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BYU Studies Quarterly

BYU Studies Quarterly

Roger Terry

Keywords

Mormon studies, Joseph Smith, Latter-day Saint culture

Abstract

This short but dense critical history of Mormon studies is unique in several ways. First, author Ronald Helfrich Jr. is a self-described “Gentile” scholar who spent “probably far too many years,” including a year as a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Brigham Young University, researching and writing this history. Second, the book is surprisingly thorough. I have been the editorial director at BYU Studies for the past sixteen years and thought I had a fairly decent grasp of Mormon studies, past and present, but Helfrich repeatedly describes the work of historians and other scholars with whom I am not familiar. These writers have tackled the movement Joseph Smith started in one way or another, and Helfrich is aware of both their work and how it fits into the framework he has constructed to examine the origins and history of this movement. Third, this book is not just a description of who has written about the Latter-day (or Latter Day) Saint movement and what they have said; Helfrich also presents his own theory on some of the major underlying questions. Finally, this book is forthright in addressing certain tensions that exist both in Mormon studies and in the Latter-day Saint religion— between anti– and pro–Latter-day Saint apologetics (our views are true) and polemics (your views are false), between “old” (hagiographic) and “new” (scholarly) Mormon studies, between Church leaders and intellectuals, and between the New Mormon Studies (launched primarily by Leonard Arrington) and what Helfrich calls the New Mormon Faith Studies (anchored largely by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies [FARMS], now reborn as the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship).

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