Mark Koltko-Rivera

Mark Koltko-Rivera converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while attending Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He served for two years as an LDS missionary in the Japan Okayama Mission. He has served in the Church as a home teacher, a Gospel Doctrine Sunday School teacher, a bishop's counselor in two wards, and a member of a stake high council. He has published about the Latter-day Saints in Sunstone , Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought , and Psychotherapy: Theory,...See more

Mark Koltko-Rivera converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while attending Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He served for two years as an LDS missionary in the Japan Okayama Mission. He has served in the Church as a home teacher, a Gospel Doctrine Sunday School teacher, a bishop's counselor in two wards, and a member of a stake high council. He has published about the Latter-day Saints in Sunstone , Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought , and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training . Mark Koltko-Rivera holds a doctoral degree from the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University (NYU). He is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association. For his scholarship, he has received several awards: the Margaret Gorman Early Career Award in the psychology of religion (from the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality), the Carmi Harari Early Career Award for Inquiry (Society for Humanistic Psychology), and, on two occasions, the George A. Miller Award for an outstanding recent article on general psychology (Society for General Psychology). He has taught at NYU, the University of Central Florida, and elsewhere. He was born and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, where he long lived in the East Village. He graduated from Regis High School in NYC, and holds an undergraduate degree from Haverford College, and a master's degree from Fordham University. Dr. Koltko-Rivera has four grown children and four grandchildren (and counting). He lives in New York City, where he is an active member of his local Latter-day Saint congregation. Dr. Koltko-Rivera is also the author of The Rise of the Mormons: Latter-day Saint Growth in the 21st Century (2012), the second edition of which he expects to issue during the summer of 2014. He also expects to issue in 2014 his long-awaited book Of Masons and Mormons: The Relationship Between Freemasonry's Rituals of Initiation and the Latter-day Saint Temple Ceremonies . See less