Presents a parallel history which focuses on the Latter-day Saints with an ongoing personal description of the author's encounters with them. By combining a portrait of the evolution of Mormonism with autobiography, it illuminates the Mormons and explains what it has been like to be on the outside of a culture that remains familiar and strange.

Infused with Jan Shipps's lively curiosity, scholarly rigor, and contagious fascination with a significant subculture, Sojourner in the Promised Land presents a distinctive parallel history in which Shipps surrounds her professional writings about the Latter-day Saints with an ongoing personal description of her encounters with them. By combining a portrait of the dynamic evolution of contemporary Mormonism with absorbing intellectual autobiography, Shipps illuminates the Mormons and at the same time shares with the reader what it has been like to be on the outside of a culture that remains both familiar and strange.