Item Detail
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26236
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2
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9
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English
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Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the American Renaissance : An Update
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Interpreter : A Journal of Mormon Scripture
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19
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Orem, UT
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The Interpreter Foundation
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1-16
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This is a follow-up to my article, “Joseph Smith and the American Renaissance,” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 2002.1 My purpose in writing that article was to consider Joseph Smith in relation to his more illustrious contemporary American authors — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In that article I tried to demonstrate that in comparison with these writers, Joseph Smith did not possess the literary imagination, talent, authorial maturity, education, cultural milieu, knowledge base, or sophistication necessary to produce the Book of Mormon; nor, I argued, had he possessed all of these characteristics, nor was the time in which the book was produced sufficient to compose such a lengthy, complex, and elaborate narrative. This addendum takes the comparison one step further by examining each writer’s magnum opus and the background, previous writings, and preliminary drafts that preceded its publication — then comparing them with Joseph Smith’s publication of the Book of Mormon. That is, each of the major works of these writers of prose, fiction, and poetry as well as the scriptural text produced by Joseph Smith has a history — one that allows us to trace its evolution from inception to completion.
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An Imperfect Book : What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself
Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited : The Evidence for Ancient Origins
Forgiving the Church and Loving the Saints : Spiritual Evolution and the Kingdom of God
Irony in the Book of Mormon
John Milton, Joseph Smith, and The Book of Mormon
Joseph Smith : Rough Stone Rolling
The Book of Mormon and Automatic Writing
The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith
The Word of God is Enough : The Book of Mormon as Nineteenth-Century Scripture