Current Projects

A Sourcebook of Mormonism in America. Co-edited with Reid Neilson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 (projected).

As part of Columbia’s ongoing series of sourcebooks in religion, this volume will present close to one hundred documents pertaining to Mormonism, covering subjects from history, theology, government and politics to race and ethnicity, identity, and lived religion. Each document will be introduced to give historical context and appropriate background.

Making Mormonism: A History of Mormon Theology.

This two to three volume study, organized by theme, will situate Mormon theology in the context of the larger Christian historical tradition, assess nineteenth-century parallels, and chart the appearance and subsequent development of Mormon doctrines by Joseph Smith and other LDS figures. A guiding thesis of this work is that Smith believed original Christianity “lay . . . in broken fragments scattered, rent, and disjointed; with nothing to point out its original, but the shattered remnants of its ancient glory.” As with the “ancient palace” now reduced to ruins, the work of restoration would entail bringing together the new and the old, the excavation and assemblage of what was sound and the replacement and incorporation of what had been irredeemably lost or corrupted from Eden.

A Handbook to Mormonism. Edited with Phil Barlow.

Oxford University Press, 2012 (projected).