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Book reviews

Book Review – 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction

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This is the first in a series of books from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute meant to seek “Christ in scripture by combining intellectual rigor and the disciple’s yearning for holiness,” (page vii) and focusing on theological aspects of the Book of Mormon. “In this case, theology, as opposed to authoritative doctrine, relates to the original sense of the term as, literally, reasoned ‘God talk’”  (page viii). This volume is by Joseph Spencer, an assistant professor of ancient scripture at BYU and the editor of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies.

At 146 pages, the book is indeed brief. It is a small paperback, but it has a lot of nice features. The front cover is embossed and both the front and back covers have flaps that can (almost) be used as bookmarks. There are woodcut illuminations matching those in the recent “Study Edition” of the Book of Mormon, also published by the Maxwell Institute. And the text has orange highlights and notes throughout.

The book has two parts. The first part, “The Theological Project of 1 Nephi,” was the most interesting to me. It talks about the original chapter breaks, and how they made it easier to see that Nephi intentionally structured the book to have two parts. The first part is an abridgment of the record kept by Lehi, and the second part, beginning with the original chapter three (now chapter ten) is about Nephi’s life. “The first half of the book prepares for the second by explaining how Nephi’s family came to possess the two key prophetic resources [the brass plates and the vision of the tree of life] essential to Nephi’s own subsequent ministerial efforts. The second half of the book then recounts Nephi’s ministry to his brothers, built on parallel expositions of the two key prophetic resources from the first half of the book” (pages 19-20). This is all shown in two diagrams, which explain that each of the original chapters had a theme and how they relate to each other. [Read more…] about Book Review – 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction

Book Review – The Voice of the People: Political Rhetoric in the Book of Mormon

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The Voice of the People: Political Rhetoric in the Book of Mormon is the final volume in the Groundwork: Studies in Scripture and Theology series published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU. The book also represents the culmination of twenty years of study and thought by its author, David Charles Gore. Dr. Gore is an associate professor and department head in the Department of Communication at University of Minnesota Duluth. A good portion of his academic career has been spent in study and teaching about the history and theory of rhetoric. 

As he states in a blog post published on the Maxwell Institute blog, “[o]ne of the aims of The Voice of the People is to search for an implicit theory of rhetoric in the Book of Mormon.”[1] He aims to show how figures in the Book of Mormon engaged with their audiences and their ideas, and in what ways they were able to reach them. As he states, “Arguing with another person, making arguments rather than having an argument, appealing to their reason and emotion as well as to their historical situation, is a sign of great respect.”[2] [Read more…] about Book Review – The Voice of the People: Political Rhetoric in the Book of Mormon

Book Review: The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Vol. 10: May – August 1842

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Nauvoo is getting busy. This volume contains 623 pages but covers only a four month timespan. Two of the biggest things that happened were the excommunication of John C. Bennett and rumors of Joseph Smith’s involvement in an assassination attempt on Lilburn W. Boggs. When Bennett left Nauvoo, Joseph became the mayor which made him even busier. For further context, this time period is covered in pages 453 – 477 of Saints, Voume. 1.

This volume features 105 documents out of nearly 400 available for this time period. Other documents are available at the Joseph Smith Papers website. However, as always, the footnotes and editorial information on each document make the book well worth having. Some of the items featured in the book are Nauvoo city scrip signed by Joseph Smith, a poem written by Eliza R. Snow for Joseph Smith, and the only known revelation giving instructions for performing a plural marriage. There are also notes from a number of sermons he gave. [Read more…] about Book Review: The Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Vol. 10: May – August 1842

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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