First Vision

Reviews / Votes

I find this book to be an impotrant argument for how we handle memory as historians; it is not simply monuments, plays, hazy thoughts, or locating the "true source" of accurate memory or fact. It is a complex cognitive process that requires our attention both to the psychological sciences and increased sophistication over how we adjudicate historical sources. * Christopher Allison, University of Chicago, Journal of Mormon History * As the 200th anniversary of the First Vision approaches, those interested in better understanding what that vision has meant to Latter-day Saints over these last two centuries will benefit from reading First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins. * Pearl of Great Price Central * Steven C. Harper has produced some fascinating and excellently researched scholarship here, and we highly recommend the book for the shelves of lay readers and experienced scholars alike. * FairMormon * Harper's treatment in First Vision is excellent. He demonstrates an obvious command of the primary sources and secondary literature, and writes with clarity and coherence. * Ploni Almoni, Ploni Almoni: A Latter-day Saint Blog * Harper offers a deeply insightful analysis of how individuals and groups remember events * in this case Joseph Smith's first visionas they tell the story of who they are over time. In extending research on memory to the process through which groups develop, internalize, and reshape their memory of their origins, Harper makes a major contribution to our understanding of the way that collective identity is formed and transformed.Ann Taves, author of Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths * Harper has written an erudite, but accessible book about Mormonism's origin story, its 'First Vision.' As a history of a history and one held sacred and energetically contested for nearly two centuries, it is a very interesting story and an illuminating one for scholar and general reader alike. Religious Studies scholars will be especially benefited from such a modern, which is to say transparent, example of how human speech becomes scripture and scripture becomes canon and not as a contemporary dead letter, but rather the lodestar of a vibrant and itself very modern religion. * Kathleen Flake, Richard Lyman Bushman Professor of Mormon Studies, Department of Religion, University of Virginia * As the biography of a theophany, this book beautifully narrates the long, complicated life of Joseph Smith's First Vision in the history, theology and culture of the Latter-day Saints. But it is also much more than that. It provides powerful analytical insights into matters of history and memory, faith and fact, canonization and identity formation that resonate far beyond Mormon Studies. Steven Harper has accomplished a remarkable thing. * David F. Holland, John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History, Harvard Divinity School *