We have a simple mission at BCC Press. We work with brilliant and creative individuals to create truth and beauty in the world that would otherwise not exist. And sometimes, we do such a good job that pride overwhelms us and we have to repent. We will be repenting a lot this week as we release Elizabeth Pinborough’s true and beautiful new collection of art and poetry, The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations.

One of the things that makes us happy at BCC Press is poetry. Lots and lots of poetry. And that means that we are going to be really happy this year, as we are coming right out of the gate with a great book of poetry: Paradoxical Glory by Nancy Heiss. As you would expect from BCC Press, the poetry is amazing, possibly life-changing. But wait, there’s more. Along with the great poems, this is also a book of great art–drawing by Brooke Newhart accompany the poems.

Taylor Kerby is the author of Scrupulous: My Obsessive Compulsion for God, the most recent book from BCC Press. He is an alumnus of Arizona State University and Claremont Graduate University and is working on a Ph.D. at Grand CanyonUniversity. Scrupulous is on sale for $7.49 (Paperback) and $5.99 (Kindle) through Christmas Day.

When I was a kid, I prayed constantly. At nearly all times there was a revolving appeal to God playing on loop in my head.

Dear Heavenly Father please forgive me for my sins in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.

This short prayer was always uttered as a single sentence, without punctuation, and repeated over and over and over again.

Dear Heavenly Father please forgive me for my sins in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.
Dear Heavenly Father please forgive me for my sins in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.
Dear Heavenly Father please forgive me for my sins in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.
Dear Heavenly Father please forgive me for my sins in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.
Dear Heavenly Father please forgive me for my sins in the name of Jesus Christ Amen.

This guest post is by Shawn Tucker, Professor of Art and Humanities at Elon College and author of BCC Press’s newest book Humility: A Practical Approach.

Bang! go two hundred feet in unison. She takes a step and, again, Bang! It is her first day of college. She is trying to find a seat in the huge lecture hall. Two hundred white men are already seated. They bang their feet every time she steps. They block every row. She is forced further down the lecture hall with more Bangs! She finally finds a seat. In the front row. With the three other women and a Nigerian. The white male students at Cambridge cannot keep women and minorities out of their school, but they can attempt to shame them, segregate them, intimidate them, and try to tell them they don’t belong.

These were the first experiences that Dr. Alice Stewart had in the 1920s when she began her medical training. Through her career she would face opposition. When she decided to study childhood leukemia, her project was underfunded. When the project started to find unwanted results, it was not her results that were examined. It was her character. And besides being a woman, here was the problem—she was saying that the shiny new tool that doctors were using might be killing patients. Medical professionals, of all people, don’t want to believe that they are harming others. Those doctors’ shiny new tool was x-ray machines. But Dr. Stewart, who clocked thousands of hours collecting and analyzing data, was starting to find that the huge spike in childhood leukemia was linked with fetal x-rays. Here was a woman, and a divorced woman at that, telling doctors that their marvelous x-ray machines were sickening and killing children. You can hear their collective feet go Bang! as they reject that idea.

Humility: A Practical Approach
Just in time for Christmas, BCC Press is deeply, profoundly humbled to bring forth our newest book: Shawn Tucker’s Humility: A Practical Approach (see what we did there?). Shawn Tucker, who professes Art and Humanities at Elon University and has written scholarly books on pride and humility and on virtue in the arts, brings oodles of scholarly cred to the topic of humility.

BCC Press is back, just in time for Christmas, with the second installment of our Essays in Mormon Studies series. And this one has been years in the making and is gonna be amazing. Mormonism and the Movies is a collection of scholarly essays—but don’t let that fool you. They are really good essays about movies. And really, what is cooler than that?

Thank you for sticking with us this last two months! We end with a discussion of the final, 17^th chapter, followed by the story of Maurine’s efforts at producing a sequel, and a synopsis of the sequel. We are excited to say that five excellent completed chapters, along with other lost works of Maurine’s, will soon be published.

A public Zoom event will be held on Sunday, October 11, 8:00 pm Mountain Time (7:00 pm Pacific), where all can come and share their questions and comments on The Giant Joshua and Maurine Whipple. The event will feature several people who knew Maurine personally sharing their memories of her, including the poet Carol Lynn Pearson, Maurine’s biographer Veda Hale, the author Marilyn Brown, and the publisher Curtis Taylor. It will last 90 minutes. Anyone interested in Mormon literature or Mormon history is invited to attend and participate.

Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85698612887
Meeting ID: 856 9861 2887

By Andrew Hall

We are nearing the end of this monumental novel, with only the final, 17^th chapter to cover next week. As we previously announced, we will hold a Zoom event on Sunday, October 11, 8:00 pm Mountain Time (7:00 pm Pacific), where all can come and share their questions and comments on The Giant Joshua. The event will feature several people who knew Maurine personally sharing their memories of her, including the poet Carol Lynn Pearson, Maurine’s biographer Veda Hale, the author Marilyn Brown, and the publisher Curtis Taylor. Lynne Larson and I, who have been writing these weekly posts, will also attend. All who have read or are reading the novel are invited to attend and participate.

We’re just days away from stepping into fall, and here at BCC Press we promise you books that are ripe for the picking — get ready to gather them all. 

The first of our autumnal offerings is Charity Shumway’s latest book, Bountiful. It’s a warm, funny, and perceptive family novel about the complex relationships between parents and their adult children, and the ongoing negotiations required to maintain a place in a beloved community. 

by Sarah C. Reed

“Hell ain’t got no terrors for me after Dixie!” (The Giant Joshua, 406)

Summary
These two chapters see tribulations continue to come to our main characters, but with opportunities for happiness and reconciliation. With the plague of the black canker passed, taking many children, including Clory’s three, Erastus Snow calls a meeting to reassure the saints. He asks them to remember their trials with sickness in Nauvoo and Winter Quarters. Some would like to leave, but Erastus shames them as cowards lacking faith and promises things will improve.

By Lynne Larson

“That was it, she thought, that which would sustain her . . . the Light was still hers, growing brighter as one gained wisdom . . . The wave of joy broke, and the dazzling spray flooded her with love, faith, divine goodness.”

It is soul-piercing grief that haunts these hundred pages – Chapters Nine and Ten – and unfathomable loss of her beloved Freeborn and her three children that points Clory toward the maturity of spirit required to recognize the “Light” of the above quotation and survive her circumstances. The ultimate victory will be hard-won.

by Andrew Hall

I’ll start today’s post with brief review of the themes in Chapters Seven and Eight, and then spend the majority of the post on a discussion of Maurine Whipple’s lifetime relationship with the Church.

Themes of Chapters Seven and Eight

These chapters are long and full of interesting stories, incidents, and conversations. There is little of the descriptions of the natural environment or introspective passages found in the previous chapters.

The chapters feature Willie and Clory’s pregnancies and births. Willie’s baby is stillborn. Clory is shocked that not only does Abijah refuse to call a doctor (to show faith) but Bathsheba, a trained midwife, refuses to help because she thinks it is too early. She is wrong, and only Clory is there to help her with the birth. Clory, in her anger, foolishly gives Bathsheba the right to raise her unborn child. After she successfully gives birth to her daughter, Kissy, she scares the superstitious Bathsheba off by claiming she had placed a hex on the baby. Clory is enraptured with her baby, and feels the increased power it gives her in the family.

By Lynne Larson      

“You couldn’t whip the desert without togetherness. The Group Faith — the ability to live outside oneself, to sacrifice oneself for the Common Good. Some day they would be strong enough to afford dissenters — now salvation lay only in complete and disciplined togetherness. Except ye are one, ye are not mine . . . You had to be ruthless to colonize.”

As Chapter Five of The Giant Joshua begins, the relentless rain has eased, but the storm, and with it the swelling of the Virgin River, has struck at the hearts of the people and reminded them that they must stand together to survive, united in their faith and in their willingness to follow strict injunctions. Food supplies have been reduced to a “grim measure.” Sickness has run riot through the camp, and ‘Sheba fears that the burial clothes will mold before she can get a lifeless body ready for the grave.

By Andrew Hall

These chapters present a microcosm of several themes and conflicts found in the novel, including stirring depictions of the faith that led the pioneer Saints to make such enormous sacrifices in their mission of building a Zion society. Here too, we see some of the less appealing aspects of the colonizing generation—its fear and cruelty towards Native Americans, its child marriages, and the heartbreak that could result from plural marriage.

St. George pioneers and the tragic price of faith
Chapter Three opens with the Saints having just arrived in what would become St. George in 1861. Whipple provides a geographic description by having Apostle Erastus Snow, the real-life leader of the Cotton Mission, observe the valley from the Sugar Loaf, a high steep rock in the red cliffs to the north. At this point, he sees his people still living in their tents and wagons, but he will return often to that spot as the settlement grows, and the Sugar Loaf becomes a landmark for the town.

By Lynne Larson

White and crimson, or black and yellow and blue — behind her and ahead and around her — spewed in fantastic violence, in every shade and nuance, the colors of this unreal landscape glittered with such intensity that she closed her eyes and for a moment her breath clung to her throat. She felt hemmed in with untamed, imponderable forces . . . between the two black ridges lay the valley of sagebrush where she was going to spend the rest of her life — the valley that was already named, President Young had told them, the city of St. George. (The Giant Joshua, p. 3-4)

            As Maurine Whipple’s heroine, Clorinda MacIntyre is vividly presented with her new home in the first pages of The Giant Joshua, we as readers are introduced to “Clory” herself, and we meet a dozen other sharply-drawn characters as well. We will come to intimately know them all as we turn the pages of  the novel. There is bearded, rigid Abijah, with his Scottish brogue, the strict family patriarch, whom the teenaged Clory has recently married. At this point, he is still ‘Uncle Abijah’ to her, since the marriage has not yet been consummated, an event she is anticipating with both apprehension and girlish curiosity. There are Bathsheba and Wilhelmina, Abijah’s other wives, the former mean-spirited, imperious, and superstitious, with a prominent wart on her jutting chin, the latter soft, shy, easily subdued, and surely Bathsheba’s foil. With these are Abijah’s sons, including Freeborn, enraptured with pretty Clory, as any teenaged boy might be. The band of pioneers includes cheery Lon Tuckett, a tailor who loves to sing and quote original verse through all his hardships, and his very pregnant German immigrant wife Betsy. Also the Hichinopers, a happy couple so worried about their firstborn baby, they carry it up hill and down on a pillow, lest it ever feel neglected. They and the others make up a caravan of Saints sent by Brigham Young to establish the Cotton Mission in southern Utah’s Dixie.

By Andrew Hall and Lynne Larson

Welcome to the BCC Late Summer Book Club!

For the next eight weeks we will be reading Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, which is widely considered to be Mormonism’s greatest novel. Maurine Whipple is an enigmatic figure—in 1938 at age 35 she was broke, divorced and depressed, a failed grade school teacher who wrote obsessively but who had never published a substantial work. In that year, however, she was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for new writers, and the coveted prize allowed her to take pen in hand, let her genius flower, and create her masterpiece. Over the next two years she worked feverishly on The Giant Joshua, the epic story of the 1861 settlers of St. George. 

In case you missed the memo, BCC Press has developed a new web site and unveiled it at this year’s all-online Sunstone Sumposium. You have already seen Bob Rees’s book that we launched today as part of this grand unveiling. By Common Consent. And you know that we are selling all books by Sunstone Symposium speakers for 25% off.

Yesterday, we let the cat out of the bag about our evil plan to flood the world with excellent, reasonably priced audiobooks of our best titles. And, like we always say, when the cat is out of the bag, you might as well listen to the meows. (OK,we’ve never actually said this until today, but you know what we mean).

Anyway, we have more audiobooks on the way, but the approval process at ACX/Audible/Amazon is so darn long that we don’t have more than one to show for the effort. We would like to give you a wealth of listening pleasures during the Coronapocalypse (Coronageddon? Covid-Nineteen-Ninety-Nine?). And (we just realized), we have the files. If we can’t find a way to sell them to you, we can GIVE them to you.

by Nancy Ross

Editor’s note: This review of our most recent BCC Press book, The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, was published yesterday on the Exponent II Blog. Normally we wold just link to it, but we liked it so much we asked if we could cross post it to BCC.  

I devoted a good chunk of my life to reading and re-reading the Book of Mormon. My preferred method in my adult life was to read it very quickly, following a schedule I’d worked out when President Gordon B. Hinckley issued his challenge for LDS church members to read the book in 100 days. I enjoyed my Book of Mormon binge reads and the text grew with me as I worked my way through the church milestones of adult life.

Today, BCC Press is tickled pinkish to be launching The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, by Fatimah Salleh with Margaret Olsen Hemming. This is a downright remarkable book of learned theology, active reading, social justice, and, above all, deep fatih. The following post is by the authors.

The strength and beauty of a holy text is that it can be read again and again, with different and new understandings and insights revealed every time. A holy text is not exhausted by a single interpretation; it compels readers to return and review, reexamine, and reinterpret. The Bible has withstood millenia of innumberable methods of understanding: orthodox, liberal, academic, literary, feminist, etc. The Book of Mormon has certainly experienced readers examining it from various points of view, including through history, literature, and orthodoxy. But a close reading of the complete book as scripture that has messages about oppression, inequality, and other issues of social justice has not been available until now. This book, the first in a trilogy, is a social justice exegesis of the first third of the Book of Mormon, from 1 Nephi to the Words of Mormon.

Here at BCC Press, we want no part of the War on Christmas. We love Christmas. We love it so much that we have marked down nearly all of our 2019 line of books by 40%. From now until the end of the year (in case you have Christmas money that you need to spend), you can get any or all of the following books for a price that is closer to free than it is to any other book of the same great quality and value.

Marked down from $12.95 to $7.77

[Read more…]

At BCC Press, we believe that the line between poetry and prophecy is vanishingly thin and not really a line at all. Nearly all of the prophets in the Bible were also poets. Read correctly, the magnificent verses of Isaiah, the profound Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the stunning rebukes of Amos and Hosea are among the ancient world’s greatest poems.

The reverse is true as well: the poets of a culture are invariably its greatest prophets. Whether it is William Blake reconciling contraries through prophetic verse, or William Butler Yeats organizing history into self-annihilating gyres, or Walt Whitman telling Americans on the eve of the Civil War that “affection shall solve the problems of freedom”–poets warn us, challenge us, and reveal new and startling truths that complicate our lives. [Read more…]