Review

Title: Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger
Author: Scott Abbott
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Essay Collection
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 294
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-1948218436
Price: 12.95

Reviewed by Amanda Ray for the Association of Mormon Letters

Reading Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger by Scott Abbott while Hulu’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” and Netflix’s “Keep Sweet: Obey and Pray” are part of the current discourse on Mormonism made for an uncomfortable experience. There’s teetering through faith transitions which manifest themselves in different ways, confronting LDS history and how it gets told, and wondering where the remaining faithful are left.

Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger is a collection of essays by Abbott. The included essays start before his time on the BYU faculty, cover his struggles with university administration, and end after he left BYU and the Church. This gives a timeline and interwoven story line arc to trace as Abbott confronts different stumbling blocks and brings up difficult questions along his journey. The reader will likely find their own outrage and frustrations as they follow along.

In a later chapter of the book, Abbott discusses how intellectual freedom is being stifled at BYU and muses on when “a university ceases to be a university.” This is a central theme that Abbott screams from the pages of the book as the essays build on each other, how the evolution of thought is necessary for stability and any kind of progression. He points out ways that he and his colleagues are limited and stopped from following their paths, how questions are silenced, and how intellect is discouraged.

While the average reader may not be able to fully understand the political and cultural climate that gets addressed in his book, Abbott gives enough context to grasp. Abbott’s essays are sometimes geared towards an outside audience that wouldn’t know the context, and some essays repeat situations and persons involved since they are being addressed to different kinds of people. Those who come from academic and/or Mormon backgrounds will be able to find enough understanding to bridge gaps.

In Dwelling in the Promised land as a Stranger, I see a lot of precedent for the current BYU culture and campus political climate. The names may have changed, but there are still stories about professors getting questioned publicly about their beliefs and how they teach them, YouTube and TikTok videos of students protesting and highlighting problems, injustices, and just plain irritants on campus. The idea that a person’s professional fate may be tied to a game of “Bishop Roulette” and whether or not they get an ecclesiastical endorsement and what that means to the person and their bishop. The bureaucracy that remains inescapable even in a religious context.

There are a number of colleagues Abbott mentions who are repeat characters in his discourse, and there practically needs to be a supplemental volume collected of their related essays to offer their perspectives and ideas at the time. There’s a sadness that pervades this collection, from Abbott pointing out, again and again, the problems he sees in the institution he loves and being pushed aside or put in the line of fire yet again, knowing the inevitable. Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger is an important collection of writings. The essays in it remain relevant and should be part of the discussion moving forward so we know better where we come from and how we can progress in hopefully a more welcoming way.