Reblog: Book Review of Understanding the Book of Mormon

In 2011 I was writing at a different blog which is now behind a password. That Christmas I received Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide. I wrote the following review at that time.

Recently I got into a conversation on Facebook on this book and a remarkably lengthy article written by Duane Boyce calling out Hardy (and others) for bad religious scholarship. I find the Facebook format unsatisfactory when someone needs a lengthy, detailed answer. To provide one, I'm copying here my old review and the follow up posts I wrote 6 years ago. Six years ago my goal was to be honest but overall positive, so while I suggest that some parts of his treatment of Nephi (and Helaman) bothered me then, I didn't really go into detail about what exactly or why. In the next post on this blog I will go into a few more specifics about why I find Hardy's treatment of Nephi so unsatisfactory and where I agree and disagree with Boyce's criticism of Hardy's book. I've added a couple comments in [brackets] below.

The tl;dr summary of what I wrote 6 years ago is: "I recommend his book for people interested in treating the Book of Mormon like literature. He does his job and he does it well. I really appreciate insights he helped me see in Mormon and Moroni. Just don't go looking for something that isn't there. ... Hardy's book is not about understanding the messages of the Book of Mormon. There is very little talk about the Atonement or Christianity itself, how Nephite Christianity is different, how the Book of Mormon expounds on and complements the Bible's message of salvation, what the mission of Jesus Christ is or any of the fundamental points the prophets set out to make. ... Of course, given how didactic the Book of Mormon is (one of his favorite words), he may feel it unnecessary: you can't read the Book of Mormon seriously without coming away with its testimony of Jesus Christ. Hardy wants to present something New. This is an intellectual exercise. I like such exercises. The thing is, if this were all anyone read, they would not come away Understanding the Book of Mormon."

Mormon Helping Hands east of Houston

So there was this hurricane that hit Texas a while back. You might've heard about it </hipster>. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called for volunteers from around the area to drive down to Houston and other locales to help.

I went down two weekends ago with 10 other people from my local church and again last weekend with a new group of 10. Someone else was our team leader each time, but I served as assistant since I was going both times. We were joined by 150-200 others from our stake each weekend (that's the Weatherford area) and approximately 10,000 Mormons from Texas and other areas nearby.

No. I AM your father.

We arrived to help muck out houses. Mucking out means we took absolutely everything that wasn't salvageable (just about everything) out of the house to be trashed, tore out the sheet rock and drywall and insulation, and left a barebones skeleton frame in the house. The first weekend we spent the entire time helping one lady, whom I will call "Mary" - about 73 years old, she's a diabetic widow with some pretty serious mold allergies. Mold is one of the biggest problems from this flood as absolutely everything gets thoroughly soaked. Because of the mold, the house smelled absolutely dreadful and I was thankful we had taken the time to buy an industrial grade air filter because of my mold allergies. In the picture you can see the water line that went up to about 4 feet.

But if the water is 4 feet high, then it seeped up the insulation to 5-6 feet and that meant all the walls had to be taken down completely. We couldn't finish her house in one weekend, so we finished the job when we came back the second weekend. We also got to help another couple where the water had only gone up 1-2 feet. It still meant they lost most of their things and we had to remove the drywall up to 4 feet.

Picture dump 2017 - Superstar

Now what has Superstar been up to? Since he is sitting over my shoulder and ready to contribute and correct, I am writing this one in the third-person instead of as if I were him. (This was one thing he noted, clever boy.)

Last school year when we got back from South Africa, Superstar discovered the rest of his honors class had been working on biographies and becoming some famous people. He had a very limited time to pick someone and become them for a living wax museum that would welcome everyone to school. He chose Thomas Edison. He was a FANTASTIC robot, with a big button that said "Hear Tom talk" and he would not talk unless someone pushed that button. He started over everytime someone pushed the button and did so while staying in character a robot of Thomas Edison! It was amazing and highly entertaining. The other kids learned what a fun toy he was, congregating around him to 'push his buttons'. It was wonderful to watch.

"Hello. My name is Thomas Edison. I am a famous inventor who lived a long time ago. I invented many useful things in America history, such as the x-ray and the light bulb. Today is the 85th anniversary of my death."

For this year he is planning to be Colt McCoy, quarterback for the Redskins. From this you might surmise that he discovered American football this year. You would be right! He has joined a football team (with a less-than-stellar win record) where he has a lot of fun as a blocker.




On our way home from Utah, we stopped in Aspen, Colorado to visit my great-Aunt Virginia. While we were in Utah, we learned a bunch of new card games, like Wackee Six, Ratuki, and Five Crowns. He figured out how to combine the Wackee Six cards I got for my birthday with the rules for Five Crowns, so he's been teaching people to play Wackee Six Crowns.

In Aspen, we all went up the mountain for lunch to enjoy the view. Here we are playing very large chess together.

Last week the kids in his class were invited to be a superhero based on a Greek or Latin root. He got ped/pad, meaning foot, and became "The Pedomaster" (peDOMuster). He is fast and can jump.

He likes to dab. This is his (patent-pending) 4-dab, because his legs are also dabbing and are in the shape of a 4.

Walking home from a football game,
we pause for a Tarleton picture

For college days on campus we got him a BYU shirt

Here he is ready for Conference in his tent. He enjoys being a bear scout, having earned his wolf last year. "Tell them I'm the only one in my scout troop that earned Tiger scout" because when we lived in Glen Rose they had Tiger Scouts and our local group here doesn't. Superstar is also very nice to have in the car on our long drives - he hands everyone food for meals or snacks and helps JT whenever he needs some attention.

Picture dump 2017 - Princess

Princess, what's been going on with you this year?

I turned six this year and started first grade! I got to celebrate my birthday several times - at home, at the hometel, and, best of all, with my cousin A. We met up at Las Vegas during the summer because Daddy's great-aunt died and we all came together for her burial. That was sad, of course, but I got to spend so much time with my best friend, A. She gave me a mermaid tail for my birthday! It was so much fun being her twinner.

In addition to being a mermaid, I also like to be Wonder Woman, a baby, a kitty, a princess, and "coocoo baby. And I love coocoo."

I walk to school everyday with my Daddy and my brother. I love my teacher and my class. I'm very good at reading - I passed off over 200 vocabulary words in the first couple weeks of school! At the end of the last school year I joined the Stephenville High Stingerettes for some training in how to be a cheerleader. I danced to Kiss the Girl from Little Mermaid. 

I got a major haircut this year - going from long hair to shoulder length. I like my new haircut. I like snuggling with Mommy in the morning. I learned how to swing all by myself (with a push at the start) but I still like it when Mommy or Daddy give me underdogs. Superstar and I took swimming lessons too. Here we are trying to cross the obstacle course at Splashville.

Picture dump 2017 - John-Thomas 1

Okay, so I'm not going to be able to go through our entire summer vacation in detail. This much is clear. But if there is one thing I learned from accidentally deleting ALL the pictures we took in the last 3 years, we need more pictures of the kids on the blog and maybe a couple stories to go with them! Thankfully we had backups of many of the pictures.

John-Thomas - what's been going on with you this that we haven't shared here yet?

Well, Dad, glad you asked. I turned three years old nearly 6 months ago. Boy, you ARE behind on this blogging thing, aren't you? I didn't want cake for my birthday. I wanted DONUTS. We ate several dozen donuts of all kinds, colors, and varieties and from several different shops. That was fun!

I got superheroes, balls, a fire truck, and a monkey to play in my kitty house. I love them all still!

I love animals, especially my brother's dog. I steal him away every chance I can get. I also love his giant Mickey, the one as big as me - did you remember he got Mickey when he was my age or a little younger? He's the best! Too bad they're both usually hiding in brother's bed where I can't get at them....

I like to read. I love reading with my Mommy and Daddy. Here I am snuggled so cozzily in our summer hometel reading on a Sunday and posing in my sharp Sunday suit with Mommy.

I also like climbing trees and playing in bouncy houses. I run around ALL THE TIME. I like to pretend to be animals, mostly kitties or puppies, but sometimes monkeys. I'm learning how to read the letters A to I. I can count to 20. 

JT's biggest fan

Superstar and John-Thomas sleep in a bunk bed, with 3 year old JT on the bottom. When he figured out how to climb, we took away the ladder to make sure he couldn't climb into his brother's bed. Superstar had to climb up using the headboards. Last month John-Thomas figured out how to climb up his brother's bunk bed without the ladder. To prevent him from falling and hurting himself badly when he came back down, we finally installed Superstar's ladder.

The immediate reaction, naturally enough, was to encourage JT to climb into his brother's bed ALL the TIME. Then one morning he turned on the fan, climbed into his brother's bed, and started jumping up and down excitedly. That's when disaster struck.

"I'm wearing my pajamas
and I look like a pirate!"

Over tonight's hashbrown dinner, I ask him to retell the experience: "Superstar was sleeping. I was climbing on Superstar's bunkbed - not on this night. And I turn on the fan. And I got whacked in the head and I didn't get breaked in the potatoes." On saying this, he resumes smashing his hashbrowns into bits.

He got hit just above his left eye. JUST above. I carried him to our bathroom to wash out the blood, give him a priesthood blessing, and try to calm him. Once we got him some Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, he was feeling a lot better.

We went to three different doctors that morning before we found someone who could see him, and she declared that he happily didn't need stitches. He has been recovering happily since then, much more wary about climbing into his brother's bed.

Reception: Ari and Paula

Here are some pictures from Ari and Paula's wedding reception. I enjoyed being MC, which consisted of telling people the line forms to the right, dinner rolls are on the left, and when it was time for our expert dancers to get their groove on.

Religious reading recommendations

So out of all those books (see last post), I must have some opinions, right? Matter of fact, I do.

CS Lewis' George MacDonald was glorious. It's one of the very few books I have ever managed to read slowly because I was constantly setting it down to ponder more deeply on a new insight. I need to read this again and again. In the introduction, Lewis writes "From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central." In that regard MacDonald said:

God does not ... make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after Him and His Will. ... The truth is this: He wants to make us in His own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How should He effect this if He were always moving us from within, as He does at divine intervals, toward the beauty of holiness? ... For God made our individuality as well as, and a greater marvel than, our dependence ... [so] that freedom should bind us divinely dearer to Himself, with a new and inscrutable marvel of love; for ... the freer the man, the stronger the bond that binds him to Him who made his freedom.

 Also: "A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself" and "He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss."

The King Dethroned: summer reading contest 2017

To encourage me and my brother to read, my parents established a summer reading contest. We got a small prize for every thousand pages we read and a big prize if we read more pages than anyone else.

I won every year.

One summer I made it through 15,000+ pages by spending most every summer morning lounging in my bed with a Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, or Ravenloft book in my hands.

But my former glory and prowess isn't really what we're here to talk about. I only need to mention it in order to showcase and highlight the glory of the rising sun: Superstar. Last summer he pulled ahead of me, but he stopped reading partway through the summer and I overtook him. By the time he realized it, I was far ahead and he had trouble catching up.

This summer he took a rapid lead, pushing ahead to double my page number. I thought I might be unseated, but kept plugging along at a steady, rapid pace. Eventually he paused and I struck by finishing off several longer books I had been working on for a while. I pulled ahead. This time I made sure to yell loudly and point it out to him early on. He rekindled his reading streak and struggled to catch up. Neck and neck we raced to the finish, sprinting through our books for all we were worth. I reorganized all our books so it would be easier for him to identify books in his age range. Superstar discovered Harry Potter and devoured the first four books. In the very last week of the contest, as we both crossed the 9000 page line, he pulled ahead.

When the dust settled the last night before school, Superstar was ahead of me by exactly 50 pages. Superstar is the new Reading King! The king is dead. LONG LIVE THE KING!

For his little prizes, he got some more books to read and for his grand prize, he chose the audiobook of Harry Potter IV to read him to sleep each night.

List of books we read:

Temples dot the Wasatch front

While driving up and down Utah and Nevada, we decided to try to show the kids as many temples as we could. It got them thinking about the temple and temple work a lot more, so they asked a lot of great questions about what happens there and why Mommy and Daddy love the temple so much.

Living just three blocks from a temple helped - the first temple each day came rather quickly. JT would call out "'Roni! Mroni!" when he saw the angel Moroni on them.

This summer was a time of dedicated temple service for us. LDS temple are there to unite families across multiple generations. We do vicarious ordinance work for them so they can have the same blessings of the gospel that we do. (more here).

A couple years ago Joy got really interested in doing some family history and she found and prepared the names of something like 60 family members for us to do temple work for. I admit the reason she did only 60 is because I asked her to stop at 50, knowing that at our usual pace of each of us doing one person each month, that was all we could manage in two years. We kept at it.

Then last year I got more interested in family history also. Playing around with both my history and Joy's, I prepared enough names to take us up to about 100 waiting on us. Oopsies.

As we counseled together about how we were going to get this done, we decided to do everything we could to more than double our temple work.

Joy: I had told Derrill, no, we didn't have the time. Then a week or so later I was feeling like I needed extra help from Heavenly Father. The answer I got was that I should go to the temple every other week. Then when I talked to you about it I remembered your insistence on doing more work for the dead, so yours was more altruistic *lol*

Over the summer, at least one of us was in the temple every week. In Brigham that meant a leisurely morning stroll for each of us to the temple three blocks away. In Stephenville that means a full day trip. We regularly sent one of us up to Dallas (2 hours away with traffic) first thing in the morning and they stayed there until the evening. It's been a wonderful, fulfilling, peaceful time.

The only "problem" is that despite taking care of more than 30 people's ordinance work, we still have 100+ people to do because I keep stumbling across more relatives who need work.