BCC Press Is Thrilled to Announce: A New Book by Bob Rees

By Common Consent is thrilled to announce our newest book–and our fourth book of the year to celebrate and examine the Book of Mormon. We lead off the first half of the year with The Book of Mormon for the Least of These by Fatimeh Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming, which has gone on to become our of the top-selling volumes in BCC Press history. We also published Mette Harrison’s book The Women’s Book of Mormon and Michael Austin’s Buried Treasures. We are proud to announce the capstone of our Year of the Book of Mormon with Robert A. Rees’s A New Witness to the World. (Kindle version here).

A New Witness to the World, which has been years in the making, contains thirteen essays by one of Mormonism’s most distinguished scholars. Bob Rees has been active in Mormon Studies for nearly sixty years. He was one of the Founding Parents of Dialogue and the journal’s second editor. During all of this time, Bob has been studying both the Book of Mormon and the religion it created, andd he has done so with the fine eye of a literary critic and the precision of an expert scholar.

The essays in this volume cover a lot of ground. But they are firmly nailed to a single theme that characteries Bob’s writing from start to finish: the argument that “the primary message of the Book of Mormon from beginning to end is the importance of love—the love of God for all his children, the love of Jesus Christ for humanity, and our love for ourselves and for one another, including our enemies.” If books must be t something,” this is uunquestionably what A New Witness to the World is about.

A few weeks ago, many of us had the opportunity to listen to Bob teach the Dialogue Sunday School lesson on Mosiah 25-28. If you missed this lesson, you can watch it from this very post. Bob spoke about how the scriptures in the lesson testified to love–to God’s love, to Christ’s love, and to the love that we need to have for each other if we consider ourselves disciples. This lesson will give you a taste of what is in the volume.

And look at the cover. Long and hard. Expertly designed by BCC Press’s art director, Christian Harrison, it features the amazing painting “Joseph and The Seer Stone” by Gary Smith, who generously gave us permission to use this amazing painting for the cover of Bob’s amazing book.