Dave's Mormon Inquiry

The Council of Fifty: A Documentary History

I don't have time to do a proper review of the 490 pages of The Council of Fifty: A Documentary History (Signature Books, 2014), edited by Jedediah S. Rogers, so I am just going to start writing and see what happens. The book hits the bookshelves today, so it's a potential Christmas gift for the Mormon history fan in your life.

Required: working knowledge of 19th-century Mormon history. The book is a collection of selections from publicly available documents that address the Council of Fifty: letters, diaries, journals, manuscripts, research notes, LDS historical documents. While the editor provides helpful footnotes and introductions, a reader who doesn't have a degree of familiarity with names and places of 19th-century LDS history will be a bit lost. This probably eliminates 80% of the active LDS population but hopefully not many readers of this review.

The Mormon Challenge, Part 1: Creation

Continuing with my project to actually read the LDS books I buy, I'm now reading The New Mormon Challenge (Zondervan, 2002), a serious book about Mormonism by a bunch of Evangelical scholars, edited by Francis J. Beckwith, Carl Mosser, and Paul Owen. Apart from our mere existence, two things about us really trouble Evangelicals: our relentless growth (which has apparently leveled off since the book was published) and our huge corps of missionaries (which has ballooned since the book was published). We are a threat. That perhaps explains why Evangelicals feel justified in disparaging Mormons from their pulpits, classrooms, and publishing houses. But this book is by academics, not pastors, and is a serious discussion, not a slam. So I was a little disappointed with Chapter 3, the first meaty chapter, which defends ex nihilo creation and critiques the LDS belief in creation out of preexisting but unformed matter.