Religious Studies Center Books

This book collects Joseph Smith’s uncanonized revelations, offering a new edition of these texts and update to past work. While most of the texts featured in this volume are accessible in The Joseph Smith Papers, both online and in print, average readers will probably find it difficult to sift through all twenty-seven volumes of the papers to locate these items. This book aims to remove that barrier to help facilitate access to these fascinating revelations.

This is a biography of Katharine Smith Salisbury, the longest-surviving member of the Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith family. The book is based on a cache of letters, interviews, and recorded speeches. It records a life of challenges, including religious prejudice and ostracism. Three of Katharine’s children died in infancy. Her husband was only intermittently available as a provider. The Salisburys were driven from Ohio and Missouri, and her husband died at forty-four. Through all these challenges Katharine remained loyal to her brother Joseph Smith Jr., vouching for his prophetic appointment. The challenges she endured solidified her commitment to take up her cross for the cause of her faith.

Joseph Wilford Booth, one of the first Latter-day Saint missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, served for seventeen years between 1898 and 1928 in what is today Turkey, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. This collection of topically arranged, annotated, and contextualized excerpts from Booth’s journals provides insights about the early Latter-day Saint presence in the Middle East, including the everyday lives of the missionaries, local Church members, and larger populations in the region. Booth’s journals address the broader social, political, and cultural issues of a volatile period in the Middle East as he witnessed the end of the Ottoman Empire and the destructive effects of World War I on the region as a whole, but especially on the Ottoman Armenian population.

The essays in this volume explore the historical context and doctrinal teachings from a selection of the canonized revelations and official declarations. Contributors explore the testimony of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon, the revelations given to Emma Smith, Hiram Page, and Thomas B. Marsh; the law of common consent, sacramental covenants, consecration, establishing Zion, the degrees of glory in the afterlife, the priesthood power of women, the visitation of Elijah in the Kirtland Temple, the sacred location of Adam-ondi-Ahman, baptism for the dead, Satan’s reality, the beginnings of plural marriage, the doctrine of redemption of the dead, and the Manifesto which led to the end of plural marriage.