The Interperter publishes a review of new Brigham Young Bio

[_Infymus]

To sum it up, Foster basically picks out all the parts of the book where John G. Turner discusses issues that paint the church/prophet Brigham in a bad light, and argues that these are weaknesses in Turners book.

It's so typical this approach to apologetics. It now borderlines on pathetic - but it still irks me.

[_Stormy Waters]

Turner’s approach to Fanny Alger is problematic for a couple of reasons. The first is that describing her as the “first well-documented nonmonogamous relationship” (p. 88) is certainly not neutral in tone or implication, since the unspoken suggestion is that Joseph had been involved in other non-documented relationships prior to Fanny. This has long been a trope used by hostile voices, but the evidence for it is scant

I'm not familiar with the evidence for relationships before Fanny Alger, but I read what Turner wrote as saying that the relationship with Fanny Alger is the first one we can be sure happened. That the existence of the possible previous relationships are not provable. If there is even scant evidence for previous relationships the above phrase is fair game in my book.
Aside from that I think he's reading too much into a simple phrasing.

[_Joe Geisner]

Thanks Stormy for pointing out the Foster hatchet job. I have yet to read the h.j. from the rag named because the editors believe they are the ones called to interpret Mormonism. But...

I hope John Turner does not waste his time on this hatchet job. It is such a waste of band width.

Foster has sold his soul to the devil and is unable to read anything that the rest of the world would see as honest scholarship. Foster is like Tom Alexander, Larry Coates and a number of other Church employees sucking at the teat of the sow. Once this is understood, it is easy to see why they write what they write.

I personally found John Turner's book to be one of the best written biographies on a Mormon subject. He made Young come a live on every level. John was able to look at Young with honest eyes and scholarly skill. It seems there is a group in Mormonism who still are not capable of appreciating this level of scholarship. John's book will be appreciated for generations to come. The three witnesses apologetic book on the MatMM (which is the kind of history Foster loves) has no legs and will never be looked at by the scholarly community. I suppose this is what the Mormon Interpreter crowd hope for, that no one looks behind the curtain and sees the wizard for what he really is, a faker.

[Guest]

Errors in Foster's review:

197: Brigham Young: American Moses was published in 1985
198: period missing following “historical context”
199: Emmeline Free’s first name is spelled two ways
199 n. 1: period missing following “14-17”
199 n. 1: Jessee is twice misspelled.
202: "his marriages" should read "the marriages"
203 n. 7: full citation repeated.
205 n. 9: comma missing following “Mississippi”; date of the article is October 24, 2010.
206: quotation of Turner should read "feared for his life while on the margins" (emphasis added)
211: “the” should be inserted following “depending upon”
211 n. 26: 1993 should read 1998.
212: “While Brigham Young…” should read “Brigham Young…”
214: “Mountain Meadow Massacre” should read “Mountain Meadows Massacre”
214: Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets was published in 2002.
216: Buchanan is misspelled.
216: a citation (pp.279-80) is mistakenly placed inside the quotation marks.
216: A citation (5) is mistakenly placed inside the quotation marks.
217: Himmelfarb is misspelled.
217 n. 34: Himmelfarb is misspelled; page number in citation is missing.
221 n. 47: date of the discourse should be 16 August 1857.

Comments:

First, it is not clear why a journal subtitled "A Journal of Mormon Scripture" is publishing a review of a Brigham Young biography.

Second, Foster argues that “while [Turner’s] book certainly spends more pages discussing Brigham Young’s family life, it did not live up to its potential. This is particularly the case when it comes to its treatment of Brigham Young’s fifty-seven children” (198). “Despite the non-Mormon caricatures of Brigham Young as an unloving, uncaring despot who neither knew the names nor personalities of his numerous wives and children,” Foster writes, “Brigham Young was actually very loving and caring, particularly when it came to his children” (198-99). Here he cites Artemus Ward's satirical description of Brigham Young’s relationship with his children: “He don’t pretend to know his children, thare is so many of um, though they all know him. He sez about every child he meats call him Par, & he takes it for grantid it is so.” He also cites two journal articles that provide "more examples of the negative portrayal of Brigham Young and plural marriage." Foster’s point is a bit obscure. I assume that he is arguing that Turner devoted insufficient attention to Brigham Young's relationship with his children (rather than that Turner had characterized Young as unloving and uncaring), but Foster could have been clearer on this point.

Foster directs readers to three sources for “examples of Brigham Young’s actual relationship with his children.” One source he cites, Dean C. Jessee’s “Brigham Young’s Family: The Wilderness Years,” BYU Studies 19/4 (1979): 1-23, is instructive on this point, but perhaps not for the reasons that Foster intended. (It should be noted that Turner cites this source several times in his discussion of Brigham Young's family life in the period between the Saints' exodus from Nauvoo until the Saints' arrival in the Great Basin.) Jessee's article illustrates the difficulties Young's family experienced during this same time:

The struggle of Brigham Young to care for his family and at the same time to direct the migration of the Mormon people to a new homeland across some thirteen hundred miles of wilderness is an epic within an epic. Like its larger counterpart, the removal of his family across the Plains is a story of lonesomeness, privation, suffering, and death, with a few moments of serenity and peace sandwiched in between. And if instances of neglect seem evident, it was because personal relationships were necessarily lost in the interest of the Kingdom of God in those trying years:

My time has been so occupied with public business since I left Nauvoo, that my personal friends have been almost totally neglected….The great cause of Zion taken en masse swallows up all minor or personal considerations and wife and children and relatives appear lost as it were and we are obliged to forsake them all to build up the Kingdom of God and bring about a reign of peace upon the earth, therefore you must forgive me for any seeming neglect.[Brigham Young to George D. Watt, 16 April 1847]

The task of caring for his family at that critical time was complicated for Brigham Young not only by the overwhelmingly larger responsibility of directing the whole Mormon migration but also by the fact that his family had more than doubled in size within six weeks of his departure, adding weight to an already heavy burden.

Even if we attribute the best intentions to Brigham Young when it came to caring for his family during this time period, we must acknowledge the reality that he likely spent limited or no time with many of his wives and children and many were left to fend for themselves. The sheer size of his family plus his limited resources plus his church duties made it inevitable that neglect would occur. (I am surprised that Foster did not cite another article by Dean Jessee, “‘A Man of God and a Good Kind Father’: Brigham Young at Home,” BYU Studies 40/2 (2001), 23-53.)

Third, Foster faults Turner for failing to cite Don Bradley’s essay titled “Mormon Polygamy Before Nauvoo? The Relationship of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger” in his discussion of Smith’s relationship with Alger. Foster states that Turner only cited two secondary sources on Alger; in fact, Turner cited a third source, Rough Stone Rolling (see p. 433 n. 16). Foster specifically criticizes Turner’s description of the relationship as the “first well-documented nonmonogamous relationship,” claiming that “the unspoken suggestion is that Joseph had been involved in other non-documented relationships prior to Fanny.” “This has long been a trope used by hostile voices,” Foster says, “but the evidence for it is scant.”

Oddly enough, Bradley himself wrote the following about Joseph Smith’s relationship with Alger: “Of all Joseph Smith’s reported non-monogamous relationships, this, perhaps the earliest, has engendered the most controversy” (emphasis added, p. 15). Bradley says that “[t]hough some sources place Smith in other non-monogamous relationships before the institution of plainly recognizable polygamy in Nauvoo in 1841 (such as one with Lucina Pendleton Morgan Harris in 1838 Missouri), the reported Fanny Alger relationship is the only one for which there is substantial documentation, and therefore, the only one on which confident conclusions about timing, nature, and even occurrence might be drawn” (p. 16).

Fourth, Foster also faults Turner for writing that “[t]here is some, but not as much, evidence that Smith consummated his marriages to plural wives who already possessed husbands,” asserting that Turner “could have enriched the discussion” by citing an essay by Brian C. Hales, who has argued that Smith never engaged in sexual activity with an already married woman to whom he was sealed except for Sylvia Sessions Lyon, who considered herself divorced from her husband. Foster’s point is valid, although he does not demonstrate the inaccuracy of Turner's brief statement regarding sexuality in polyandrous marriages. Nevertheless, Foster concludes this discussion by writing that “[t]he Smith-Alger relationship and the question of sexuality in polyandrous marriages were not the only aspects of plural marriage about which John Turner appears to have been less than neutral” (p. 202).

Fifth, I will let Turner address the criticism that he “chose to ignore the essay by Craig L. Foster, David Keller, and Gregory L. Smith, 'The Age of Joseph Smith’s Plural Wives in Social and Demographic Context'” in his discussion of early marriages, while citing Todd Compton’s essay appearing in the same volume. According to Foster, he and Turner discussed this point in October 2012 (Foster does not indicate the setting). Turner apparently told Foster that The Persistence of Polygamy was published, to use Foster’s summary of their conversation, “too late for him to really use or cite it much in his book” (p. 204).

Sixth, Foster criticizes Turner for writing, regarding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, that "[Brigham] Young and others repeated false rumors that members of the Arkansas company had brought trouble upon themselves by poisoning the creek and an ox they had given to the Indians." Foster responds: "Such a statement forces us to ask how these men could have been spreading false rumors if they sincerely did not understand about microbes and infectious diseases and had instead reached a conclusion that seemed plausible? Mistaken they could have been, but this does not mean they were intentionally spreading ‘false rumors’” (p. 215). Foster may be reading too much into Turner’s statement. Young and others may have repeated false rumors without knowledge that the rumors were false. Perhaps Turner will clarify his meaning here.

Seventh, Foster criticizes Turner’s treatment of two sources regarding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets and Ron Walker, Richard Turley, and Glen Leonard’s Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Turner writes that Walker, Turley, and Leonard “depicted the massacre as the work of local leaders” and “allow that ‘errors were made’ by Young, but they include his mistakes among those of James Buchanan and many others.” Foster claims that “[t[he reader is left to assume that all blame and mistakes must rest with Young and no others. Were there not mistakes made all around? Most historians of this tragic event certainly think so.” I am not certain that Turner would disagree with Foster’s point. As Foster himself notes, Turner concluded that “Young bears significant responsibility for what took place at Mountain Meadows” (emphasis added). Turner's wording indicates that he does not lay all blame or responsibility on Young.

Eighth, as discussed earlier by Spanner, Foster’s identification of factual errors in Turner’s book is a weak point. Foster seems to be nit-picking on the first point regarding the Masonic lodge. Regarding the second error, it may be that Young was specifically referring to the bowery in his August 16 sermon (perhaps the transcription of the unpublished sermon notes the location; see also the report of Heber Kimball’s sermon on the same date), but the error is a small one in any case.

[_Uther]

Excellent work as always Tom.

[_Kishkumen]

As always, I appreciate your hard work to keep the apologists honest, Tom. Or, failing that, at least show where they have not lived up to academic standards for a fair review of a book. What you have written here suggests to me that Foster is trying to make Brigham look good by making Turner look bad. Unfortunately, Foster's criticisms miss the mark, and so it is Foster who ends up looking bad. Discriminating readers can tell the difference. It is a shame.

[_Sammy Jankins]

Isn't this from the same group that tells people that if they didn't know about something it's their fault for not reading more, but then at the same time they advise the average member not to read a book like this.
See the contradiction apologists?
You steer people away from critical information and then blame them for not knowing it. At least be consistent.