front cover of The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion
The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion
McMurrin
Signature Books, 2000
A Philosopher, Sterling M. McMurrin (1914-96) appreciated the similarities between Mormonism and Hellenistic Christianity. For instance, Church Fathers of the fifth century admired Plato, who taught that there is one God, coexistent with such eternal entities as Justice and Loveâ€"to which Joseph Smith added Priesthood and Church. Where Augustine modified Plato, Mormonism would tend to side with his critic, the Stoic-leaning Pelagius. In this broad context, what is Mormonism's contribution to the overall pursuit of life's fundamental, ontological questions? Herein lies McMurrin's intentâ€"an invitation to join him on a wide-ranging search for purpose. He finds his church's synthesis of heresy and orthodoxy to be refreshing and impressive in this light, in its treatment of evil, sin, and free will. Belief in a personal God may run counter to traditional faith, but it is nonetheless emotionally satisfying and accessible to the human imagination.
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The Thieves of Summer
Linda Sillitoe
Signature Books, 2014
Set in Salt Lake City at the height of the Great Depression, Linda Sillitoe’s last novel opens with three little girls, eleven-year-old triplets, skipping in front of their house at 1300 South, across from Liberty Park. They giggle lightly as they chant: 

Prin-cess Al-ice in Liberty Park
Munch-es ba-nan-as ’til way after dark.

Princess Alice is an elephant the children of Utah purchased by donating nickels and dimes to a circus. The girls don’t know this, but her handler takes the mammoth princess out on late-night strolls around the park when the moon is out. What they do know is that the elephant sometimes escapes and goes on a rampage, crashing through front-yard fences and collecting collars of clothesline laundry around her neck, a persistent train of barking dogs following behind. The girls’ father is a police officer who is investigating a boy’s disappearance. As the case unfolds, the perception of the park, with its eighty acres of trees and grass, will change from the epitome of freedom to a place to be avoided, even as Princess Alice moves to a secure confinement at a new zoo at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. The story is loosely based on the exploits of a real live elephant that lived in Liberty Park a decade before Sillitoe’s childhood in the neighborhood.  
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Things in Heaven and Earth
The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff
Thomas G. Alexander
Signature Books, 1993
 Wilford Woodruff converted to the LDS church in 1833, he joined a millenarian group of a few thousand persecuted believers clustered around Kirtland, Ohio. When he died sixty-five years later in 1898, he was the leader of more than a quarter of a million followers worldwide who were on the verge of entering the mainstream of American culture.

Before attaining that status of senior church apostle at the death of John Taylor in 1886, Woodruff had been one of the fiercest opponents of United States hegemony. He spent years evading territorial marshals on the Mormon “underground,” escaping prosecution for polygamy, unable even to attend his first wife’s funeral. As church president, faced with disfranchisement and federal confiscation of Mormon property, including temples, Woodruff reached his monumental decision in 1890 to accept U.S. law and to petition for Utah statehood.

As church doctrines and practices evolved, Woodruff himself changed. The author examines the secular and religious development of Woodruff’s world view from apocalyptic mystic to pragmatic conciliator. He also reveals the gentle, solitary farmer; the fisherman and horticulturalist; the family man with seven wives; the charismatic preacher of the Mormon Reformation; the astute businessman; the urbane, savvy politician who courted the favor of prominent Republicans in California and Oregon (Leland Stanford and Isaac Trumbo); and the vulnerable romantic who pursued the affections of Lydia Mountford, an international lecturer and Jewish rights advocate. He traces a faithful polygamist who ultimately embraced the Christian Home movement and settled comfortably into a monogamous relationship in an otherwise typically Victorian setting.

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Thirteenth Apostle
The Diaries of Amasa M. Lyman, 1832-1877
Scott H. Partridge
Signature Books, 2016

Originally from New Hampshire, Amasa Mason Lyman converted to Mormonism over the objection of his family at age nineteen. Compelled to leave home with a total of eleven dollars in his pocket, he ventured some 700 miles east to Ohio, where Joseph Smith told him to return east and serve a mission despite his unfamiliarity with the church’s doctrines and procedures.

Ten years later Lyman temporarily replaced Orson Pratt in the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. This made him a kind of fifth wheel (thirteenth apostle) when Pratt was reinstated. Lyman would nevertheless regain his position in the quorum two years later and serve faithfully until his expulsion in 1867 for denying the divinity of Jesus. He then gravitated toward the anti-Brighamite spiritualist movement in Utah. Tracing the arc of this transformation from firm believer to prominent heretic, Lyman’s diaries are a window into the thinking of pioneer Mormons and the idealogical issues that sometimes divided them. This is the first in an anticipated multi-volume collection of historic diaries that will comprise the Signature Legacy Series.

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front cover of This Insatiable August
This Insatiable August
Clark, Maureen
Signature Books, 2024
August is an insatiable month. Whether it is a dry spell, drought, or simply parched with want, or filled with thunderstorm, deluge, destruction of property or ideals, it is the place of scarcity or cloudburst, beginnings, or endings. The month of August is the focal point of what this author describes as insatiable. In these poems, she identifies the numerous places in our human experience where we face insatiability, where we are ravenous with desire for greatness, passionate for education, even if, like Vesalius, we get it wrong. We lust after partners we cannot have; yearn for true love; we are voracious for sex. We fall in love with language, buttons, umbrellas, light, and silence. We live in agony and rage at the death of a loved one, or even obsession with a child lost in the mountains whose body is never found. We are insatiable in religious belief, even when it drains us of our time, our creativity, even our own souls. Our appetites direct our lives even if we think we have a foundation of basic beliefs to keep us afloat. In these poems, what we know and what we think we know come down to a thin string of possibility.
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To Be a Friend of Christ
The Life of Marion D. Hanks
Hanks, Richard D.
Signature Books, 2024

Marion Duff Hanks (1921–2011) was one of the most beloved and influential leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century, serving as a General Authority (senior leader) for forty years. He was also a leader of national import. As a recognized expert on youth, five US presidents appointed him to their President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Hanks also served as an executive leader of Rotary International and the Boy Scouts of America.

Author Richard Hanks draws on previously unavailable primary sources—journals, correspondence, notebooks, and recordings—to share this first and only authorized biography of his father. Hanks traces his father’s influence as he advocated for numerous changes in the institutional church, including humanitarian efforts, refugee relief services, missionary community service, a focus on mercy for the sinner, and a churchwide emphasis on “coming unto Christ.” A Renaissance man, Duff Hanks felt comfortable mingling with presidents and world leaders and speaking from pulpits and podiums to huge audiences and on television. But he found his greatest joy in assisting the individual, encouraging each in their personal search for happiness. Once, when asked about his goals, he replied, “My strongest desire is to qualify to be a friend of Christ.”

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front cover of To the Mormon Newlyweds Who Thought the Bellybutton Was Somehow Involved
To the Mormon Newlyweds Who Thought the Bellybutton Was Somehow Involved
Deja Earley
Signature Books, 2018
This extraordinary poetry collection opens with the author as a little girl delighted with the jewelry being sold by a vendor along the beach, unaware that the bowtied rabbit earrings symbolize the Playboy empire.

In navigating her life as a free-spirited Mormon, each of Earley’s poems expresses the tension she feels in adhering to and expanding the confines of her faith. From awkward first kisses shared on a church couch to refusing to talk to men who are not Mormon “lest I fall from grace, on my ass,” her poems remain funny, wry, thoughtful. Despite the promise not to talk to non-Mormon men, her final poems detail her marriage to a Catholic husband who offers Hail Mary prayers after a lost pregnancy while she struggles to find comfort from an elusive Mother in Heaven. Despite their differences and moments of heartache, they thrive, allowing themselves to “imagine we’re floating in bright bubbles of light.” It is an emotional roadmap for anyone else facing such tensions, joys, and accommodations.
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