DiaBLOGue

Review by J. Stapley

Behold, there shall be a record kept among you.

These are words of revelation to which all those interested in the human past muster a resounding amen, Latter-day Saint and non-Mormon alike. The process of heeding that call in the early Church of Christ started and restarted in fits of optimism. Because of the records that were eventually kept, the project of Joseph Smith’s institutional history was ultimately finished, though more than a decade after his death. Most interested observers of Mormonism have approached this history through B.H. Roberts’ edited version, published and republished as the History of the Church (sometimes called the “Documentary History of the Church” in the twentieth-century literature because of its documentary structure). However, there are more histories than one, and more pure.

Title: Dimensions of Faith: A Mormon Studies Reader
Author: Stephen C. Taysom
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Religious Studies
Year: 2011
Pages: 500
Binding: Softcover
ISBN13: 978-1-56085-212-4
Price: $28.95
Back when he was a doctoral student in religious studies, Stephen C. Taysom wished he had a collection of “fine scholarship” he could use to show professors and others “who expressed skepticism about the fitness of Mormonism as an object of serious academic study” what they were missing (vii). Now Taysom is a professor of religious studies at Cleveland State University. His reworked dissertation, Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries, was published in 2011 by Indiana University Press. Enough has changed within the academy (and within Taysom’s own circles) over the past few years to turn his professors’ skepticism into inquiry: “I have received requests from colleagues for a selection of readings that might be used profitably in courses dealing with Mormonism,” Taysom reports in Dimensions of Faith: A Mormon Studies Reader (xi). The reader is a collection of fifteen essays analyzing Mormonism through literary, ritual, film, gender, folklore, and other studies. Taysom argues that the collection’s very existence bears witness that “Mormonism is a rich field of inquiry into which theories and methods of a vast array of disciplines are being widely and skillfully integrated” (viii). Rather than describing a few of the papers Taysom selected and giving them a thumbs up or down, I’d like to use the book as a way to examine a few key issues being debated—or not—in discussions of Mormon studies today.

Title: Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission in New Zealand, 1854–1958
Author: Marjorie Newton
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: History
Year: 2012
Pages: 343
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-58958-1210
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Amanda Hendrix-Komoto
Note: The term Pakeha refers to the white settler population of New Zealand, while the Maori are the islands’ indigenous peoples.
Tucked in the back of Marjorie Newton’s Of Tiki and Temple is a Maori glossary. It is possible to read and understand her work without referring to it to discover that a mihi is a greeting or welcoming ceremony or that quarterly conferences were called hui pariha in the Mormon Church in New Zealand. The glossary’s existence, however, is evidence of Newton’s commitment to writing a history of the Mormon Church in New Zealand that recognizes the contributions of indigenous Maori culture to the church and is meticulous in its detail.

Stephen Taysom, The Patheos Guide to Mormonism (Series Editor Kathleen Mulhern), available in e-book formats for $2.99. For details, see this website.
Reviewed by Kevin Barney
Remember when you were in high school, and you were assigned a five-page paper? Oh, how you struggled to reach that goal of five pages! If you got desperate enough, perhaps you played with fonts, margins and line spacing in an effort to cross the finish line with some hopefully-not-too-obvious space padding techniques made possible by the computer age. What a relief it was when you finally achieved the assigned length. Maybe you would even add an extra paragraph, so it wouldn’t look too obvious how much you were straining to get to five pages of text.

Title: The Persistence of Polygamy: Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy
Editors: Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster
Publisher: John Whitmer Books
Genre: History
Year: 2010
Pages: 306
Binding: Softcover
ISBN13: 978-1-934901-13-7
Price: $24.95
Reviewed by Blair Hodges
We usually just want the unvarnished truth. Tell us the facts. Drop the spin. Lay it all out on the table. State your case objectively and we’ll decide to believe you or to reject your views. Give us some easy bullet points, a quick overview, a succinct argument, and the jury will return shortly with the verdict. The problem is that we all too often forget we’re all incapable of constructing, let alone judging between, contrasting claims about our past in an “objective” way. This is my non-comprehensive way of explaining our persistent interest in history, of course. “History speaks not only of the past but also of the present.”¹

Title: How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
Author: N. T. Wright
Publisher: HarperOne
Genre: New Testament
Year: 2012
Pages: 282
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-0-06-173057-3
Price: $25.99
Reviewed by Blair Hodges
The crux of Anglican scholar N.T. Wright’s latest book, How God Became King, can be summed up quite easily, if quite dramatically: “most of Western Christianity has simply forgotten what the gospels are really about” (ix). According to a dominant Christian view today, God created the world and called Israel to be His people, and upon their failure he sent down Plan B, Jesus, to fix everything up and take us away to heaven (84). This is all wrong, Wright says, and reflects an over-emphasis of the early creeds on one hand and problematic Reformation additions or over-reliance on critical scholarship on the other, more than it reflects the stories or purposes of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John: