The author demonstrates that the Book of Mormon is a native Mesoamerican book (or codex) that exhibits what one would expect of a historical document produced in the context of ancient Mesoamerican civilization. He also shows that scholars' discoveries about Mesoamerica and the contents of the Nephite record are clearly related, listing more than 400 points where the Book of Mormon text corresponds to characteristic Mesoamerican situations, statements, allusions, and history.
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Mormonism is one of the fastest growing, most misunderstood, and most debated religions of recent times. Even the simple act of defining WHAT Mormonism is (or should be) has been filled with controversy. The author reconstructs the signal events of early Mormonism as perceived from INSIDE the faith.
From the bestselling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493—an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world. In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
This is volume 14 (2015) of Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture published by The Interpreter Foundation. It contains articles on a variety of topics including "Sustaining the Brethren," "Who Was Sherem," "Whoso Forbiddeth to Abstain from Meats," "Where in Cincinnati Was the Third Edition of the Book of Mormon Printed?" "Celestial Visits in the Scriptures, and a Plausible Mesoamerican Tradition," "Father is a Man: The Remarkable Mention of the name Abish in Alma 19:16 and Its Narrative Context," "A Redemptive Reading of Mark 5:25-34," "Restoring the Original Text of the Book of Mormon," "The Implications of Past-Tense Syntax in the Book of Mormon," "Reflections of Urim: Hebrew Poetry Sheds Light on the Directors-Interpreters Mystery," "John L. Sorenson's Complete Legacy: Reviewing Mormon's Codex," "Lehi the Smelter: New Light on Lehi's Profession," and "Place of Crushing: The Literary Function of Heshlon in Ether 13:25-31."
Robert Bowman compares the evidence for Jesus' resurrection with the evidence for Joseph's visions, showing how the historical data confirm the truth of Jesus' resurrection, and that the accounts of Joseph Smith's visions are historically unreliable
Mormon studies is one of the fastest-growing subfields in religious studies. For this volume, Terryl Givens and Philip Barlow, two leading scholars of Mormonism, have brought together 45 of the top scholars in the field to construct a collection of essays that offers a comprehensive overview of scholarship on Mormons. The book begins with a section on Mormon history, perhaps the most well-developed area of Mormon studies. Chapters in this section deal with questions ranging from how Mormon history is studied in the university to the role women have played throughout Mormon history. Other sections examine revelation and scripture, church structure and practice, theology, society, and culture. The final two sections look at Mormonism in a larger context. The authors examine Mormon expansion across the globe-focusing on Mormonism in Latin America, the Pacific, Europe, and Asia-in addition to the interaction between Mormonism and other social systems, such as law, politics, and other faiths. Bringing together an unprecedented body of scholarship in the field of Mormon studies,The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism will be an invaluable resource for those within the field, as well as for people studying the broader, ever-changing American religious landscape.
Book of Mormon record keepers drew upon the natural world thousands of times to enrich their speaking and writing. Their references to beasts, fruit, seashore, stones, trees, vineyards, and wilderness (to name only a few) provide amazing insights into how, and where, those record keepers lived.A near consensus among Latter-day Saint scholars is that Mesoamerica is the land where the Book of Mormon record-keepers lived. Given my understanding of crop physiology, and considering Nephi's words about how remarkably their Jerusalem-gathered seeds performed in the New World, I researched an alternate hypothesis-that the Lehi party landed in a Jerusalem-like Mediterranean eco-region of the Americas, and that the record keepers from Nephi to Moroni stayed and lived in such a region. Crookston evaluates the usage of 107 ecology-related Book of Mormon words including plants, animals, and lands, in all their spiritual and temporal contexts, providing considerable insight into the record keepers' lives and culture, enabling a determination as to whether each word, as deployed in the text, is a better fit with a Mesoamerican or Mediterranean-like region.The compelling conclusion of this work is that, based on the ecological information in the text, Mesoamerica should be seriously reassessed as the land where the Book of Mormon record keepers lived. The hypothesis that an American Mediterranean eco-zone served as their home definitely deserves further investigation.
