Mindful

Truly, Buried Treasures

Revisado: 10-13-24

For those of us who love the Book of Mormon, this is a very good book about the author's reading of the Book of Mormon thirty years after the last time he read it.

The explanation alone for the name of the Anti-Nephi-Lehies is worth the cost of the book. Many of the themes developed in this book are expanded in his later book, A Testimony of Two Nations.

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Terrible Production Values

Revisado: 10-13-24

You may or may not like this book, but the actual recording was terrible. Passages repeat, there is a thumping sound every so often that indicates a passage is going to be replayed, and you can hear a lot of extraneous noise in the background. I thought Audible.com was supposed to sell quality products. This may or may not have been a good book, but I gave up because of the terrible recording. I want my credit back.

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Jacob Reimagined as Woke Social Justice Warrior

Revisado: 01-24-21

Green’s reading of Jacob imposes on the text the fulness of her woke ideology and she recasts Jacob as the perfect 21st-century social justice warrior. She does not provide insightful readings FROM the text but rather imposes already existing woke social justice categories ON the text. In her book, you will find all the usual buzzwords: justice, injustice, oppression, consent, social justice, equality, inequality, marginalized, right relation, wrong relation, entitlement, privilege, social construction, hierarchy, sexual agency, skin color, etc. It is all right there in the index at the end of the book. What we have here is, following Green’s use of gendered pronouns in her text, the philosophies of this woman, mingled with scripture.

She uses non-standard definitions of terms to fit her ideology, without deriving those definitions from a close reading of the Book of Mormon. For example, she describes charity as “neighbor love,” that having charity is “learning to love as God loves, that is, universally and equitably” (p. 34). But this is not charity in the Biblical or Book of Mormon sense. You don’t "learn" to love as God loves nor do you "appropriate" charity, as Green says (p. 34). Charity is a gift from God, who bestows it upon true followers of Christ (Moroni 7:48) through the power of the Holy Ghost (Moroni 8:26). It is not neighbor love, but the pure love of Christ (Moroni 7:47), love as it exists in the bosom of Christ, that is, redeeming love (Ether 12:33-34). The Book of Mormon is rich with allusions to charity, all of which Green ignores in her rush to impose her social justice categories on the text.

In talking about how Jacob combats racism, she acknowledges that “white vs. black” in the Book of Mormon can be interpreted metaphorically. But then she goes on to ignore that concession and insist that, in the text, white Nephites are oppressing black Lamanites in the Book of Mormon and that it's NOT metaphorical. Further, she claims that whiteness vs. blackness (or light and dark) are evil, oppressive categories even when used metaphorically. I guess Joseph Smith was evil and oppressive (JS-History 1:15-17), to cite one prominent example from LDS scripture.

In a scholarly work, she virtually ignored all of the fine scholarship on Jacob 5. I found it astounding that she didn't reference or tip her hat to the fine research that has been done in the past on this topic.

Even when her interpretations follow the text, as in Jacob’s discussion of the Nephite vs. Lamanite treatment of women, others have made that argument much more forcefully and cogently (Joseph Spencer and Kim Berkey come to mind). I could go on, as Green’s book is full of such problems. But I won’t. This book will not age well. When the other books in this series have proven their worth over time, this one will be loaded with early 21st-century jargon and secular critical ideology that will appear shockingly out of place and dated.

Did I like anything about the book? Did I learn anything from the book? The answer is yes and yes. I liked and learned from her discussion of consent and agency. BUT she did not derive this from a close reading of Jacob. Like a lot of ideas in this book, it was imposed on the text. The cover art was great (and also followed the text more closely than Green's reading). I also liked the voice talent who narrated the audiobook. Orendia Goodheart did an excellent job with the reading. Would I recommend it to others? No. It’s the least impressive book in this most impressive brief theological introduction series.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

One of the best

Revisado: 01-11-21

I picked up a paper copy of this book while in Provo, UT, over Thanksgiving and read it quickly. I was floored by the insights. So when it came available on Audible, I downloaded it and listened to it. I loved the author's reading of her own work. She read with tenderness and love and I could feel her deep passion for the subject. In a couple of places, her reading brought me to tears. Not all authors make good readers of their own works, but Turley succeeds admirably.

Some of the many things I learned:
Alma the "younger" was not a young man when he went about seeking to destroy the church.
Repunctuating Alma 36:9 and 11 so they make sense.
Alma's five years of silence after Ammonihah and his resulting trauma.
Is Alma 29 a great missionary anthem, or something else entirely? Turley suggests it is a psalm of lament and provides evidence to back up her assertion.

In addition to being an astute theologian, Turley is an excellent writer, which makes the book so much more powerful. You get to see people you thought you knew (Alma, Abbish) in new and different lights. The very best of books make me see things I've never seen before and think about things I've never thought about before. This book did both. This little book is up there with 1 Nephi (Joseph Spencer) and Moroni (David Holland) as the best three books in this series.

Highly recommended for serious students of the Book of Mormon.

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Disappointment

Revisado: 11-03-20

This is a big disappointment after the first four volumes of this series, which were exceptionally good. You do not have to be a philosopher to understand Mosiah! It is less of an introduction to Mosiah and more of an exegesis of Mosiah 4 and the first five verses of Mosiah 15.

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Passengers meets Home Alone

Revisado: 12-12-18

This was a very interesting take on space travel. Think Passengers meets Home Alone and you won't be far off.

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