Mormon Stories Essays
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American Apocrypha
In the preceding pages, I have tried to show how a historical-critical view of the Book of Mormon illuminates some of its more interesting problems. Many questions remain, and many problems have yet to be discovered and analyzed. I myself have questions about the Book of Mormon's origins that I cannot yet answer. However, that fact does not diminish the certainty of my conclusion that the Book of Mormon is a modern text.
Faithful History
Over the past decade, Mormon history has undergone a transformation as LDS scholars have debated how their church's story should be written. New Mormon Historians distinguish between what they believe is verifiable and what they suspect may be folklore, and they approach history from a variety of different academic and social perspectives. Mormonism has also become of interest to non-LDS scholars. This raises the question of whether outsiders can truly understand Mormons, and conversely whether insiders can achieve enough detachment to see themselves objectively, or whether this is even desirable. Does history have an inherent meaning beyond the scholar's particular viewpoint, and should a writer strive to understand another person's perspective, or is one's own subjective vantage all that is possible and ultimately what is important? The new Mormon traditionalists contend that objectivity is, in fact, impossible and that history is written with certain pre-understandings; also, that some viewpoints are superior based on spiritual insight, including a belief in God and in Joseph Smith as the prophet, and that one should not impassively report examples of faith but should actively promote them. In this compilation, the editor has assembled sixteen essays which represent all sides of this ongoing discussion.
Spencer Kimball's Record Collection
"At times jubilant, at times elegiac, this set of ten essays by music historian Michael Hicks navigates topics that range from the inner musical life of Joseph Smith to the Mormon love of blackface musicals, from endless wrangling over hymnbooks to the compiling of Mormon folk and exotica albums in the 1960s. It also offers a brief memoir of what happened to LDS Church President Spencer Kimball's record collection and a lengthy, brooding piece on the elegant strife it takes to write about Mormon musical history in the first place. There are surprises and provocations, of course, alongside judicious sifting of sources and weighing of evidence. The prose is fresh, the research smart, and the result a welcome mixture of the careful and the carefree from Mormonism's best-known scholar of musical life"--