Joseph Smith's Polygamy heavily cited in new LDS.org essay on early Mormon plural marriage October 23 2014

by Brian Hales
Hardcover, 638 pages*
$36.95
ISBN 978-1-58958-189-0

LDS.org just published a new essay on the origins of polygamy in the LDS Church and Joseph Smith's implementation of the practice. The essay is exceptionally candid and forthright in dealing with the difficult questions surrounding the origins of LDS plural marriage, and routinely cites Brian Hales's groundbreaking research and thorough analysis of the subject, contained in his 3-volume Joseph Smith's Polygamy. 

For those interested in Hales's work but who might prefer to engage it in more abbreviated form, Kofford Books is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a single-volume paperback, summarizing the research of the three volumes, co-authored by Hales and his wife Laura: Joseph Smith and Nauvoo Polygamy: Separating Fact from Fiction.

*This title is also available in ebook for the Amazon Kindle (Part A, Part B), Barnes and Noble Nook (Part A, Part B), Apple iDevices (Part A,Part B), and Kobo eReader (Part A, Part B).
____________________________________

Preview Bradley J. Kramer’s “Beholding the Tree of Life” October 13 2014

We should be announcing a release date for this exciting new title for our Contemporary Studies in Scripture series soon. Until then, check out the front matter and first chapter of this excellent and insightful book that will change the way you read and study the Book of Mormon.

Recent Reviews of Kofford Books Titles October 10 2014

Women at Church, by Neylan McBaine

• “I wholeheartedly recommend Women at Church. Read it yourself, then give a copy to your mom, your husband, your bishop, your Relief Society president, and your best girlfriends.” — Segullah
• “This is a monumental piece of work that comes at a time when it is sorely needed.” — This Week in Mormons
• “This book gives me a lot of reasons for hope.” — FairMormon
• “[Readers] may find much in Women at Church to help LDS women have broader impact.” — Mormon Times
• “I thank God for people like Neylan, speaking from a place of faithfulness and rootedness in the Mormon tradition.” — Jana Reiss, Flunking Sainthood

Q&A with The Liberal Soul author Richard Davis September 22 2014

Q: What initially motivated you to write this book?

The one-sided nature of the existing literature on the restored Gospel and politics. LDS Church members easily could reach the conclusion there is only a limited range of thought possible for members on this subject and that is a range between the economic conservatism advocated by people like Orrin Hatch and Mitt Romney and the economic libertarianism promoted by people like President Ezra Taft Benson, Cleon Skousen, and Glenn Beck.

I believe there is a third option - a view that the government can and does play a positive role (although neither the exclusive nor even the primary one) in helping bring about the type of society we all desire. That is my main point in the book.

Q: You have been actively involved in politics. How has your experience as both a political scientist and a political activist shaped the approach you take in the book?

My experience in practical politics, particularly in Utah County, has given me insights into the thinking of LDS voters about politics and the Gospel. That helped me understand their perspective in writing the book and attempting to address some misperceptions about what constitutes Church doctrine and what actually is personal opinion.

Q: Besides the fact that the book argues for a progressive Gospel-based politics, there are also some important rhetorical differences between The Liberal Soul and other LDS books on the subject. In particular, you are making an argument about a political vision that can find support in Gospel principles, rather than arguing that the Gospel demands a particular politics. Why the different approach?

I do not like the dogmatic approaches that characterize politics today generally. I think it particularly doesn't fit in the LDS Church since we  seek to be inclusive rather than exclusive. It is not my intent to suggest that people who think differently don't belong in the Church or are somehow less faithful. There are already too many people who think that way. Rather, I want to help members who may believe that to understand that those who sit in the pews with them but think differently than they do on politics come at their views from a Gospel perspective as well.

Q: Is this a book primarily for liberal or conservative Mormons?

It is for LDS people generally, regardless of ideological label.

Q: Do you have any future plans, either in politics or for future book projects?

I intend to stay involved in attempting to make my community a better place and to encourage more engagement by others. I have been involved in the creation of a new Office of Civic Engagement at BYU, which seeks to stimulate civic engagement among BYU students. Additionally, I am part of the effort to create the Utah Debate Commission, which is a new group dedicated to hosting and televising candidate debates in Utah at the statewide and federal level. What I do beyond that in terms of local activism is still to be determined.

The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics, Available September 24th! September 18 2014

Preview Richard Davis’s The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics September 05 2014

We have another exciting title on the way. Richard Davis’s The Liberal Soul: Applying the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Politics is scheduled to be released on September 24, 2014. Check out the introduction to the volume below.

You can also see advance praise for the volume and pre-order it here.

Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women's Local Impact, Now Available! August 28 2014

Greg Kofford Books is pleased to announce the release of Neylan McBaine's long-anticipated Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women's Local Impact, available today in paperback and e-book.
 

With discussions about women's participation and roles in LDS leadership becoming more frequent and visible, Women at Church describes active and vibrant conversations, modest but meaningful and sometimes creative changes at the local level to increase gender-cooperation. This book presents faithful LDS women working not against but with Church leaders in a spirit of cooperation to increase the voice, influence, participation, and utilization of women in our wards and stakes.

Early reviews of Women at Church have praised its thoughtfulness and its timeliness:

• “In her timely and brilliant findings, Neylan McBaine issues a gracious invitation to rethink our assumptions about women’s public Church service. Well researched, authentic, and respectful of the current Church administrative structure, McBaine shares exciting and practical ideas that address diverse needs and involve all members in the meaningful work of the Church.” — Camille Fronk Olson, chair of the Department of Ancient Scripture and author of Women of the Old Testament and Women of the New Testament (Deseret Book).
   
• “Neylan McBaine’s voice is uniquely important. She speaks as a unifier, knowledgeable of gender issues and attentive to all perspectives.” — Margaret Blair Young, co-author of Standing on the Promises.
   
• “Such a timely, faithful, and practical book! I suggest ordering this book in bulk to give to your bishopric, stake presidency, and all your local leadership to start a conversation on changing Church culture for women by letting our doctrine suggest creative local adaptations—Neylan McBaine shows the way!” — Valerie Hudson Cassler, author of Women in Eternity, Women of Zion.
   
• “A pivotal work replete with wisdom and insight.” — Fiona Givens, co-author of The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life.
   
• “Neylan McBaine has a wonderful mind! What I love about it is her ability to focus on the important, essential questions, without getting distracted by instant solutions. Good questions are the only way to finding good answers.” — Clayton M. Christensen, author of The Power of Everyday Missionaries.
   
• “With her keen insights, Neylan McBaine has emerged as a leading voice in a necessary conversation. Women at Church brings attention to gender issues while offering innovative solutions. A truly remarkable resource that belongs in every Latter-day Saint home!” — Juliann Reynolds, co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of FairMormon.
   
• “Her approach is one of consensus building, while taking into account the very real differences that occur among members. She is hopeful, and calls for ways of staying within the church in order to improve it for everybody. I like her approach. I find her hope infectious.” — Emily January Petersen, The Exponent
   
• “This book gives me a lot of reasons for hope.” — S. Hales Swift, FairMormon
   
• “The book is accessible and offers a way forward for faithful seekers to highlight the contributions of women in the Church and empower all people in the spirit of equity in the Gospel of Christ.” — Lindsay Hansen Park, founder of the Feminist Mormon Housewives Podcast.
   
• “I thank God for people like Neylan, speaking from a place of faithfulness and rootedness in the Mormon tradition.” —  Jana Riess, author of The Twible and Flunking Sainthood.

Read an excerpt from Women at Church here.

Read a Q&A with the author here.

____________________________________

Neylan McBaine, a life-long Mormon, grew up in New York City and later attended Yale University. She currently lives with her husband and three young daughters and works as a brand strategist for an advertising agency in Salt Lake City. Widely published as a religion writer, Neylan founded the Mormon Women Project, a digital library of interviews with LDS women from around the world, in an effort to emphasize the many ways that modern faithful women choose the right. The site, which posts about one interview a week with the help of dozens of volunteers, includes over 250 interviews with LDS women from 22 countries.

Q&A with Women at Church author Neylan McBaine August 21 2014

Neylan McBaine’s Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact available August 28th! August 12 2014

by Neylan McBaine

$21.95
Paperback, 211 pages
ISBN 978-1-58958-688-8
Order yours here!
(This title will also be available in various e-book formats) 

Greg Kofford Books is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of Neylan McBaine’s long-anticipated Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women's Local Impact, available in paperback and e-book August 28th, 2014.

With discussions about women's participation and roles in LDS leadership becoming more frequent and visible, Women at Church describes active and vibrant conversations, modest but meaningful and sometimes creative changes at the local level to increase gender-cooperation. This book presents faithful LDS women working not against but with Church leaders in a spirit of cooperation to increase the voice, influence, participation, and utilization of women in our wards and stakes.

Early reviews of Women at Church have praised its thoughtfulness and its timeliness:

Neylan McBaine, a life-long Mormon, grew up in New York City and later attended Yale University. She currently lives with her husband and three young daughters and works as a brand strategist for an advertising agency in Salt Lake City. Widely published as a religion writer, Neylan founded the Mormon Women Project, a digital library of interviews with LDS women from around the world, in an effort to emphasize the many ways that modern faithful women choose the right. The site, which posts about one interview a week with the help of dozens of volunteers, includes over 250 interviews with LDS women from 22 countries.

Preview Neylan McBaine's Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact July 23 2014

Neylan McBaine's Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact is scheduled to be available on August 28th, 2014. While waiting for this exciting release, you can preview the introduction and third chapter from this highly-anticipated book.

Dates and locations for speaking and signing events accompanying the release will also be announced soon. Be sure to follow sign up for our newsletter, as well as follow us on facebook and twitter, to be notified of the times and locations.

Women at Church can be pre-ordered here.

Gospel Topics: “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham” July 08 2014

This morning the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published another essay in its Gospel Topics series at LDS.org, this one on the subject of  “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham.” The essay discusses a number of complexities surrounding the coming forth of the Book of Abraham, with a refreshing candor that balances scholarly rigor and faith in the book's scriptural authenticity and value.

Among other things, the essay offers an insightful approach to this book of scripture that takes into account many of the issues raised by contemporary scholarship. Rather that treating the scriptural text as a direct translation of a papyrus written by Abraham himself, the essay suggests that:

Thus, a space is clearly opened up for faithful Latter-day Saints to consider the Book of Abraham as a kind of midrash, an inspired account of the life and teachings of Abraham, revealed directly to the prophet Joseph Smith.

Author David Bokovoy has discussed these issues at some length, establishing himself as perhaps the premier exponent of the catalyst theory of the Book of Abraham. In his book, Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis—Deuteronomy, he explores in great detail the questions and insights raised about Abraham by historical criticism and documentary analysis. Professor Bokovoy's chapter on the Book of Abraham in Authoring the Old Testament is an absolute must read for Latter-day Saints interested in these questions.

Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis—Deuteronomy is available in both print and ebook, and can be purchased here.

David Bokovoy holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East and an MA in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies both from Brandeis University. He received his BA from Brigham Young University, majoring in History and minoring in Near Eastern Studies. In addition to his work in Mormon studies, David has published articles on the Hebrew Bible in a variety of academic venues including the Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, Studies in the Bible and Antiquity, and the FARMS Review. He is the co-author of the book Testaments: Links Between the Book of Mormon and the Hebrew Bible. The father of four children Kate, Rebekah, Joshua, and Madelyn, David is married to the former Carolyn Bird. He currently teaches courses in Bible and Mormon Studies at the University of Utah.

Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World's Greatest Poem, Now Available! July 07 2014

In this innovative and thoroughly engaging book, Austin probes deeply into what is perhaps the most difficult to understand of all books in the Bible: Job. While a cursory reading of the text seems to relay a simple story of a righteous man whose love for God was tested through life's most difficult of challenges and rewarded for his faith through those trials, a closer reading of Job presents something far more complex and challenging. The majority of the text is a work of poetry that authors and artists through the centuries have recognized as being one of—if not the—greatest poem of the ancient world.

In Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem, Austin shows how most readers have largely misunderstood this important work of scripture and provides insights that enable us to re-read Job in a drastically new way. At the same time he shows that the story of Job is far more than that simple story of faith, trials, and blessings that we have all come to know, but is instead a subversive and complex work of scripture meant to inspire readers to reconsider what we think we know about God.

Early reviews have enthusiastically praised this book:

• “In this remarkable book, Michael Austin employs his considerable skills as a commentator to shed light on the most challenging text in the entire Hebrew Bible. Without question, readers will gain a deeper appreciation for this extraordinary ancient work through Austin’s learned analysis. Rereading Job signifies that Latter-day Saints are entering a new age of mature biblical scholarship. It is an exciting time, and a thrilling work.” — David Bokovoy, author, Authoring the Old Testament
   
• “Warning: this is not your Sunday School teacher’s Job! Austin pays close attention to the structure of the book in an earnest attempt to understand its argument and appreciate its aesthetic and moral beauty.... The reader is left, not with a settled and comforting fairy tale, but with a demanding invitation ‘to collaborate with the poet to produce better answers ourselves.’ Remarkably, Austin calls us to this task with prose so deft and witty that the work of understanding is not a chore, but a delight.” — Kristine Haglund, editor, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
  
   
• “There is something new under the sun! Michael Austin’s reading of Job is faithful and critical, learned and accessible, serious and witty.... He has also set a new gold standard for Mormon writings about scripture by seamlessly blending serious biblical studies, the Western literary tradition, theological reflection, and personal insight into one remarkably well-written book.” — Julie M. Smith, author,Search, Ponder, and Pray: A Guide to the Gospels
   
• “Many of us long for more meaningful engagement with the scriptures. Mike Austin’s new book, Re-reading Job, offers just that.... Insightful, witty, and faith sustaining, Austin engages both our minds and our hearts in a conversation about the tough questions Job calls on us to contemplate. He challenges us to take seriously the ethical claims the book demands of us: to demand justice as we give compassion. Rereading Job demonstrates that Mike Austin is one of the most profound, funny, and kind voices hiding in plain sight among the LDS community.” — Boyd Jay Petersen, author of Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life and Dead Wood and Rushing Water: Essays on Mormon Faith, Culture, and Family

Read an interview with author Michael Austin about the book  here.

And you can read a preview of Re-reading Job here.

*News about hardcover availability for Re-readingJob will be forthcoming.

______________________________________________________________

Michael Austin received his BA and MA in English from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of seven books and more than 50 articles, book chapters, and reviews. His books include New Testaments, a study of biblical typology in the 17th and 18th centuries;That’s Not What They Meant!, an analysis of the debates of America’s Founding Fathers; and Useful Fictions, an exploration of the connections between cognitive psychology and literature that was named a CHOICE outstanding academic title for 2011. His composition textbook, Reading the World: Ideas that Matter, is used in more than 200 colleges and universities worldwide, and he has also written widely about Mormonism in literature, including articles onAngels in America, Big Love, The Book of Mormon: A Musical, contemporary mystery fiction, and the works of Terry Tempest Williams, Judith Freeman, and Vardis Fisher. He is currently the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas, where he lives with his wife, Karen, and his children, Porter and Clarissa.

ROUND-TABLE PANEL: "Is Scripture Relevant?" July 04 2014

Here is the video of this week's panel discussion at Zion's Books in Provo, Utah, featuring authors David Bokovoy, Joseph Spencer, and Adam Miller.

Author Events, July 2nd: Zion's Books (Provo) and Benchmark Books (Salt Lake) July 01 2014

• David Bokovoy: "'I Will Tell You in Your Mind and in Your Heart': Reading the Bible Critically as a Believing Latter-day Saint"
   
• Adam Miller: "Reading Scripture: Continuing the Work of Translation"
   
• Joseph Spencer: "Scripture and the Structure of Religious Life"
   
• Moderator: Janiece Johnson

Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World's Greatest Poem, Available July 7th! June 23 2014

Pre-order your copy today here.

Read an interview with author Michael Austin about the book  here.

And you can read a preview of Re-reading Job here.

---

Michael Austin received his BA and MA in English from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of seven books and more than 50 articles, book chapters, and reviews. His books include New Testaments, a study of biblical typology in the 17th and 18th centuries; That’s Not What They Meant!, an analysis of the debates of America’s Founding Fathers; and Useful Fictions, an exploration of the connections between cognitive psychology and literature that was named a CHOICE outstanding academic title for 2011. His composition textbook, Reading the World: Ideas that Matter, is used in more than 200 colleges and universities worldwide, and he has also written widely about Mormonism in literature, including articles on Angels in America,Big Love, The Book of Mormon: A Musical, contemporary mystery fiction, and the works of Terry Tempest Williams, Judith Freeman, and Vardis Fisher. He is currently the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas, where he lives with his wife, Karen, and his children, Porter and Clarissa.

Q&A with Re-reading Job author Michael Austin June 14 2014

Q: So, why Job?

A: Job was my first experience teaching the Bible in a literature class. I have read and taught all of the scriptures in a Church setting, and, as a graduate student writing a dissertation, I encountered portions of the Old Testament as a scholar. But when I took a job teaching World Literature at a state college in West Virginia, I taught Job every semester for twelve years in a course that included Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. And this was an introductory course for non-majors, so I had to find ways to make Job both understandable and relevant.

What I discovered while teaching this course was that my experiences with the Book of Job as a Latter-day Saint—in seminary, in Gospel Doctrine, and in my Old Testament class at BYU—had not only failed to prepare me to discuss the book in a literary setting; they had actually gotten in my way of understanding the text. This has not been my typical experience. When I studied the Bible as a graduate student, I found that my religious education had generally given me an advantage over my peers. I had a good understanding of the general narrative arcs of the Old and New Testaments, which was an excellent starting place for the type of specialized knowledge that one tries to acquire while writing a dissertation.

But Job was different. The things that I learned in a Church context were not merely oversimplified and biased towards the LDS perspective. They were flat out wrong, and I really couldn’t teach Job well until I unlearned them. So I spent more reading, re-reading, and reading about Job than I spent with anything else I taught during my first few years as a literature professor. In the process, I fell in love with the magnificent poem that constitutes most of the book. It is something that I have wanted to write about for a long time.

Q: You devote a lot of the early part of the book to talking about how people misread Job. Could explain a little bit more about that? How do most people—and especially most Latter-day Saints—read the Book of Job, and what is the problem with the ways they read it?

A: In the first place, we think that Job is patient, that he never gets mad at God, and that he bears his many trials with perfect equanimity. None of this is true.

The most important thing we have to understand about the Book of Job is that it is two completely different versions of the same story. In the first version, which is fairly simplistic and in prose, Job does indeed suffer great trials without complaining. This was probably a Persian folk tale that the Jews were introduced to when Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and they became citizens of the Persian Empire. But this is only the first two chapters and the last little bit of the last Chapter of the Book.

The rest of the book is a long, complicated poem that uses the same characters from the folktale but casts them in a very different light. The Job of the poem complains all the time. He accuses God of both injustice and incompetence. And his friends, the Comforters (who sit silently for seven days in the Prologue) become his tormentors. They insist that he must be a great sinner because, otherwise, he would not have been punished by God. The poem becomes a great meditation on friendship, compassion, religious orthodoxy, and the nature of divine (as compared to human) justice. It is an absolutely indispensable work of literature on all of these topics.

But here’s the thing: the poem is not just a continuation of the folk tale. It is, and was always intended to be, an ironic commentary by somebody who recognized that the tale taught the wrong things. In the original version of the story, Job is rewarded in the end for suffering so patiently. He gets new children and twice as much stuff and lives happily ever after. But that’s wrong! That teaches us that God really is an ATM machine that gives us money and happiness if we push the right buttons. The poet understood this very well, and he wrote one of the greatest poems ever written and stuck it in the middle of the folk tale as if to say, “guys, the universe is a lot more complicated than your old story makes it out to be.”

Q: You are pretty direct in saying that the Book of Job is a fictional text—that we should not read it as the story of a man who actually lived and interacted with God in the ways portrayed in the text. That’s not what most people hear in Gospel Doctrine. How do you think that Latter-day Saints will react to this assertion?

A: The most important point that I want to make in the book is that God can inspire people to write poetry as easily as He can inspire people to write history. There is a lot of resistance to this idea in all parts of the Christian world. A lot of people believe that every part of the Bible has to be historically true or it can’t be true at all. As somebody who has devoted his entire adult life to the study of imaginative literature, I find this idea remarkably strange. Documentary history as we understand it is only a few hundred years old. Poetry is a human universal found in every culture we have ever studied. Why in the world would we think that God couldn’t inspire somebody to write a poem?

To me, and to a lot of other people in the world, poetry and fiction are true in ways that documentary history can never be true. History can only tell us what happened. Poetry can tell us so much more if we know how to read it. And this does not mean that other parts of the Bible are not historically true. It just means that we should read historical scriptures historically and poetic scriptures poetically.

The Book of Job does not present itself to us as a historical artifact. A lot of things in the story work against such an understanding. It begins with the Hebrew equivalent of “once upon a time,” for example. It goes out of the way to avoid situating itself in a time or a place. And it has God and Satan acting in ways that flatly contradict the ways that they act in all of the other scriptures we are familiar with. As history, it is deeply problematic.

As literature, though, it is not. Instead of asking the question, “why would God kill all of a man’s children in order to win a bet with Satan,” which is a horrible question to try to answer, we can ask, “why would somebody write a story about God killing all of a man’s children in order to win a bet with Satan?” This is a terrifically interesting question, and it is one that we can answer without tying ourselves up in theological knots trying to defend the indefensible.

Let me be very clear, though, that I am not saying that Job is not “true.” I believe that it is a true work of scripture, written under the inspiration of God for the benefit of all who read it. And there is no doubt in my mind that all of these things can apply to poem or to any other work of imaginative literature. The trick is to learn how to read poems as poems.

Q: You use the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translation of the Bible as your source for Job, and you make a point of saying that you did not consider using the King James Version. Why is this, given that you are writing for an audience whose primary experience with the Bible comes through the King James Version of the Bible?

A: This was a hard decision for me, but it was not a hard call. I am usually a huge supporter of the King James Bible. Not only is it the Bible I grew up with as a Latter-day Saint. It is the Bible I have always used in my scholarship. My professional training is in the British literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, during this time, the King James Version of the Bible was the culture’s most important single document.

The King James Bible is a remarkable work of literature in its own right. It is good for many, many things. But understanding Job is not one of them. It’s not just that the archaic language makes it difficult for modern readers to understand (which it does). I could work with that. But the KJV does not make any distinction between prose and poetry. It prints every word of the Bible as prose text, and it elevates the diction of every sentence to the level of great poetry. But Job is a text that moves between simplistic prose and great poetry in ways that readers are supposed to notice. These shifts in genre and registrar are part of how the text means things.

I did not know what version of the Bible I would use when I started this project. I actually wrote the first five chapters using the Revised English Bible (REB), but that version becomes very problematic in the last chapters, during God’s final speech to Job from the whirlwind. In the end, the Jewish Publication Society had the best mix of good scholarship and good English poetry for the book that I wanted to write.

Q: What about other books of the Standard Works that are primarily poetic or narrative? How do different genres of scripture lead to different strategies for reading or understanding them?

A: The Hebrew Bible, or the Tanakh, divides its readings into three different sections: the Torah, or the first five books of Moses; the Nevi’im, or the books of prophecy; and the Ketuvim, or the writings. Most of the books in the last category present themselves to readers as literature, either as poems (Job, Song of Solomon, Lamentations), tales (Ruth, Esther), or collections of epigrams (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes). These are all literary genres of the Ancient Near East, and the texts present themselves to us precisely as literature to be interpreted rather than as history to be absorbed. As a teacher of literature, I think this is wonderful.

The idea that a work of scripture can be true as literature—that God can inspire poets and storytellers as well as historians and prophets—opens up a lot of ways to read these scriptures that simply aren’t available to us when we read them in other ways. And all we have to do, really, is read the scriptures the way that they ask to be read

Q: Who are some of the writers and commentators whose views of Job influenced your own? Who would you say are your influences?

A: The amount of commentary on any book of the Bible is enormous, and the amount on Job is especially enormous. All any casual reader can ever do is graze a bit. That said, my understanding of Job—and much of the rest of the Bible—has been shaped by two amazing scholars who are also literary critics: Robert Alter and Northrup Frye. Alter’s recent translation of Job was especially helpful, as was his earlier book, The Art of Biblical Poetry. I spent a lot of time with Marvin Pope’s Anchor Bible commentary on Job, trying to make sure that I understood every verse. And, for different parts of the book, I consulted some of the generally recognized heavy hitters of biblical scholarship: Brevard Childs on the canonical shape of the text, Martin Noth on the Deuteronomistic history, Gerhard von Rad on Wisdom literature. But I did not make a comprehensive study of these works.

Two more recent books were very helpful. Carol Newsom’s The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations shaped the way I understood the Wisdom Dialogue (chapters 3-27) that constitutes the largest part of Job; and Mark Larrimore’s The Book of Job: A Biography was an invaluable reference for the history of the book as a book.

But my greatest inspiration came from the writers who have struggled to make their own poetry out of the Book of Job. Some of the greatest works of literature in the Western canon come out of Job: Goethe’s Faust, Voltaire’s Candide, Kafka’s The Trial—these are all Job stories. And the 20^th century used Job all over the place to try to make sense of the world: Archibald McLeish’s J.B, Robert Frost’s  A Masque of Reason, Muriel Spark’s The Comforters, Neil Simon’s God’s Favorite, Eli Weisel’s The Trial of God. It’s Job, everywhere you look.

I am a literary critic, rather than a philosopher or a theologian or a Hebrew textual scholar, so I suppose it is natural that I found my greatest inspiration of studying Job as great literature by studying other great literature based on Job.

Q: What’s next? Any plans for a sequel?

A: I feel like there is more that I want to say on the literary content of the Old Testament, but I am not sure yet what shape it will take. I have thought of perhaps writing a book that takes 10 or 15 representative Psalms and subjects them to the intense close reading that people usually reserve for Keats or Eliot. I have also thought of a book about satire in the Bible, including both the Old and the New Testaments. There is a lot to say about the way that Biblical writers used satire and irony to get their points across.

For now, though, I am focusing my attention on another project that I am tentatively calling “The Mormon Diaspora at Midcentury,” which focuses on the novels of Vardis Fisher, Maurine Whipple, Virginia Sorensen, Paul Baily, and a few other mid-20^th century writers and asks the question, “when in history does it become possible for someone to be a ‘Mormon writer’ without accepting Mormonism as a religion?” It is a fascinating question for which I do not yet know the answer.
_____________________________________________

Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World's Greatest Poem will be available in paperback and e-book on July 7th. You can preorder it here.
Hardcover release date and price is forthcoming.
_____________________________________________

Michael Austin received his BA and MA in English from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of seven books and more than 50 articles, book chapters, and reviews. His books include New Testaments, a study of biblical typology in the 17th and 18th centuries; That’s Not What They Meant!, an analysis of the debates of America’s Founding Fathers; and Useful Fictions, an exploration of the connections between cognitive psychology and literature that was named a CHOICE outstanding academic title for 2011. His composition textbook, Reading the World: Ideas that Matter, is used in more than 200 colleges and universities worldwide, and he has also written widely about Mormonism in literature, including articles on Angels in America, Big Love, The Book of Mormon: A Musical, contemporary mystery fiction, and the works of Terry Tempest Williams, Judith Freeman, and Vardis Fisher. He is currently the Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas, where he lives with his wife, Karen, and his children, Porter and Clarissa.

Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority June 12 2014

reporting of recent events has raised a number of questions about dissent, criticism, and ecclesiastical discipline in the LDS community. Some commentators have even drawn a parallel between these events and what came to be known as the "September Six"—the September 1993 disciplining of six prominent LDS scholars. 

In Latter-day Dissent: At the Crossroads of Intellectual Inquiry and Ecclesiastical Authority, author Philip Lindholm interviews many of the "Six" as well as several other LDS public intellectuals who faced Church discipline. Their experiences confronting LDS Church authority vary as widely as the outcomes of their trials: some were excommunicated, others disfellowshipped; some retained belief in the divinity of the Mormon Restoration, others rejected LDS faith claims; some returned to full activity and fellowship in the Church, others never came back. 

Each interview illustrates the tension that often exists between the Church and its intellectual critics, and highlights the difficulty of accommodating congregational diversity while maintaining doctrinal unity—a difficulty hearkening back to the very heart of ancient Christianity.

Latter-day Dissent is also available in e-book for Amazon Kindle, Apple iBook, Kobo eReader, and Barnes and Noble Nook.

Paperback, 272 Pages

$24.95

ISBN 978-1-58958-128-9

From Above and Below: The Mormon Embrace of Revolution, 1840-1940---Winner of the 2014 MHA Best International Book Award! June 06 2014

The Mormon History Association has selected Craig Livingston's From Above and Below: The Mormon Embrace of Revolution, 1840-1940 as its 2014 winner for the Best International Book Award (the same award last year also went to a Kofford Author, Marjorie Newton). 

For the first century of their church’s existence, Mormon observers of international events studied and cheered global revolutions as a religious exercise. As believers in divine-human co-agency, many prominent Mormons saw global revolutions as providential precursors to the imminent establishment of the terrestrial kingdom of God. Many Mormon thinkers accepted secular revolutionary arguments that the old world order needed to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to clear the way for the new. 

In From Above and Below, author Craig Livingston tells the story of Mormon commentary on global revolutions from the European revolutions of 1848 to the collapse of Mormon faith in revolutionary progress in the 1930s, when communist and fascist regimes exposed themselves as violent and repressive. As the Church bureaucratized and assimilated to mainstream American and capitalist values, Mormons became champions of the conservative view of political and social development for which they are known today.

UPDATE (June 10, 2014): An online newspaper in Houston just posted a story on Professor Livingston's award.

Past Kofford Books recipients of MHA awards include:

• Mark Lyman Staker, Hearken, O Ye People: The Historical Setting of Joseph Smith’s Ohio Revelations (Best Book, 2011)
• Marjorie Newton, Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission in New Zealand, 1854–1958 (Best International Book, 2013)
• Veda Tebbs Hale, “Swell Suffering”: A Biography of Maurine Whipple (Best Biography, 2012)
• Boyd Jay Petersen, Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life (Best Biography, 2003)

>>Click here to order<<

____________________________________

For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope, now available! June 02 2014

Joseph Spencer, whom Terryl Givens describes as “one of the most astute readers of sacred texts working in Mormon Studies,” examines these questions through the scriptures of two continents separated by nearly two millennia. In the first half, Spencer engages in a rich study of Paul's letter to the Romans to better understand how the apostle understood hope and what it means to have it. In the second half of the book, he jumps to the early years of the Restoration and Joseph Smith's various revelations on consecration to understand how Latter-day Saints are expected to strive for Zion. Between these halves is an interlude examining the hoped-for Zion that both thrived in the Book of Mormon and was hoped to be established again.

Early reviewers have praised For Zion:

• “[A] new benchmark for solid, innovative Latter-day Saint scholarship that is at once provocative and challenging.” — Eric D. Huntsman, author, The Miracles of Jesus
   
• “For Zion proves that there can be such a thing as genuinely Mormon theology.” — Mark Ashurst-McGee, Joseph Smith Papers
   
• “Blending theological savvy, historical grounding, and sensitive readings of scripture, he has produced an original and compelling case for consecration and the life of discipleship.” — Terryl Givens, author,Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought

You can preview the introduction and opening chapter of For Zion here.

And read a Q&A with author Joseph Spencer here. 

____________________________________

Preview Michael Austin’s Re-reading Job May 29 2014

Michael Austin’s Re-reading Job: Understanding the World’s Greatest Poem is nearing completion and looking at a late-June or early-July release. While waiting for an official date of availability, go ahead and preview the front matter and first chapter of this exciting new book for your Contemporary Studies in Scripture library.

For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope, Available June 3rd May 27 2014

Greg Kofford Books is pleased to announce the release of For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope, by Joseph M. Spencer, available June 3rd, 2014. 

The book explores key questions in Mormon theology and history: What is hope? What is Zion? And what does it mean to hope for Zion? Spencer examines these questions through the scriptures of two continents separated by nearly two millennia. In the first half, Spencer engages in a rich study of Paul's letter to the Romans to better understand how the apostle understood hope and what it means to have it. In the second half of the book, Spencer jumps to the early years of the Restoration and the various revelations on consecration to understand how Latter-day Saints are expected to strive for Zion. Between these halves is an interlude examining the hoped-for Zion that both thrived in the Book of Mormon and was hoped to be established again.

Early reviewers have praised For Zion:

• “[A] new benchmark for solid, innovative Latter-day Saint scholarship that is at once provocative and challenging.” — Eric D. Huntsman, author, The Miracles of Jesus
   
• “For Zion proves that there can be such a thing as genuinely Mormon theology.” — Mark Ashurst-McGee, Joseph Smith Papers
   
• “Joseph Spencer is one of the most astute readers of sacred texts working in Mormon Studies. Blending theological savvy, historical grounding, and sensitive readings of scripture, he has produced an original and compelling case for consecration and the life of discipleship.” — Terryl Givens, author, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought

Pre-order the book today by clicking here.

You can read the introduction and opening chapter from For Zion here.

And read a Q&A with author Joseph Spencer here. 

For review copies or to schedule interviews with the author, book signings, and other events contact Brad Kramer (bradk@koffordbooks.com).
____________________________________

Q&A with Joseph Spencer, author of For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope May 23 2014

Q: Latter-day Saints from both academic and non-academic backgrounds tend to be suspicious of formal theology for a variety of reasons. How do you understand theology, and why do you think it belongs in Mormon studies?

I take it as given that theology—good theology anyway—is philosophically informed reflection on what it means to live a life of faith. For my part, that’s another way of saying that to do theology is, essentially, to repent and to invite others to repent along with you. I do theology because I hope that careful reflection will allow me to see where we tend to hold grace or life at a distance. To do theology well is to begin to see where we’ve positioned idols as barriers to keep God away from us. That should leave us fully prepared to break down the idols we’ve constructed. On the other hand, to do theology poorly is to construct elaborate temples around those very idols theological work might help us to abandon.

It’s worth saying that the kinds of things that theology gives its attention to aren’t exclusively religious. Hope, for instance, is hardly a uniquely religious phenomenon, nor is consecration—though the latter isn’t likely to be called “consecration” outside of a religious setting. To do theology well is to reflect on what it means to be alive, to be a human being, to be in a world with others. That’s why I think theology not only belongs but is essential to Mormon studies. Too much of Mormon studies speaks only to Latter-day Saints or only to already-interested historians. If we want Mormonism to speak with a universal voice, we’ll have to begin asking how it gives us to understand the nature of life. From where I’m standing, much of what has been produced in the field of Mormon studies is just a prelude to what we really want to talk about.

Q: Some of your most influential philosopher-theologian colleagues (I’m thinking specifically about Jim Faulconer and Adam Miller) have embraced and modeled Mormon theology as a kind of anti-theology. How do you see your work alongside theirs? Alongside the work of older generation Mormon theologians like Truman Madsen or even Roberts and the Pratts?

There’s no question that I’m closely allied with thinkers like Jim Faulconer and Adam Miller, at the very least because we’re all interested in contemporary French thought in addition to our commitment to theological reflection on Mormonism. I think, though, that we all understand what might be called anti-theology or atheology in different but related ways. What unites us, perhaps, is our commitment to the idea that theory can’t be divorced from practice, or even the idea that theory is somehow predicated on practice. What differentiates us is what we privilege or emphasize when we think about the sort of practice on which theory is predicated. Both Jim and Adam give an important place to scripture (Jim more consistently than Adam), but I think what distinguishes me from them—if anything—is the particularly heavy emphasis I give to scripture. I find I have a hard time writing about anything else.

It’s a little embarrassing to try to think about what my work looks like alongside thinkers like Madsen or Roberts or the Pratts. If I have a consistent complaint about most of what’s been done in the history of Mormon theological reflection, it’s that so little of it begins from exegetically responsible readings of scripture. The exception there might be Orson Pratt. I’ve been struck just in the past few months at how much of his thinking might be taken to be a reflection of his commitment to the Book of Mormon. Even his infamous theological resistance to Brigham Young might be seen to have grown out of his careful study of the Book of Mormon. There may be a methodological parallel between my own work and Orson’s, then. I don’t see much of myself in most of the tradition, though, and the conclusions I come to in light of scripture don’t look much like Orson’s either. If there’s a figure in the tradition whose work mine echoes, it’s probably Hugh Nibley—someone we desperately need to begin reading as a theologian and a thinker, rather than as a historian or an apologist.

Q: There has been a recent uptick of LDS devotional works focused on hope. Why do you think that is, and how do you see this book in conversation with their work?

I never discuss in For Zion why I began to reflect on hope, but it began with a determinate worry. It’s no surprise to hear that Latter-day Saints tend to divide into “conservative” and “liberal” camps. But I was struck some six or seven years ago by the kind of talk used by these two groups to criticize each other. Conservative Mormons often criticize liberal Mormons for what they view as their lack of faith, while liberal Mormons often criticize conservative Mormons for what they view as their lack of charity. I was struck at about the same time by the tone of despair that often accompanies such criticisms, from whichever side. It was fascinating to me that a certain loss of hope accompanies the divorce between faith and love, whether it’s begun from the one side or the other. It was this curious situation that set me thinking about hope—about how it might be what allows faith and love to work together fruitfully, and about how it might be the most universally absent virtue in contemporary Mormonism.

When I began reflecting on these questions, I looked through the available devotional literature and was startled to find only one book on hope. About the time I began serious work on For Zion, however, a handful of devotional titles on hope suddenly appeared, and a few more have been published since. As I read these works, however, I’m startled at how different my motivations have apparently been from theirs. If I were to take a guess, I’d say that they have their roots largely in the cultural shift Mormonism is experiencing, with the emergence of the most serious generation gap the Church has seen in decades. Almost universally, such devotional works seem to take hope and faith as equivalent, and their account of hope/faith is like that of “conservative” Mormonism when it criticizes “liberal” Mormonism: faith/hope is presented as a kind of courageous obedience. Obviously, I think there’s more to the story than just that. I worry that the devotional literature only puts off the real problem.

Q: To produce an account of hope, you look at the writings of the Apostle Paul. Paul is often regarded as formidable by Latter-day Saints, and there are occasional attempts to make him more accessible by simplifying his message. In For Zion, by contrast, you read Paul’s writings as deeply complex. What’s behind that approach? Is it a product of your general embrace and celebration of scriptural complexity, or does this specific project benefit from such a reading?

My approach to Paul is probably more reflective of my general embrace and celebration of scriptural complexity than anything else. I think we can provide simpler or more accessible accounts of the things going on in scripture, but I don’t think we can do so without having done a great deal more work on scripture. It’s only the genuine expert who can put together a summary that doesn’t do horrible injustice to what needs summarizing, and I don’t think we’ve yet had any experts on scripture in the history of the Restoration. It’s only in the past couple of decades that we’ve had more than one or two trained bible scholars, but even they wouldn’t claim that their training has made them experts on more than a few themes or a few passages. We’ve produced a remarkable number of historians over the past sixty or seventy years, but it’s only been in the past couple of years that we’ve had the documentary resources necessary for solid study of the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants or the texts making up the Pearl of Great Price. And we’re still largely without devoted scholars of the Book of Mormon—that book that forms the keystone of our religion.

Summarily put, I don’t think we’re remotely prepared to make any of our scriptures more accessible or to produce “made easier” volumes yet. The task at present is to come face to face with the historical, literary, and theological complexity of scripture, and to see if we can’t make some preliminary sense of what these texts have to say to us. If Paul is complex—and I think it’s perfectly clear that he is—then I want him to remain complex until we’ve begun to sort out the implications of his writings. And I think the same goes for the rest of scripture as well. Of course, there’s an important place in the lived religion of Mormonism for devotional reading, for being inspired by scripture regardless of its immense complexity. I don’t at all mean to deny that. But I think scholars do a disservice to everyday readers of scripture when they obscure complexity, since they thereby make it far more difficult to hear any real call to repentance in scripture.

Q: In the second half of the book, you set out the law of consecration as the real hope for Mormonism. Is there any particular reason you feel that it’s important now to discuss consecration?

Consecration has been at the heart of the Church since its inception, and it receives pretty regular attention from Latter-day Saint authors. I think, nonetheless, that there are at least two reasons it needs careful attention right now. Perhaps the most obvious and important of these is the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers. It has become possible to trace the development of consecration in Mormonism’s earliest years in a remarkable way. This availability of resources can be coupled with the undeniable renaissance of academic Mormon history since the turn of the millennium. The great works on consecration were written by Leonard Arrington (and a few others) thirty to fifty years ago. It is time to update and supplement that work. I’ve tried to draw on the best of what’s available to me to do something along those lines. Mostly, I’ve tried to clarify a set of concerns I often hear expressed about the relationship between the early history of consecration and the canonical text of the Doctrine and Covenants.

The other major reason to revisit consecration right now is because of the deeply political climate through which the American Church is passing. The various sorts of political commitments with which Latter-day Saints align themselves often lead to problematic attitudes about consecration. I won’t review these attitudes here since I give attention to them in For Zion, but I think it’s this tendency to reduce consecration to some kind of economic or political program, and some kind of economic or political program that happens to look a lot like one’s own economic or political commitments, that suggests that we’d do well to read the relevant revelatory texts much, much more carefully. I don’t pretend to be innocent of political biases myself, of course, but I think that the kind of theological approach I’ve taken to the text—asking about what’s meant by “use” in the notion of stewardship—can skirt some of the overdetermination that usually colors readings of the Doctrine and Covenants.

Q: At several points in your discussions of consecration, you identify parallels between the scriptural account of consecration and certain practices and beliefs espoused in the Catholic monastic tradition. That’s likely to surprise most Latter-day Saints. What do Mormons have to learn from monasticism?

I was quite surprised by this finding as I worked through this project. I suspect I’ll continue thinking about this connection for a long time. Latter-day Saints have often identified with reformers and innovators in the pre-Mormon Christian tradition. I’m beginning to wonder whether we shouldn’t pay close attention to the Franciscan monastic tradition alongside folks like Wycliffe and Tyndale, Luther and Wesley. I’ve noted occasional expressions of appreciation for separatist movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the Waldensians, for instance. (Such expressions of appreciation can be found as early as the lifetime of Joseph Smith.) It’s perhaps time we collectively recognized that Saint Francis was a part of that same general climate, even if he and his followers didn’t break so overtly with the Roman Church. As I think I show in For Zion, the Franciscans may have been the first in a very long time in Christianity to have raised questions that have been central to Mormonism from its beginnings.

Of course, for Latter-day Saints to begin to appreciate monasticism, it’ll be necessary for them to overcome a few common misconceptions. It’s not at all uncommon to hear Latter-day Saints equate the cenobitic and the anchorite traditions—that is, monks and hermits. The monastery was a matter of living together, while the anchorite was someone who retreated alone from the world. It won’t do to criticize monasticism because it fails to mesh with the Mormon sense of community, or because it supposedly embraces some otherworldly retreat from real life. Further, Latter-day Saints will need to get over the idea that monasticism was primarily about privation. I’ve already mentioned that what monks sought in the monastery was a certain form of living together. That has to be seen as the chief aim of the monastic way of life. A certain fraternity or sorority, which Latter-day Saints have sought from early on, was the ideal, and certain sorts of privation followed from that ideal.

Q: On the back cover of your book, Mark Ashurst-McGee compares your work to that of Hugh Nibley, and you yourself made that comparison above. You’ve also dedicated For Zion to Nibley’s memory. How do you understand the ongoing relevance of Nibley’s work?

I suspect many will see my debt to Hugh Nibley’s work as being primarily a question of theme. I think that’s a mistake. What Nibley left us was first and foremost was a method, and that’s what I hope I’ve inherited from him—not only in For Zion, but in all of my work. Nibley was above all a theologian, as Stuart Parker’s forthcoming book, History through Seer Stones, will help to make clear. Nibley produced over the course of his career a theological dispensationalism that deserves to be studied for its theoretical power, and for the way it draws on important themes both implicit and explicit in Mormon scripture. He was neither a parallelomaniacal conservative forcing resistant historical data to match current practices and policies, nor a blasé liberal obscuring the complexities of free market capitalism to push a countercultural agenda. In light of what I said above about the way that hope might play a mediating role between faith and love, I might say that Nibley was deeply hopeful.

Frankly, I think the general distaste for Nibley that seems to have emerged over the past couple of decades—some of it, unfortunately, during the last years of Nibley’s life—has more to do with the fact that we aren’t yet equal to the task of reading Nibley than it has to do with anything particularly lacking in Nibley’s own work. It’s certainly true that he drew on texts and traditions in ways that don’t fit with today’s academic methods, and it’s certainly true that he oversimplified Mormon history to present a unified account of what he thought needed our attention. But it’s also true that what we’re working on today will be problematic and passé in another generation, as it’s true that we oversimplify Mormon history to present a unified account of what we think needs our attention. We have far more to learn from Nibley than we think we do. We’re not likely to see another such mind in Mormonism for centuries.

Q: How does your vision of a more fully consecrated LDS membership (and Church) differ from Nibley’s?

I understand Nate Oman is gathering essays on Nibley’s Approaching Zion for a published collection. I think he’d be better at answering this kind of question than I would, if he’d be willing to wade through my theological musings. For my part, I wonder if I can answer it adequately. I suppose I would say that I don’t see Nibley getting quite to the heart of the question of consecration. The ship of his thought runs aground on the reef of markets and capitalism, but I think a still deeper and more central question needs addressing: What does it mean to use something without owning it? And the key to answering that question lies in a scriptural passage about which I don’t think Nibley ever said anything substantial: 1 Corinthians 7:29–31, Paul’s discussion of living “as though not.”

Of course, I think it’s possible to give Nibley a more charitable reading. Perhaps it was not that he wrongly felt that the central question was markets and capitalism, but that the Saints more generally use markets and capitalism as excuses to dodge consecration. Perhaps Nibley saw that, and he tried to problematize that move, and rightly. And perhaps it’s possible to interpret Nibley’s work on education and learning as a kind of indirect investigation of the Pauline idea of living “as though not.” Perhaps it’s possible to see Nibley as having reproduced the Pauline idea through a reinvestigation of what it means to consecrate one’s mind. Obviously, it’d take me a while to explain either of these possible reinterpretations of Nibley in anything like convincing detail, but I’d like to be clear that Nibley and I may prove to be closer in certain ways than I’ve been thinking we are.

Q: A clichéd but still important question, I think: How did writing this book change you, your ideas, your commitments?

I wonder what I’ll say in response to this sort of question in a decade or two. For the moment, I feel as if my work on For Zion has focused the central concern of my theological work. My first book, An Other Testament, deals with the theme of the Abrahamic covenant in the Book of Mormon. For Zion keeps its eye trained on the covenantal theme, albeit more consistently in the writings of Paul and the revelations of the Restoration than in the Book of Mormon (although I do dedicate a chapter to the Book of Mormon!). My work on this book has thus helped to focus me all the more consistently on things Abrahamic. At the heart of consecration, whether in Paul or in Joseph Smith, is the complicated relationship between Israel and the gentiles—that same theme to which Jesus Christ gave his almost exclusive attention in his visit to the New World. I’m more eager than ever to investigate this theme throughout both biblical and uniquely Mormon scripture. How are we to understand the Abrahamic dimension of our faith?

At a more practical level, this book has changed my devotional life. I was surprised, actually, to find that the Doctrine and Covenants presents a more or less systematically consistent conception of consecration. I didn’t anticipate that. I knew going into the project that I wouldn’t find a revelation repealing the law of consecration—as is sometimes claimed regarding, say, the revelation on tithing (D&C 119)—but I didn’t expect to find something quite as coherent as I did find. I was also surprised to see how much more theologically compelling the revised text of the revelation on consecration turned out to be. I suppose I expected the original to be more consistent or more forceful. My work convinced me that what we have in the current version of Doctrine and Covenants 42 is the law of consecration to be lived right here and right now. That realization has clarified the life of devotion for me. I’d like to hope that I’ve become more consecrated in the course of my work on this book.

For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope is available June 3rd. You can pre-order it here.

Q&A with Marjorie Newton, author of Mormon and Maori May 12 2014

What attracted your interest in the Mormon experience in New Zealand and ultimately led to this book?

My interest in New Zealand LDS Church history began when I was a young teenager in the late 1940s and Elder Matthew Cowley, newly called to the Council of the Twelve, spoke at our district conference in Sydney, Australia. Elder Cowley’s stories of the faith and devotion of the Maori Saints in nearby New Zealand held me enthralled.

However, the idea of writing about Mormonism in New Zealand never entered my mind until nearly five decades later. My history of the Church in Australia (Southern Cross Saints: The Mormons in Australia) was published in 1991 by the Institute for Polynesian Studies at BYU Hawaii. Soon afterwards, Dale Robertson of IPS suggested that there was a need for a more detailed history of the Church in New Zealand than was currently available, and asked if I’d be interested in writing it.

So you started with the history of Mormonism in Australia? But how did that lead to Mormonism in New Zealand?

It’s actually fairly logical from a historical point of view. The original Australasian Mission, based in Sydney, Australia, was organized in 1851. It covered all the British colonies in Australia and New Zealand, although the first missionaries didn’t get to New Zealand until 1854. The Australasian Mission wasn’t divided into separate Australian and New Zealand missions until the 1890s.

Southern Cross Saints was based on my MA Honours thesis, and my supervisor at the University of Sydney, where I was a mature-age student (a very mature-aged student) encouraged me to proceed to a doctorate – but not in Mormon history. This was because no one in the History Department at Sydney University at that time had any expertise in Mormon history. I’d virtually given up the idea of a doctorate. Then Eric Sharpe, a world-respected missiologist teaching in the School of Studies in Religion there, read Southern Cross Saints and offered to supervise my doctoral candidacy if I transferred to his department. So I found myself with both a topic and a supervisor. As my proposed topic wasn’t my own idea but was suggested to me by someone who thought I could fill a need in the history of the LDS Church in the Pacific, I felt that Dr Sharpe’s message was a great blessing and a confirmation that with his help and advice, I should go ahead and do my best.      

I was very nervous about starting this project, because I’m an Australian rather than either a Maori or Pakeha (European) New Zealander. So I felt somewhat presumptuous in attempting to deal with Mormonism in New Zealand. But the more research I did on this topic, the more I wanted to know. I became more and more excited about it and more and more deeply committed to it.

How does Mormon and Maoridiffer from Tiki and Temple?

Both books are developments of my doctoral dissertation, which was examined in 1998. But they are very different books.

Tiki and Temple is a history of the LDS Church in New Zealand that expands the first two chapters of my dissertation into a detailed chronological narrative. The story begins with the arrival of the first Mormon missionaries in New Zealand in 1854. After slow (but significant) achievements among the Pakeha residents of New Zealand, the missionaries began proselytising among the Maori in the 1880s. Tiki and Temple recounts their success. By 1901, the Book of Mormon had been translated into Maori, and seventy-nine LDS branches had been organized in New Zealand with nearly 4,500 members, about 90 percent of them Maori. This success continued and reached a high point with the dedication of the New Zealand Temple, the opening of the prestigious Church College of New Zealand, the organization of the first stake and the division of the New Zealand Mission, all in 1958.

Today there are well over 100,000 Latter-day Saints in New Zealand, more than two-thirds of whom are estimated to be Maori – about 11.5 percent of the total Maori population. The LDS Church is the sixth-largest church in the country.

So your goal in writing Tiki and Templewas primarily to supply a narrative history of the Church in New Zealand that Mormon readers everywhere could use as both a resource and as engaging reading?

That’s right. My hope is that Tiki and Temple achieves two goals: first, of portraying the inspiring faith and devotion of both the American missionaries and mission presidents and their Maori and Pakeha converts, and second, of maintaining historical accuracy to the best of my ability.

But getting back to Mormon and Maori—you obviously didn’t need to do another narrative history, so what were your objectives with this second book?

Yes, Mormon and Maori is quite different. It’s an updated version of the main thrust of my dissertation, where I discuss several topics that illustrate the impact of both Mormon doctrine and Mormon culture on the Maori Saints from the 1880s to the present day.

Maori culture—how does it fit with the strongly American version of Mormonism that we’re probably all familiar with?

Mormon and Maori discusses not only the reasons why Maori were attracted to Mormonism, but the difficulties faced by both American missionaries and Maori Saints as they struggled to identify which aspects of Maoritanga (Maori culture, the Maori way of life) were compatible with the gospel, and which weren’t. Because decisions of successive mission presidents weren’t always consistent and were often influenced by their own American culture, many problems occurred and recurred in the mission over the last century.

Mormon and Maori sits squarely in the middle of the discussion of cultural/national accommodation, resistance, assimilation, and compromise. My last chapter deals with a difficult question – how Maori may a Maori Mormon remain?

And what’s your answer?

I’m certainly not qualified to give answers. But I hope that Mormon and Maori will be a helpful voice in the discussion. I think this question has even more relevance today than when I wrote my dissertation, in the light of both the enormous international growth of the Church and the recent controversy over DNA research. That discussion is significant not only to American “Lamanite” Mormons and all the Polynesian Saints in the Pacific, but to anyone who is interested in the current expansion of Mormonism among many races and cultures worldwide. While many of our General Authorities today urge members to prioritise a “celestial” rather than a racial or national culture, how feasible is this ideal in everyday life? What parts of their culture might converts in Africa and Asia have to give up, and what may they retain, as they accept Mormonism?

Obviously the New Zealand experience provides helpful precedents—and perhaps even a model—of how to grapple with those questions?

The message of the gospel is that “all are alike unto God” (2 Nephi 26:33), but each of us faces the challenge of reconciling our own cultural backgrounds with the imperative of truly seeing and accepting each other as brothers and sisters. Mormon and Maori recognises that our culture is an integral part of us, not easily discarded and not easily subjugated to a higher law. This was just as true for American mission presidents and missionaries serving in New Zealand as it was for their Maori converts - and still is for many of the descendants of those converts. It applies today as the Church attracts converts in yet more countries and among people of other cultures around the world today. There are no quick or easy answers, but I’d like to think that Mormon and Maori might help us better understand both the New Zealand experience and the problems faced in many stakes and missions today.

Preview Joseph Spencer’s “For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope” May 05 2014

Joseph Spencer’s For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope is nearing completion. Praising this work, Terryl Givens says, “Joseph Spencer is one of the most astute readers of sacred texts working in Mormon Studies. Blending theological savvy, historical grounding, and sensitive readings of scripture, he has produced an original and compelling case for consecration and the life of discipleship.”

Here is a preview of the first chapter. We hope to have it available by the end of May. A solid release date will be forthcoming in the next couple weeks.