Mormon Land

Covering the origins, history, and modern challenges of the church, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know offers listeners a brief, authoritative guide to one of the fastest growing faith groups of the 21st century.

Decades before Melville and Twain composed their great works, a farmhand and child seer named Joseph Smith unearthed a long-buried book from a haunted hill in western New York State that told of an epic history of ancient America, a story about a family that fled biblical Jerusalem and took a boat to the New World. Using his prophetic gift, Joseph translated the mysterious book into English and published it under the title The Book of Mormon.

On the morning of November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities-fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century.

Mormonland is the raw confessional memoir of a Mormon boy who grew up in a small western town and pursued the Hollywood dream. He devoted five decades of his life to a church filled with highly questionable doctrine, troubling temple rituals, and never-ending expectations. What outsiders may call racist, sexist, and cult-like practices, insiders call God-given, the true Family Proclamation, and too sacred to share.

Beginning with a handful of members in 1830, the church that Joseph Smith founded has grown into a world-wide organization with over twelve million adherents, playing prominent roles in politics, sports, entertainment, and business. Yet they are an oddity. Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction explains who Mormons are: what they believe and how they live their lives.

American Zion is the story of the Bundy family, famous for their armed conflicts in the West. With an antagonism that goes back to the very first Mormons who fled the Midwest for the Great Basin, they hold a sense of entitlement that confronts both law and democracy. Today their cowboy confrontations threaten public lands, wild species, and American heritage.

In 1830, a young seer and sometime treasure hunter named Joseph Smith began organizing adherents into a new religious community that would come to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and known informally as the Mormons). One of the nascent faith’s early initiates was a twenty-three-year-old Ohio farmer named Parley Pratt, the distant grandfather of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In The Mormon People, religious historian Matthew Bowman peels back the curtain on more than 180 years of Mormon history and doctrine.

From the moment Sariah and Lehi’s family arrived in the promised land, their prophets warned that the people would face destruction if they failed to trust in Christ. Centuries later, Mormon witnesses the fulfillment of this dark prophecy. He witnesses his own people hewn down in open rebellion against God. Crying out from the depths of his heart, the prophet reflects on what went wrong and how it might have been avoided. Through it all, hope in Christ abides.

For hundreds of years in ancient Mesoamerica, the Nephites and Lamanites continued a feud started by a single family. This family crossed the sea from Jerusalem to settle in a Promised Land, clinging to the promise that God would protect them as long as they remembered him. Inspired by the narratives found in the Book of Mormon, Tales from the Promised Land is a collection of exciting short stories set against the backdrop of the ancient Americas.

While Christian denominations world-wide have been slipping into apathy, worldliness, and biblical illiteracy, the cult of Mormonism has been able to preach its satanic doctrines throughout the world deceiving countless souls in the process. It's time for true men, women, and even children of God to stand against the heresies being taught by the Mormons and contend for the true Christian faith.

From Zarahemla to Cumorah: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Challenges is the powerful conclusion to a transformative trilogy exploring the rise and fall of the Nephite civilization, as recorded in the Book of Mormon. In this third volume, the author delves into the causes of the Nephites' decline, offering timeless lessons on leadership, resilience, unity, and the dangers of spiritual complacency.

A 14-year-old boy struggles with family relationships and accepting the beliefs he was taught as a child. While on the vacation of a lifetime, driving from the United States through México, Central and South America, he visits ruins and reads scripture. As his feelings and opinions begin to clarify, he decides to express his feelings through mazes of scenes representing his religious interpretations, with short write-ups intended to help other young people discover what took him so long to understand.