There’s this place in downtown Provo called Pioneer Book.
It’s a super cool local bookstore with a bunch of weird hidden treasures in it.
I joke with my wife that if I knew about Pioneer Book before we met I probably would have never met her.
This isn’t a native advertisement for Pioneer Book.
I’m mentioning the place because I’ve bought a couple hundred dollars in books from there over the past couple of years. They have an amazing collection of LDS books and I stock up on books like some stock up on food storage.
Elder Marion D Hanks explains, better than I ever could, why learning as much as you can about the church is so important.
“No one knows anything about Christ’s work simply by being born a member of the Church, and often he knows little about it after years of unmotivated exposure in meetings or classes. He must learn. And learning involves self-investment and effort. The gospel should be studied ‘as carefully as any science.’ The ‘literature of the Church’ must be ‘acquired and read.’ Our learning should be increased in our spare time ‘day by day.’ Then as we put the gospel truth to work in daily life, we will never find it wanting. We will be literate in the most important field of knowledge in the universe, knowledge for lack of which men and nations perish, in the light of which men and nations may be saved.”
With all of this being said I wanted to give some suggestions for books relating to various aspects of church history and teachings.
The photo credit below goes as follows: Amazon, Facebook, me, me, Amazon.
Some of the older texts can be found online for free while some can be bought in various bookstores or online.
1. Sacred Symbols: Finding Meaning in Rites, Rituals and Ordinances
If you’re like me, you found Temple Prep to be as close to useless as missionary trio.
Although it’s not as deep and academic-y as everything else on this list, I love this book because it goes in great detail about the temple.
GREAT DETAIL
Alonzo Gaskill is a BYU professor and his book is sold at Deseret News and the BYU Bookstore.
So if you start talking about stuff in the temple and someone gets angry…. you have an excuse.
2. The Joseph Smith Papers
The Joseph Smith Papers is an on-going resource which keeps on coming out with new episodes.
“The Joseph Smith Papers Project is an effort to gather together all extant Joseph Smith documents and to publish complete and accurate transcripts of those documents with both textual and contextual annotation,” says JosephSmithPapers.org. “All such documents will be published electronically on this website, and a large number of the documents will also be published in print. The print and electronic publications constitute an essential resource for scholars and students of the life and work of Joseph Smith, early Mormon history, and nineteenth-century American religion.”
3. Church History
B. H. Roberts did an amazing outlining the early history of the Church.
I feel like 90% of Church History we talk about at church is more sparknotes than actual history.
Roberts’ history of the Church is a great go-to for church history.
4. The Journal of Discourses
Have you seen those crazy quotes that get thrown around? Ever wanted to know whether Brigham Young really said that one, weird, semi-racisty thing?
Look no further than the Journal is Discourses.
If an early Church leader said it, whether that something was uplifting, controversial, funny, edifying, doctrinal or opinionated, it’s probably somewhere in the Journal of Discourses.
5. Joseph Smith: A Rough Stone Rolling
This is probably one of the most comprehensive biographies about Joseph Smith.
Translating the plates, gold-digging and alcohol; it’ all in there.
The thing I love about this is biography is it’s not coming from a Mormon Stories point-of-view but it’s not coming from an apologetic POV either. Bushman does a great job at simply presenting the facts about Joseph.