The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has commissioned a new biography of church founder Joseph Smith — an official look at the 19th-century charismatic leader who launched a global movement.
Latter-day Saint scholar Richard Bushman wrote the highly acclaimed "Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling."
Bushman, considered by many to be the premier Latter-day Saint biographer of the founder, discussed many previous attempts in ““Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet,”“I can’t imagine a better time to research the life of Joseph Smith,” Turner wrote in an email. “The Joseph Smith Papers project has made it so much easier to examine the sources that document his life.”
At the same time, he notes that Smith had “very little to say about some of the key moments in his life. He preferred not to discuss the details of the, and he only made oblique references to plural marriage. So it’s still an intimidating task to try to write a biography of Mormonism’s founding prophet.”
For Turner, who is not a Latter-day Saint, the good news “is that there’s plenty of room in this vineyard for many writers.” The engaging but controversial Smith led “a complex, multifaceted” life,” he said, “and it’s essential that historians bring different backgrounds and presuppositions to the task of better understanding him and the movement he started.”
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