Review: E. Marshall Brooks. Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a February 1990 newsletter from the Southern California chapter of Saints Alive in Jesus/Ex-Mormons for Jesus, an anonymous author wrote: I am currently a Mormon who is searching for answers. So far, my studies have led me to have serious doubts about Mormonism, however, I am so fearful and emotionally distraught over leaving the religion that it’s sometimes difficult for me to think rationally. I have been a member for 25 years (I am now 34) and I have 4 children who are very involved in LDS activities. All my friends (most of them anyway) are members and my immediate family is too. T he concerns that this author articulated—over doubts generated by study, over being socially embedded in the Latter-day Saint community, and over what it might mean to leave that community—are precisely the kinds of anxieties explored in E. Marshall Brooks’s Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints. Taking an ethnographic approach to the question of the “cultural causes and consequences of religious disenchantment,” Brooks describes Mormon disenchantment in the twenty-first century as “a personal experience and cultural phenomenon [that] is characterized by an ambiguously conflated intimacy with and estrangement from religion, including the people, places, beliefs, and practices that define it” (vii)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".