Gregory A. Prince

This is one in a series of beautifully-produced biographies of Latter-day Saints recently published by the University of Utah Press. This particular biography stands out for at least three reasons:

1) David O. McKay was an unusually charismatic and cheerful person, and it's hard to read about his life without feeling optimistic yourself.

2) Many progressive Mormons seem to look back with nostalgia to the McKay administration as a better time. This book gives an extensive, even-handed account that sheds light on the accuracy (or not) of that perception.

3) Pages 103 and 104 record President McKay's accounts of the answers he received when he prayed about ending the Priesthood ban. ("I've inquired of the Lord repeatedly. The last time I did it was late last night. I was told, with no discussion, not to bring the subject up with the Lord again; that the time will come, but it will not be my time, and to leave the subject alone.") No revisionist narrative of the ban that ignores or suppresses these accounts should be taken seriously.… (more)

A Good Festivus Gift

Little did I realize 25 years ago when I was reading his gentle histories The Mormon Experience and Brigham Young: American Moses how upset Leonard Arrington was with the leaders of the Church, as here revealed by his personal diaries. In 1982, he commissioned Lavina Fielding Anderson to compile his memoirs, which Anderson entitled Doves and Serpents. Of this private compilation, Arrington said: "It's a pretty intimate history, and must not become public knowledge because it essentially gives the story of The Good Guys and The Bad Guys. The General Authorities, in that work are the Bad Guy." (Emphasis in original.) Arrington apparently toned things down for his published autobiography Adventures of a Church Historian, but after his death his children apparently decided that there should be a public airing of grievances after all, so we have this book.

On the back cover, Anderson assures us that Arrington was quite possibly the best human being of his generation. I would have expected to come away more edified from reading the biography of someone in the 99.9999999th percentile of humanity, but maybe I didn't come to the book with a mind open enough to permit me to recognize his saintliness.

One chapter that I was pleasantly surprised by was the one on the Priesthood Revelation of 1978. Prince captures the jubilation of that moment as I remember it, without going on to condemn us all for accepting the previous policy in the first place.… (more)

Leonard Arrington was a remarkable American historian. I knew just a bit about him when I discovered Greg Prince's detailed biography of Arrington. I appreciated learning about how Leonard developed from a farm boy to a historian while maintaining a strong belief in religion and the LDS church. Prince has also provided some insight into how the LDS church works, some positive and some negative. Certainly, Arrington experienced trying times during while he was LDS historian, however, it is clear that he was a mentor to many of the current generation of Mormon historians. Prince's biography inspires me to read Arrington's Great Basin Kingdom, Arrington and Bitton's The Mormon Experience, as well as George Santayana's Reason in Religion, Lowell Benion's What about Religion?. Thanks to Greg Prince for an excellent biography of Leonard Arrington and more importantly for giving me much more to learn.… (more)