Dave's Mormon Inquiry

Can Books Cause Problems? Reflections on Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

I recently did a quick read of John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet and posted notes here. Here is my one-sentence summary: "Turner gives a balanced if candid portrayal of Brigham, one that mainstream Mormons should be able to read without serious difficulties." But not everyone agrees. Some very bright people think the book might very well cause problems for mainstream Mormons and should therefore perhaps be avoided. It's a serious question: Can books cause problems? If so, what do we do with those problem books: Ignore them? Hide them in locked cases? Burn them?

Turner, Part 4: Brigham's Last Two Decades

[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3] This last post covers Chapters 9 through 13 of John G. Turner's excellent Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012). This section of the book covers events from the Mormon Reformation, the Utah War, and Mountain Meadows in 1857 through the completion of the St. George Temple and Brigham's death in 1877. Those are twenty eventful years.

Chapters 9 and 10 start with the Mormon Reformation of 1856/57. Here's Turner's account of a typical sermon:

In mid-September 1856, Young delivered a fiery sermon in Salt Lake City, forcefully condemning a multitude of sins, ranging from adultery to dishonesty to a failure to tithe. Mincing no words, he complained that some Saints kept their "brains ... below their waistbands." He warned that the "whole people will be corrupted if we do not lop off those rotten branches." At the same time, he held out the prospect of forgiveness and spiritual empowerment, calling on the repentant to repeat their baptisms and "receive the Holy Ghost and then live in it continually." Sinners could choose between repentance and flight. Otherwise, they deserved excommunication and possibly death. (p. 255.)

Turner, Part 3: Brigham as Pioneer and Prophet

[Part 1 | Part 2] This post covers Chapters 5 through 8 of John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012). This section of the book covers Brigham's assumption of leadership of the Church upon the death of Joseph Smith, his successful relocation of the main body of Mormons from Illinois to unsettled Utah, and the difficult first few years there, punctuated by the 1852 public announcement of the practice of plural marriage by the LDS Church.

Turner, Part 2: Brigham as Preacher and Polygamist

[Part 1] This post covers Chapter 2 through 4 of John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012). Topics covered in this fast-paced section of the book are Brigham's early preaching as an LDS missionary, his call to the Twelve and mission to England, followed by his return to Nauvoo and initiation into polygamy as practiced under Joseph Smith.

Turner, Part 1: Brigham the Reformed Methodist

I'm a little late to the party for John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, which has of late blazed through the Bloggernacle. I've read both Arrington's American Moses and Bringhurt's Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier, so this is familiar ground, but it's clear from other reviews that Turner uses a lot of archived letter and journal material that were either not accessible or not prominently featured in earlier books. In this post, I look at Brigham's pre-LDS religious experience as a Reformed Methodist. All quotations are from Chapter One, "A New Creature."

Turner's Book

It is hard to grasp the variety of early 19th-century sects, even within just one denomination. Brigham and his family were attracted to the Methodists but, being unhappy with the form of the Methodist Episcopal Church, gravitated toward the more congregational Reformed Methodists. Turner notes that "the Reformed Methodists exhibited several of the impulses later central to early Mormonism."

Volcanism, Mormonism, and Historical Contingency

Mormonism can pop up just about anywhere these days. I was reading through The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, From Stardust to Living Planet (Penguin Group, 2012) when I stumbled across this interesting passage:

[T]he colossal April 1815 eruption of Tambora, which produced an amazing twelve cubic miles of lava, was the deadliest of all. More than seventy thousand lives were lost, most as a consequence of agricultural failure and subsequent mass starvation. Tambora's injection of immense quantities of sun-blocking sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere turned 1816 into the Northern Hemisphere's "year without a summer." (p. 270)

The author, a geologist, was recounting the fury of Tambora while speculating on the likelihood of a supervolcano eruption in the next few thousand years. Unlike earthquakes, which max out a little above 9 on the Richter scale, volcanic eruptions scale up almost without limit.

The Lost History of 1844

Just finished The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began (Walker and Co., 2012). It recounts a variety of episodes and events that were roiling each of the major countries in the months before they plunged into World War 1, but that were largely forgotten in the aftermath of the war. Those events were, so to speak, overshadowed by the glare of that terrible war and largely lost to the memory of those who lived after. England was dealing with near civil war over revolt in Ireland, America was preoccupied with Pancho Villa and a revolution brewing in Mexico, France was obsessed with a political scandal that derailed the career of a figure who might have argued for peace not war in 1914, and Germany's Kaiser was trying to manage a Reichstag full of feisty Social Democrats. When the heir to the Austrian crown was assassinated in Sarajevo in August, the countries tumbled into war, but it could have played out so differently. For anyone who has read Tuchman's The Guns of August, this book gives a whole different perspective on the events of 1914, both those we remember and those we have forgotten.