book notes

'The Joseph Smith Papers project is so fruitful that some scholars are harvesting fruits from particular volumes before they've even been published. Such is Sustaining the Law, a collection of papers addressing the legal side of Joseph Smith's multifaceted life. The book's three editors began its compilation while working on the Joseph Smith Papers Project's Legal and Business Records series and while crafting a course on Joseph Smith and early American law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University.

...with reflections on the Maxwell Institute's mission Over the past decade, Richard Mouw evangelical (Calvinist) president of Fuller Theological Seminary has been in dialogue with various Latter-day Saints in order to better understand Mormonism and to help Mormons better understand evangelical Christians. During Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns he became one of the go-to sources in news reports about Mormon/Evangelical relationships. He's taken a lot of heat for this within his religious community, going as far as apologizing to the Mormon community on behalf of evangelicals who he said had sinned against Mormonism by misrepresenting their beliefs and practices. His latest book Talking with Mormons: An Invitation to Evangelicals is an effort to educate the evangelical community about his ongoing work with Mormonism.

At the dawn of the twentieth century the LDS Church was in the midst of a transition from 'a settlement-founding polygamous and communitarian organization into an increasingly mainstream American church' (347). No survey has covered these shifts in greater detail than Thomas Alexander's Mormonism in Transition. Alexander's latest book, Edward Hunter Snow: Pioneer, Educator, Statesman, covers the same transitional period through the experiences of a particular historical figure who not only exemplified but also helped shepherd the fundamental changes being made.