Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was 23 and went on to organize a church, found cities, and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age 38. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with others, and how he received revelations.

Parent-child is the default relationship of church to member—the church as parent, the member as child. In this opening chapter, I propose that differentiation from the church is the most important developmental task we face while living on the inside of the edge.

With the advancement of the internet, changing worldviews, and the rising generation of millennials, Latter-day Saints today face unique challenges to faith on an unprecedented scale. Unlike most books written to help those struggling with their testimonies, Bridges: Ministering to Those Who Question is written to help local leaders and family members better understand the sources of these challenges and how to minister to those affected by them.

This is the story of high-ranking mormon leader Hans Mattsson seeking sincere answers from his church but instead finding contempt, fear, doubt...and eventually peace.

What if we understood faith crisis as part of a natural cycle of spiritual growth, a breaking open to make room for new life and new faith? In the new book Navigating Mormon Faith Crisis, Thomas McConkie draws on the study of adult development to provide a map for people who find themselves in faith crisis, fearing they might have taken a wrong turn in their spiritual progression.

For 30 years, Lynn Wilder, once a tenured faculty member at Brigham Young University, and her family lived in, loved, and promoted the Mormon Church. Then, their son Micah, serving his Mormon mission in Florida, had a revelation: God knew him personally. God loved him. And the Mormon Church did not offer the true gospel. As Lynn tells her story of abandoning the deception of Mormonism to receive God's grace, she gives a rare look into Mormon culture, what it means to grow up Mormon, and why the contrasts between Mormonism and Christianity make all the difference in the world.

In 2012, Mormon General Authority Marlin K. Jensen acknowledged that members are leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints "in droves". Access to the internet is often credited and blamed for this mass exodus, where members learn about problematic doctrines and cover-ups of LDS history. Many are happy as Mormons. And many are not. Those who leave, and those doubters who stay face struggles that few others can understand.

Sixty-five million adults in the US have dropped out of active church attendance, and about 2.7 million more are leaving every year. Faith After Doubt is for the millions of people around the world who feel that their faith is falling apart. Using his own story and the stories of a diverse group of struggling believers, Brian D. McLaren, a former pastor and now an author, speaker, and activist, shows how old assumptions are being challenged in nearly every area of human life, not just theology and spirituality.

Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith.

This essential guide explores the methods by which groups and individuals can manipulate people's minds and behaviors in a subtle and covert manner. Hassan combines his personal narrative with extensive psychological research to provide strategies for protection, intervention, and healing for those affected by destructive cults.

Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, often treated as fringe cultists or marginalized polygamists unworthy of serious examination. In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief, tragic life of a lost Mormon city, demonstrating that the Mormons are essential to understanding American history writ large. Using newly accessible sources, Park re-creates the Mormons' 1839 flight from Missouri to Illinois.

This book is an effort to lift up the Restoration's distinctive principles that invite us to renounce violence and proclaim Christ's good news of love and peace to a world that desperately needs it. Proclaim Peace seeks not to promote any particular ideology, but to invite listeners, especially the rising generation, to reflect on the interpersonal, ethical, and social dimensions of Christian discipleship.

Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale defend the absolute claims of Christ against modern belief in the "secular gods" of atheism, scientism, relativism, and more. The rise of these secular gods presents the most serious challenge to the absolute claims of Christ since the founding of Christianity itself. The Christian worldview has not only been devalued and dismissed by modern culture, but its believers are openly ridiculed as irrelevant. This audiobook is fresh, insightful, and important, and faces head on today's most urgent challenges to Christian faith.

Ordained as an apostle in 1906, David O. McKay served as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1951 until his death in 1970. Under his leadership, the church experienced unparalleled growth - nearly tripling in total membership - and becoming a significant presence throughout the world. The first book to draw upon the David O. McKay Papers at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism focuses primarily on the years of McKay's presidency.

The Restoration began in the spring of 1820, when Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in a grove of trees in upstate New York. Joseph had questions, and Jesus had answers. That was 200 years ago. As the Restoration enters its third century, the world has new questions. A loving God has answers. In Restoration, scholar and author Patrick Mason reflects on what it means for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to participate in the ongoing Restoration.

A provocative and positive response to Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and other New Atheists, Good Without God makes a bold claim for what nonbelievers do share and believe. Epstein's Good Without God provides a constructive, challenging response to these manifestos by getting to the heart of Humanism and its positive belief in tolerance, community, morality, and good without having to rely on the guidance of a higher being.

Atheism For Dummies offers a brief history of atheist philosophy and its evolution, explores it as a historical and cultural movement, covers important historical writings on the subject, and discusses the nature of ethics and morality in the absence of religion. A simple, yet intelligent exploration of an often misunderstood philosophy.

Discover the books that have already changed the lives of millions. This unabridged guide to the literature of the spirit surveys 50 of the all-time classics, giving you their key ideas, insights, and applications - everything you need to know to start benefiting from these legendary works.

Frank Schaeffer has a problem with Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and the rest of the New Atheists—the self-anointed “Brights.” He also has a problem with the Rick Warrens and Tim LaHayes of the world—the religious fundamentalists. The problem is that he doesn’t see much of a difference between the two camps. As Schaeffer puts it, they “often share the same fallacy: truth claims that reek of false certainties.

The Problem of God is written by a skeptic who became a Christian and then a pastor, all while exploring answers to the most difficult questions raised against Christianity. Mark grew up in an atheistic home, and after his father's death, began a skeptical search for truth through exploring science, philosophy, and history, asking the big questions of life, and eventually finding answers in Christianity. In a disarming, winsome, and persuasive way, The Problem of God responds to the top 10 questions people raise against God, and Christianity.

In this illuminating story of her life and conversations, the host of public radio's Speaking of Faith describes her journey of spiritual exploration - a journey shared by countless others.

With his trademark brilliance, generosity of spirit, and clear pastoral calling, Brian McLaren synthesizes an accessible and inviting understanding of what it means to follow Jesus.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America's premier religion writers revives ancient expressions through cultural commentary, vulnerable personal narratives, and surprising biblical insights. Both provocative and liberating, Learning to Speak God from Scratch will breathe new life into your spiritual conversations and lure you into the embrace of the God who inhabits them.

A guidebook for living a life without religion, combining sociological insight and personal inspiration. Over the last 25 years, "no religion" has become the fastest growing religion in the United States. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people have turned away from the traditional faiths of the past and embraced a secular - or nonreligious - life, generating societies vastly less religious than at any other time in human history.

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the church. Not since the Reformation five centuries ago have so many Christians come together to ask whether the church is in sync with their deepest beliefs and commitments. These believers range from evangelicals to mainline Protestants to Catholics, and the person who best represents them is author and pastor Brian McLaren. In this much anticipated book, McLaren examines ten questions facing today's church - questions about how to articulate the faith itself, the nature of its authority, who God is....

In this compelling new book - drawn from conversations with and narrated by award-winning Vatican journalist John L. Allen Jr. - Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, proclaims in vivid language the goodness and truth of the Catholic tradition. Through Barron's smart, practical, artistic, and theological observations - as well as through personal anecdotes about everything from engaging atheists on YouTube to his days as a young die-hard baseball fan from Chicago - To Light a Fire on the Earth covers prodigious ground.

With compelling and often humorous stories from his own life, Bible scholar Peter Enns offers a fresh look at how Christian life truly works, answering questions that cannot be addressed by the idealized traditional doctrine of "once for all delivered to the saints".

The End of Faith. The God Delusion. God Is Not Great. Letter to a Christian Nation. Best seller lists are filled with doubters. But what happens when you actually doubt your doubts? Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, addresses the frequent doubts that skeptics, and even ardent believers, have about religion.

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. These Christian intellectuals - Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others - sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.

Ariel Burger first met Elie Wiesel at age 15. They studied together and taught together. Witness chronicles the intimate conversations between these two men over decades as Burger sought counsel on matters of intellect, spirituality, and faith while navigating his own personal journey from boyhood to manhood, from student and assistant to rabbi and, in time, teacher. In this profoundly hopeful, thought-provoking, and inspiring audiobook, Burger takes us into Elie Wiesel's classroom, where the art of listening and storytelling conspire to keep memory alive.