Book reviews

Book Review: The Rise of the Latter-day Saints: The Journals and Histories of Newel Knight

February 18, 2020 by Trevor Holyoak Leave a Comment

Newel Knight lived from September 13, 1800 to January 11, 1847. He met Joseph Smith in 1826 and remained close friends with him until Joseph’s death. He was directly involved in some of the early events in church history, so his autobiography and journals are valuable to historians. However, these have only been available in manuscript form, in several different versions, which have made them difficult to use. This book amalgamates them in a coherent form and provides a transcription that can be better understood and cited.

The book splits Knight’s writing into five parts, covering different chronological periods of his life. Each section has an introduction with a biographical summary. Editorial remarks are given in footnotes, and spelling and punctuation are generally retained, except in cases where the editors felt clarification was necessary (which to me seemed inconsistent, and in at least one case, possibly incorrect[1]).

There are many things included that are important, such as a letter from Joseph Smith that has not been published in the Joseph Smith Papers Project, Christ’s appearance in the Kirtland Temple[2], many accounts of healings, the aftermath of the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, and the exodus from Nauvoo. Despite his human imperfections, Knight comes to life as a role model worth emulating with his tremendous faith, even during discouragement, and always remembering to be grateful for the blessings that followed.

I found this particular episode of 1839 in Nauvoo to be very interesting, involving his wife Lydia: [Read more…] about Book Review: The Rise of the Latter-day Saints: The Journals and Histories of Newel Knight

Conclusions in Search of Evidence

December 31, 2019 by John Gee 7 Comments

Cross-posted from The Interpreter Foundation

Review of Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 312 pages. $29.95.

Abstract: Riess’s book surveying the beliefs and behaviors of younger members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was supposed to compare the attitudes of younger generations with those of older generations. Unfortunately, flaws in the design, execution, and analysis of the survey prevent it from being what it was supposed to be. Instead the book is Riess’s musings on how she would like the Church to change, supported by cherry-picked interviews and an occasional result from the survey. The book demonstrates confusion about basic sampling methods, a failure to understand the relevant literature pertaining to the sociology of religion, and potential breaches of professional ethics. Neither the survey results nor the interpretations can be used uncritically.

Oxford University Press has a number of excellent titles in sociology and the sociology of religion that I can recommend.¹ Unfortunately, the volume under review is not one of those. On the bright side, this book did not come out of the division of Oxford University Press that deals with sociology but out of the division that deals with religious studies. The unfortunate flip side is that this book did not benefit from peer review by someone who actually does social science.

The author of the book, Jana Riess, is a journalist with a PhD in American religious history from Columbia University, where she studied under Richard Bushman. She has no training in social science or statistical analysis and outsourced the statistical work on her book to others. Her book is based on a survey she calls “The Next Mormons Survey.” She put more effort into this book than typically expected from a journalist, and it shows, but the result does not attain the level of top-quality social science work. Riess’s book is not horrible, but it is plagued with problems. As David Frankfurter, professor of religion at Boston University, once noted, “[M]any scholars in Religious Studies have had a certain aversion to the positivistic use of evidence, borne of post-modern critiques of scientific verifiability and a general relativism toward truth-claims.”² They thus tend not to be well situated to evaluate or use evidence, which shows in the book under consideration. On a certain level, the book deserves to be taken seriously, seriously enough to go to the effort to dissect certain aspects and analyze them carefully. I will discuss the problems with the book in order of the steps taken to put the book together. [Read more…] about Conclusions in Search of Evidence

Book Review: The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture

December 19, 2019 by Trevor Holyoak

Most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have probably never thought of the Pearl of Great Price as controversial. The Book of Mormon, yes—it has been under attack practically since the night Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith. Yet, Givens and Hauglid [1] use this book to argue that the Pearl of Great Price is even more so. Unfortunately, the majority of the effort goes into attempting to prove the point, and it leaves the book less than faith-promoting. It does have some bright spots, however.

The book begins with the assertion that “without the Book of Mormon, the Church of Jesus Christ would lose its principal evangelizing tool and its most conspicuous sign of Smith’s prophetic vocation but relatively little of its doctrine.… With the Doctrine and Covenants, the church would lose a good bit of its ecclesiology—organization templates and guidelines for church government and its offices—but would not suffer a devastating loss of the deeper theological underpinnings of its faith.” [2] I found these statements to be very surprising. The Book of Mormon has enough unique doctrine in it for Tad Callister to devote an entire chapter of his recent book to it, and in several places Givens admits that doctrine found in places like the Book of Moses was first taught in the Book of Mormon. In addition, the Doctrine and Covenants contains a great deal of unique doctrine, in spite of the removal of the Lectures on Faith (which the book points out is commonly thought to have been the Doctrine of the Doctrine and Covenants). A comparison of our edition with that of the Community of Christ shows some of what would be missing without it.

The book goes on to make its point: “Mormonism, in other words, is absolutely inconceivable apart from this collection of scriptural texts that provided the faith’s theological core from the beginning but only received canonical recognition in 1880. At the present moment, controversies regarding multiple accounts of Smith’s ‘First Vision,’ as well as the origins of the text of the Book of Abraham, have brought unprecedented attention to this hitherto largely neglected work. The consequence is that the Pearl of Great Price represents at one and the same time the greatest vulnerabilities and the greatest strengths of the Church of Jesus Christ.” [3] As I argue below, this is quite an overstatement. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Pearl of Greatest Price: Mormonism’s Most Controversial Scripture

Book Review: The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Vol. 9: December 1841 – April 1842

October 14, 2019 by Trevor Holyoak

As we reach the last few years of Joseph Smith’s life, the Documents series volumes cover decreasing amounts of time while still requiring a significant number of pages. This volume covers five months in 595 pages. I’ve been told volume 15 will cover a mere five weeks.

Volume 9 takes place between December 1841 and April 1842. During this time, Joseph Smith opened a store, became vice mayor of Nauvoo, took over as editor of the Times and Seasons, joined the Freemasons, and helped start the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, all while continuing to sell land to incoming Saints, lead the church, and command the Nauvoo Legion. An estimated 70 percent of the documents in this volume were not published prior to the Joseph Smith Papers Project. The documents consist of letters, revelations (many of them personal, so not canonized), discourses, legal and business documents, minutes from meetings, and selections from the Times and Seasons. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Vol. 9: December 1841 – April 1842

Book Review – First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins

August 19, 2019 by FairMormon Staff

book cover — Available in the FairMormon Bookstore

First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins by Steven C. Harper is the latest entry into the fascinating scholarship focused around what members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints refer to as Joseph Smith’s First Vision. However, as discussed by Harper in this latest volume, the First Vision wasn’t always styled as such. Nor did the young boy prophet’s theophany always occupy its present prominent place in the faith’s founding narrative.

Dr. Harper is not a newcomer to his subject and has published and presented on the First Vision before in a number of Latter-day Saint scholarly venues.[1] He is comfortable with the scholarship and historiography of his subject, and is able to present his research extremely clearly to his readers as a result. This volume: [Read more…] about Book Review – First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins

Book Review: If Truth Were a Child: Essays

July 31, 2019 by Trevor Holyoak

George B. Handley is a humanities professor at Brigham Young University. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MA and PhD from UC Berkely. This book, part of the Maxwell Institute’s “Living Faith” series, is a collection of personal essays he has written about “the seamlessness of humanities and belief, intellect and faith” (page XI).

Handley explains in the preface that “What keeps me in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint and what keeps me working at living according to its principles is the fundamental fact that I accept the tenets of my faith as plausible, compelling, and deeply moving. They make sense to me intellectually. More importantly, they have taken root in my very being as a result of acts of faith that brought personal witnesses of the gospel’s spiritual truths” (page XII).

There are several essays that I particularly enjoyed. In “Why I Am a Christian,” he says “We talk of sin as a deliberate rejection of God, but sin often feels to me more like being a slave to myself, unable to escape my own psychology, genes, upbringing, habits, or personality even and especially when I am aware that life calls me to better habits and deeper commitments” (page 3). He further explains, “nothing has given me more confidence in the living reality of Jesus Christ as the Redeemer and resurrected Son of God than the way that my trust in him has converted my awareness of my insufficiencies into hope, into a palpable increase of love for myself, for others, and for life itself that is beyond my natural instincts…. A willingness to repent and then to declare my faith has opened me to deeper appreciation for the meaning and power of Christ’s atonement” (pages 4-5). He also makes the important distinction that “Christ’s pure love is not the same thing as blanket tolerance for all human behavior or belief” (page 7). [Read more…] about Book Review: If Truth Were a Child: Essays

Book Review: A Documentary History of The Book of Mormon

July 21, 2019 by Trevor Holyoak

Larry E. Morris has written books on the exploration of the American West as well as several papers on Oliver Cowdery and the other witnesses of the Book of Mormon. He also served as an editor of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. He gave a presentation at the 2007 FAIR Conference and he will be speaking at the upcoming FairMormon Conference on August 8.

In this book, Morris brings together for the first time a single volume collection of primary source documents pertaining to the production of the Book of Mormon. The documents are annotated and introductory essays are included that give us the context. He draws on the work of authors such as Richard Bushman, Terryl Givens, D. Michael Quinn, Fawn Brodie, Dan Vogel, Richard Van Wagoner, Grant Palmer, and Dale Morgan, where applicable, while not hesitating to also provide critiques on their work as necessary. [Read more…] about Book Review: A Documentary History of The Book of Mormon

Book Review – Who is Truth? Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith

June 12, 2019 by Trevor Holyoak

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). We take this literally for the words “way” and “life,” but what if we also took it literally for the word “truth”? In their book Who ~~What~~ is Truth? Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith, that is exactly what authors Jeffrey L. Thayne and Edwin E. Gantt encourage us to do, changing our way of thinking from truth as an idea (this turns out to be rooted in Greek philosophy) to truth as a person (Hebrew thought).

The chapter headings give a good summary of what is covered: “What if truth is a person?,” “The ancient roots of person-truth,” “Faith in ideas, or faithfulness to a Person?,” “Knowing God vs. believing ideas about Him,” “Person-truth does not give us control,” “Knowing person-truth through covenant,” “Our on-and-off relationship with person-truth,” “What it means to be an authority on truth,” “The archnemesis of person-truth,” “What is sin, if truth is a person?,” “Rethinking the atonement of Christ,” and “Person-truth in a world of science and reason.” There is also a conclusion chapter, a list of further readings, and appendixes with more on Greek and Hebrew thought and questions and answers.

I was initially skeptical when offered this book to review. But it claimed to offer help for those having a faith crisis, and to strengthen faith in Jesus Christ and the Restoration, so I thought it would be worth a look. I was pleasantly surprised, and found myself agreeing with the conclusions (the good fruit being brought forth), even as I am still processing the explanations that led up to them. The authors anticipated skepticism, and they addressed all the potential red flags that came up in my mind as I read. [Read more…] about Book Review – Who is Truth? Reframing Our Questions for a Richer Faith

Book Review – Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon

June 10, 2019 by FairMormon Staff

Quincy D. Newell’s new book Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon is a unique and valuable addition to the fields of both Mormon Studies and nineteenth-century American History.

As Newell points out in her introduction, Jane Manning James’s story is “important because it troubles the waters” and “expands our understanding of nineteenth-century African American history beyond the standard narratives.”[1] That story is not as well-known as it should have been, and has been neglected by many scholars, perhaps, as Newell speculates, because Jane’s “membership in the LDS Church leads many scholars to see her as a dupe or a victim.”[2] Her narrative seems to move in a separate direction than many of the others. Instead of moving from “slavery to freedom”, Jane goes from being born free into a church that “treats her as a second-class citizen.”[3]

Book Review: A Case for the Book of Mormon

June 6, 2019 by Trevor Holyoak

[A interview of the author can be found here.]

Tad Callister is an emeritus member of the Seventy and was the Sunday School General President until his release in the recent April General Conference. He has previously written books on the atonement and the apostasy. He has degrees in accounting and tax law and was a lawyer professionally. He is scheduled to speak at the 2019 FairMormon Conference in August.

This book presents both a spiritual and intellectual case for the Book of Mormon, drawing on previously published and unpublished books and talks by the author. In fact, the last chapter (which is a summary of the book) is a slightly modified version of his October, 2017 General Conference talk, “God’s Compelling Witness: The Book of Mormon,” and chapter two is from a talk he gave at a BYU Devotional on November 1, 2016, “The Book of Mormon: Man-Made or God-Given?” Much of the research cited is from FairMormon, Book of Mormon Central, and FARMS (now the Neal A. Maxwell Institute), along with classic scholarship from B. H. Roberts, Richard Lloyd Anderson, and Hugh Nibley.

The book has five parts, starting with an introduction stating that the Book of Mormon must be either true or false, a divine work or a fraud, and explaining why. And we are reminded why all this is important, with a quote from Anglican theologian, Austin Farrer: “Though argument does not create conviction, lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish” (page 9). [Read more…] about Book Review: A Case for the Book of Mormon