Terryl Givens publication on History of Mormon Theology Out
 

This November

http://www.amazon.com/Wrestling-Ange...=terryl+givens

Oxford Book, vol. 1

Whoa.

"most comprehensive account"

Not a modest claim.

OTOH, there is not a large universe of competing works.

Mormon Doctrine, the non-doctrinal work of BRM. What else?

A competition of two.

Mormon Doctrine by Givens

Modoc is of a slightly different genre than this one. Modoc concerns the content of doctrine, not its development. There have been treatments by others of how certain aspects of theology was developed (Sam Brown, Harrell), but this one is comprehensive.

I'm thinking of buying it. Has anyone here read it? It gets good reviews.

I'm 5/8 through.

It's what you expect from Terryl Givens: Engaging writing + Intellectual history.

He examines a lot of contemporary parallels. Chapters are topical.

still haven't ordered it. The cover is a little weird.

Another thing you'd expect from Givens: homoerotic covers.

I've just started reading and am enjoying it. It's excellent so far in setting the religious scene JS was born into, not just by describing the level of religious excitement, but by explaining how the revivalists thought differently than the mainline protestants and how that would have affected how JS thought about things like apostasy and restoration. It's also doing a great job showing how JS, Parley P. Pratt, Sidney Rigdon and other LDS of his time had a fairly significantly different way of looking at these topics than how modern LDS tend to think about them. It's extremely thoroughly researched both from LDS and non-LDS sources with a ridiculous number of footnotes.