Armand Mauss has died :(

[_malkie]

Armand Mauss, a giant in the field of Mormon studies, died this morning of heart failure. He was a friend and mentor to many, including me. When I worked with Sunstone as a young student, Armand visited me in Berkeley and was very supportive and encouraging. He remained a source of insight and inspiration throughout my life and career.

She is encouraging those who knew Armand to share thoughts about him, anecdotes and impressions of the man and his work on her Facebook page.

https://www.Facebook.com/peggy.fletcher ... %2CO%2CP-R

[_honorentheos]

I'm very sorry to hear this, and my thoughts are with his family.

The Angel and the Beehive was an influential work that moved my thinking at a critical time in my own evolving beliefs. It may have been one of the first works I read that grounded aspects of the faith in reality I didn't realize existed entirely in a cloud of mythology and quips for me before. To be in the world but not of the world...

[Guest]

She is encouraging those who knew Armand to share thoughts about him, anecdotes and impressions of the man and his work on her Facebook page.

I won't trot over to Facebook to make the following comment:

I appreciated that Mauss felt it was important that we protect ourselves from the abuses of institutions, including the LDS Church. Mauss, as far as I know, remained a faithful member of the LDS Church, but he had it right--and I think this is something people sometimes forget--when he said that remaining safe from abuse is a burden that falls upon us and not others.

The interesting thing is that you can't expect to hear that from the LDS Church, which is happy to allow its members to feel completely dependent on it in a very one-sided way.

[_Simon Southerton]

I just read his "testimony" on the FairMormon website. An interesting read and quite revealing. He certainly didn't think much of the behaviour of the church as an institution.