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“A Fresh Investigation of Latter-day Saint Theology”

“A Fresh Investigation of Latter-day Saint Theology”

Last updated on: March 20, 2026 at 4:28 pm by Dan Peterson

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“A Fresh Investigation of Latter-day Saint Theology” 2026-03-20T16:28:34-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Wulf Barsch, “The Ascension of Isaiah”
(I have been unable to find copyright information regarding this image of a work by a prominent contemporary LDS artist whom I admire, so, if anybody who holds copyright on it wishes to contact me, that would please me and put my mind at ease.)

A new review article has appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “A Fresh Investigation of Latter-day Saint Theology,” written by Spencer Kraus and published in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 68 (2026) : 213-222:

Review of Grant Underwood, Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2025). 640 pages. $39.99 (hardcover).

Abstract: Grant Underwood’s recent book, Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies*, is an excellent treatment on the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints written primarily for those outside of our faith. However, it is still a very useful book for Latter-day Saints and well worth their attention. Specifically, this book helps Latter-day Saints better understand other Christian denominations and beliefs, can help them communicate their own beliefs more clearly to others not of our faith, and (though not written for this intent) provides good apologetic grounds for the restoration of the gospel as Latter-day Saint belief is compared with the theology of early Christianity. This book would be a welcome addition to any Latter-day Saint’s library.*

Newly married, Brigham Young (John Donovan Wilson) and Mary Ann Angell Young (Twyla Wilson) walk home together in a scene from the 2024 Interpreter Foundation theatrical film Six Days in August.

Episode 8 of Becoming Brigham is now up online. And the previous seven installments of Becoming Brigham remain available here at no charge. I hope that you’re enjoying them, and I hope that you’re spreading the word. And, by the way, a one-minute teaser for Episode 9 (“A Place of Revelation”) is now also up for you to watch. (“Was it really the Gift of Tongues when Brigham Young first met Joseph Smith?”)

Based on book sales, Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-1866) was many times the author that her contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville were. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

An item showed up in my feed this morning that I found interesting. It concerns a letter of complaint that Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of such works as The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), evidently wrote to his publisher in January 1855. He was furious. Not, though, at his publisher. And not at a rival author or a critic. He was furious at the American reading public.

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” he wrote. Women were writing bestsellers. He wasn’t.

In 1854, Maria Susanna Cummins published The Lamplighter. She was twenty-six years old. It sold 40,000 copies in eight weeks and, by the end of its first year, it had sold roughly 70,000. For comparison, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) had sold approximately 3,000 copies in its early years. The Scarlet Letter had done better, selling around 10,000 to 15,000 in its first year. But that was nowhere near the sales figures for Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter, whose only serious rival, in terms of sales, was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two-volume 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin., although Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World had been a massive bestseller in 1850 and Ruth Hall (1854), by “Fanny Fern” (Sara Payson Willis), had also done very well.

Of course, Moby-Dick, which had been a commercial failure in Herman Melville’s lifetime, was rediscovered and elevated into the American canon in the 1920s, and The Scarlet Letter became required high school reading. I read them in high school; perhaps you did, as well.

Meanwhile, The Lamplighter, a book that had outsold both Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter by large margins, never seems to have made its way into classrooms or high school syllabi and effectively vanished from public memory. And Maria Susanna Cummins died at age 39.

Does the disappearance of Maria Susanna Cummins from literary memory mean that she was a poor author? Does the fact that virtually nobody today has heard of The Lamplighter, let alone read it, demonstrate it to have been a bad book? I doubt it. But, never having previously heard of Ms. Cummins nor having ever seen her principal novel, I really can’t speak to its quality and I can have no opinion as to her abilities as a writer. Maybe The Lamplighter is worth a look. After all, more than a few authors, artists, and composers who seemed to have failed during their lifetimes (think of Vincent Van Gogh) or whose reputations went into profound eclipse after their deaths (think of Johann Sebastian Bach, before the “Bach Revival” spearheaded by such figures as Felix Mendelssohn and Albert Schweitzer) went on to eventual recognition in the pantheon of greats. (The starving artist is almost proverbial.)

But neither do the low sales figures for Moby-Dick and for The Scarlet Letter prove those to be bad novels nor their authors to be bad writers. Both would now be included in just about any list of “canonical” novels and novelists.

Many films that failed commercially at the box office are now highly thought-of. For example, Blade Runner (1982) was a flop, but has since become recognized as a foundational masterpiece of science-fiction movie-making. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) was a major box-office failure, but is now frequently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) lost a significant amount of money for RKO Pictures, only being recognized as a classic, and becoming a beloved Christmas tradition, many years later. And The Wizard of Oz (1939) didn’t make a profit until its re-releases and television broadcasts . . . decades after its initial appearance.

The grain silo at Salt Lake City’s Church-owned “Welfare Square” has been around for a long time. But Church humanitarian and philanthropic efforts have increased dramatically in recent decades. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

And now I close, as is my frequent habit, with a pair of items that I’ve retrieved from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

“Church Specialists Tour 2 Utah Care Facilities to Better Serve Veterans and Needy: Visits provided perspective on how community resources can help accomplish the mission of the Church”

“Relief Society Women in England Unite to Care for Women and Children in Need: Wards in the Northampton England Stake work with local charities all year and gather for the 184th anniversary of Relief Society”

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