Joseph Smith survives today as one of nineteenth-­century America’s most controversial religious figures. He claimed visions of angels, dictated a lost record of the ancient inhabitants of the New World, announced new revelations from heaven, and restored what he believed was an ancient yet more complete form of Christianity, over which he presided as prophet, seer, and revelator until his death in 1844.

A child of impoverished Yankees, raised in rural New England and New York, Smith grew up in a hardscrabble frontier culture that embraced a spectrum of competing folkways, religious fervor, and intellectual thought. He was both a product of his times and a syncretic innovator of a compelling vision for God’s people. Perhaps more importantly, he was the self-proclaimed herald of Christ’s imminent return, called by the Father to reveal the fullness of the Christian gospel for the last time.

As prize-winning historian Richard S. Van Wagoner narrates the first twenty-five years of Smith’s life, the young seer struggled with his family through a series of roller-­coaster hardships, eventually securing work as a scryer of lost treasure and money digger. In the wake of successive failures, including run-ins with the law, Smith’s glass-­looking activities gave way to more religiously oriented pursuits, especially after a heavenly messenger showed him the location of buried golden plates containing a pre-Columbian story of the Americas and charged him with the record’s decipherment and publication.

Smith also learned, following another extraordinary vision, that his sins had been remitted, that humanity was in a state of apostasy, and that Jesus would soon return to the earth. After eloping with Emma Hale, much to her skeptical father’s chagrin, the couple settled down to complete work on what would appear for sale in early 1830 as the Book of Mormon. By this time, Smith had begun to shoulder more fully the prophet’s mantle, issuing proclamations in God’s own voice, and on April 6, 1830, organized the Church of Christ, known today as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“I treat the early years of the Mormon prophet as I would approach an archaeological dig,” Van Wagoner explains. “The deepest levels, those deposited first and least contaminated by subsequent accumulates, are of primary interest in my pursuit of the historical Joseph. Mindful of the prophet’s controversial reputation, I try to remain sensitive to the impact that some of the more problematic elements of his behavior may have on believers. But truth is often best evidenced in the detail.”

Van Wagoner’s meticulously researched study offers more detail than any previously published biography of Smith, and provides what may be the most culturally nuanced analysis ever attempted of the early years of the American prophet.

Since at least the time of Plato, religious explanations of the metaphysical foundations of morality have typically fallen into one of two camps: natural law theory, according to which morality is fundamentally explained by facts about human nature—facts that God is responsible for—and divine command theory, which holds that moral obligations arise directly from God’s commands or some other prescriptive act of the divine will. J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin offer an accessible analysis of these traditional views, reconstruct the various arguments for and against them, and offer an extended consideration of the historical emergence of the divide between these positions within the Christian tradition. Nature and Command goes on to develop and defend a theory that combines these two views—a metaethical approach that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.

Along the way, the authors make use of underexplored theological resources drawn from the Stone-Campbell movement, a nineteenth-century restoration movement that culminated in one of the largest Protestant groups in America by the dawn of the twentieth century. Nature and Command summons the resources of this particular Christian heritage—its first principles, call for unity, and ecumenism—to solve one of the great dilemmas of moral philosophy and theology dating back to Plato’s Euthyphro.

This historically aware, argumentatively rigorous, and highly readable volume will serve as a valuable resource for moral philosophy and ethics, as well as for mining the Stone-Campbell Restoration tradition for historical and theological insights.

Born in the early 1940s in northern Arizona’s high country desert, Jim Dandy began life imbued with the traditions of the Navajo people. Raised by his father and grandfather—both medicine men—and a grandmother steeped in Navajo practices, he embraced their teachings and followed in their footsteps. But attending the LDS Placement program in northern Utah changed his life’s course when he became a member of the Mormon Church. Following graduation from high school, Jim served an LDS mission among his people, obtained a bachelor’s degree, and entered the work force in southeastern Utah as a career counselor, teacher, and community advocate who improved educational opportunities on the Navajo Reservation.

Jim has led a life of service and teaching. He maintains the traditional philosophy with which he was raised and the Mormon beliefs that he learned and continues to follow; his life reflects the values inherent in these two different worlds. Readers interested in Navajo philosophy will find his blend of these two distinct views fascinating, while others will better understand the effects of the controversial placement program on the life of one individual. However, this is primarily the warm story of a man’s life among his people and his love for them and their culture.