable 17 years old girl who had not yet experienced love to a true women who forgets “all those things (she doesn’t) want to remember, and remember(s) everything (she doesn’t) want to forget” (1) in various of perspectives: Janie’s education and her grandmother’s instigation about marriage; Janie’s misloves with Logan and Jody; and Janie’s love for Tea Cake. Before Janie even learned the concept of “love”, Hurston showed how Janie was raped when she still had her “womanly”
1. The Girl Scout Mom The mother claims to promote “feminism” and is under the impression that she is helping Shala by forcing her to take off her hijab. In reality, she is not only portrayed as a hypocrite and a “child” but an intolerant and close-minded person who does not understand why Shala wears a hijab or what it represents.
Religion is such a prominent figure in culture and society. Brideshead Revisited not only focused on the idea of religion, but also included how religion influences family life. Theologically, this novel made me realize the whole idea of religion and the say that children should have in religion. Prior to reading this novel, I never thought about children's rights to choose what religion they want to follow. In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism is the focal point and the family dynamic is influenced by religion.
When Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints, asked God which Christian denomination he should join, he claimed that God said “they were all wrong” and that “their creeds were an abomination to [my] sight” (Smith). By sharing his discovery, Smith incited violent persecution, “common among all the sects” who “all united to persecute [him]” after fielding attacks on their religion (Smith). Hatred towards Smith grew so violent that he was forced to leave his home in Manchester (Smith), but persecution of Mormons and Mormon communities continued for years. To other Christians, Mormonism offered an unwarranted, modern interpretation of Christian beliefs, history, and saints. The institution of polygamy was seen as its most sacrilegious practice.
Duality in Our Nig Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson narrates the life of Frado, a young woman who experiences racism and enslavement in the North despite the common, idealized notion that the North was a safe refuge for blacks in the United States. Frado is a mulatto woman with a white mother and a black father, a unique situation in the mid 1800s that provides a polarizing premise for the main character’s story. Frado is unable to identify fully with either the black or the white community, but the Bellmonts consider her to be black and call her “our nig” (Wilson 26). Therefore, the Bellmonts, accompanied by the lingering racist tendencies of the North, prevent Frado from exercising her freedoms as a “free black” living in a Northern state.
They also made it clear what they believe about homosexuality, declaring that “homosexual behavior violates the commandments of God, is contrary to the purposes of human sexuality, and deprives people of the blessings that can be found in family life and in the saving ordinances of the Gospel.” While many in the LGBT community may find the church's stance offensive, the church also made some very important clarifying statements that truly show the Christian character of the declarations. The church was very clear that while homosexuality is a sin, and the church will not participate in any ceremonies that promote such sin, the homosexual people themselves are to be respected and loved. The Mormons have stood beside same-sex couples who have fought for equality is hospitalization and medical care, employment, and housing issues.
With twenty-one thousand years of history, Christianity has spread to become the largest religion in the world providing hope and guidance to billions of people. In the novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte illustrates the personal journey the titular character goes on while maturing both physically and spiritually as she finds what God and Christianity mean to her. As she transitions from a student at the charity school Lowood, to governess and wife, Jane encounters several religious figures that represent the flaws the Bronte sees in traditional interpretations of religion. Jane Eyre rejects the conventional Victorian philosophies of Helen Burns, Brocklehurst, and St John to form her personal faith and religious identity. Jane’s first friend,
To Kill A Mockingbird Literary Analysis Throughout To Kill A MockingBird, by Harper Lee there are many acts of courage. This is shown in Atticus Finch, Jem Finch, and Boo Radley. Atticus shows the most courage in the book but all three of these characters show true courage in some way, shape, or form. Boo Radley showed a lot of courage, but he was not in the storyline as much as Atticus. Throughout To Kill A Mockingbird, courage is defined as standing up for people and doing what’s right.
Oftentimes, minor characters help to reveal a theme or contribute to the characterization of the protagonist. In the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Helen Burns serves as a foil character to the protagonist, Jane Eyre. Throughout the novel, Helen’s docile and pious nature helps to emphasize Jane’s development from a passionate girl to a modest woman. Helen’s theological beliefs also allow her to serve as a foil character to Mr. Brocklehurst, the headmaster of Lowood Institution, and St John Rivers, a zealous missionary, in order to reveal how Christianity is used to control Jane. Compared to the male characters in the novel, Helen’s positive use of religion proves to be more effective in encouraging Jane to adopt Christian values.
“To the Ladies”, written by Lady Mary Chudleigh, is a poem that expresses feminism, and gives women a taste of how they would be treated in a marriage. Chudleigh displays this poem as a warning to women who are not married yet, as she regrets getting married. She uses such words that compares to slavery, and negative attitudes toward future wives to warn them. Back in this time period when the poem was published in 1703, women were known as property of men and you won’t have an opinion or a say so. The poem expresses a life of a naïve woman, who is bound to marriage by God, and she cannot break the nuptial contract.
Throughout this novel Go tell it on the Mountain; James Baldwin examines the different roles of his characters in the Christian church, in the lives of African-Americans. In the context of the biblical language, gender roles; masculinity and femininity are rendered in indubitable. Because John considers the man in the woman on Sundays through a lens he adopts from things he has “read of in the Bible,” he understands men to be, and become strong or “mighty” whereas he interprets the women’s strength as “patient” and “long suffering.” Just as Florence's use of skin creams makes the real racialized constructions of beauty, so do Elizabeth’s actions make real for John traditional oppositional gender roles; Baldwin again emphasizes the interconnections
To sum it up, Margaret Atwood wrote this book to hint many things in life and one of them is hypocrisy. Sometimes people with authority and power get away with almost anything, which isn’t justifying. Individuals with less power such as the guardian/angel who raped a handmaid got punished for doing the same thing that every commander practices in this new reality. It’s something that is considered a job to them. It is raping because rape come in many forms and there are many types.