29.95 24.95

If you have not yet bought A World of Faith, BCC Press’s new edition of the classic children’s (and adult’s) illustrated tour of world religions by Peggy Fletcher Stack and Kathleen Peterson, then it is now officially your lucky day. In celebration of Peggy’s Mormonland interview, we are offering it at the ridiculously low price of $24.95. If you aren’t sold yet, you can listen to the whole interview here:

https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2023/05/10/mormon-land-richness-religious/?fbclid=IwAR0MaNPbNk7OMtCZdgCHwR-Oajrrnz-hpvsvRHMTGajx91r9c8Rfac8Hx2k

April is National Poetry Month, and BCC Press has always been the place to go for great Mormon poetry. Since the founding of the press in 2017, we have led the way in publishing the freshest, most thought-provoking, and just all around best volumes of poetry to be found anywhere in the Mormon world. Or, really, anywhere else too.

Even by the high standards we have set, however, April 2023 is our high-water mark. Our only competition is ourselves, and we have blown ourselves out of the water as we today release three volumes of poetry by three of Mormondom’s most amazing poets. We still can’t believe how awesome we are.

This is what we’ve got for you:

Later Dad will tell me why he believes it is right for Ali to remain Muslim. He will invite me into his room and sit me on the edge of the bed, his computer across his lap, and read a line from his journal: 

Ali has an old faith and an old country and we have a new faith and new country. If we were to convert all of the Muslims, that would be the end of us. Their culture is too old, we would be the ones that were assimilated. We might not even know it but we would become Islam like Christianity became Rome. 

If you live in Utah, then you have no excuse: get yourself to Writ & Vision in Provo tonight at 6:00 for the launch of Josh Sabey’s new book, Ali: The Iraqi. If you don’t live in Utah, you may still be able to catch a flight, or start driving, or just move there. It will be worth it. This book is that good.

One hundred and seventy nine years ago, on April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith delivered a sermon to commemorate the death of King Follett, a close friend of his who died a month earlier in a construction accident. Smith spoke for two and a half hours to an audience of around 20,000 people. No exact transcription of the discourse remains, but several extensive reports, mixing quotation, paraphrase, and commentary, survived.

You may know that the LDS Young Woman’s program was way cooler in the early 20th century than it has been during the lifetime of anyone alive today. But you probably didn’t know how cool it was. Mikayla Thatcher is here with Beehive Girl to tell you that it was amazing beyond your wildest dreams.

Ooops, we did it again. BCC Press has come up with a book that is so amazing, so relevant, and so in tune with both the zeitgeist and the spiritus mundi that you are going to have a hard time finishing this article before heading over to Amazon to buy it. That’s OK. We know the feeling. We’ll wait.

The first edition of A World of Faith, by award-winning Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack, with illustrations by the phenomenal artist Kathleen Peterson, was published in 1998 to thunderous applause. Plaudits for this edition came from former president Jimmy Carter, Notre Dame University President Theodore Hesburgh, and professional free-thinker Paul Kurtz. It was an enormously successful volume. A commemorative version was published in 2001 to celebrate the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

If you are one of the people for whom this book was written, you will know it immediately, probably from the title: Living on the Inside of the Edge. This is a book—and we are pretty sure the only book—for Latter-day Saints who can’t be all the way in but don’t want to be all the way out. The back-row-sitting, striped-shirt-or-pantsuit-wearing, read-a-book in Sacrament Meeting crowd that feels Mormon to the core but sometimes wishes they didn’t. Christian doesn’t want to try to convince you to stay, and he doesn’t want to encourage you to leave. He wants to give you some practical advice about how to be reasonably happy as an edge-dweller.

Oh boy, have we been busy at BCC Press. Here it is December, and we are proud to present two more amazingly awesome, incredibly relevant, and deliciously readable new books just in time for Christmas shopping and Christmas-break reading. And, trust us, you will want them both.

Guest post by Taylor Kerby

I went on my mission at the high peak of the “I’m a Mormon Campaign.” We would often watch through the posted videos, ostensibly for the sake of our investigators, but also probably as a product of having no other entertainment. It was commonplace for us to play these videos during our lessons and, as a missionary assigned to a Chinese-speaking area, it was important to have something, anything, that featured a person who looked like the people I served.

From the very beginning of William Morris’s new book, The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, we are presented with an interpretive problem. Are these strange stories about Mormons? Or are they stories about strange Mormons? Fortunately, we don’t have to think about this much, because the answer is both—clearly, abundantly, terrifyingly, and marvelously both.

After a brief summer hiatus, BCC Press is back with our ELEVENTH book release of 2022. And boy, are we excited.

The Corianton Saga, edited by the inimitable Ardis E. Parshall, represents years of careful archival work, transcribing, and editing a series of documents that, taken together, tell one of the wierdest and most wonderful stories in the Mormon Universe.

BCC Press is proud to announce the publication of The Burning Book: A Jewish-Mormon Memoir, by Jason Olson and James Goldberg—the true story of Jason Olson’s conversion from Judaism to Mormonism and his life spent reconciling the two cultures and religions into something beautiful, coherent, and whole. Along with the amazing James Goldberg, one of the Mormon world’s premier novelists and poets, Olson weaves a remarkable story of faith and change that makes room for everybody.

Two and a half years ago, BCC Press made the world a better place when we published the first volumes of The Book of Mormon for the Least of These and The Women’s Book of Mormon. You responded by buying them in massive quantities of these volumes and making them two of our bestselling books of all time. And now we are about to do it again with a pair of volume twos.

One of the things they tell you in business school is, “focus on what you do better than anyone else.” This is really hard for BCC Press, since we do so many things better than anyone else. But one of the things we do really, really well is poetry. That is why we are pleased, proud, preening, and prancing around to bring you Tyler Chadwick’s new poetry collection, Litany with Wings.

BCC Press loves John Bennion. He is one of the lions of Mormon literature. His 1991 collection Breeding Leah & Other Stories was one of the first collections of Mormon-is stories to be real literature–you know, the stuff that you can teach to college students and write about for academic journals and be proud that your little subculture of a subculture produces. And his 2000 novel, Falling Toward Heaven joined the ranks of truly top-flight Mormon novels. His more recent books—mystery novels set on the Utah frontier during the waning days of polygamy—are smart, engrossing, and fun (see review here and here).

It’s spring, and, as we all know, this is the time that Persephone is released from the underworld and returns to Demeter, who, in joy and gratitude, makes the flowers bloom and the weather fair. And nothing says Spring like poetry, and, at BCC Press, we are all about poetry. From now until Mother’s Day, you can get an amazing deal on some amazing poetry by and about women—strong women, lawless women, mothers, daughters, maidens and crones. So celebrate with Demeter and check out our amazing deals on poetry that matters.

Warner Woodworth’s new book Radiant Mormonism is an actual event, and an important one at that. If you don’t believe us, listen to Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and a worldwide leader in micro-finance. Yunus pioneered the practice of giving small, simple-interest loans that impoverished people can use to start their own businesses and raise themselves from poverty. This is what Dr. Yunus has to say:

It is not by design—but it is certainly a happy accident—that BCC Press is releasing Scott Abbott’s Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger at a time when Brigham Young University is in the news for a number of controversial things. It has always been challenging for the Church’s flagship institution of higher education to balance the competing demands of its mission to provide its students with both an excellent university education and a distinctive religious experience. There are a lot of places where these two things come into conflict, and in its history, BYU has managed to find most of them.

Last year, when we announced the Essays in Mormon Literature, we proudly crowed that we were unveiling “something big—really big.”  Since then, we have issued the second volume in the series—Mormonism and the Movies—to rave reviews and enthusiastic applause. Today, we are releasing our third volume, Experiment Upon the Word, Frederick Kleiner’s expansive analysis of the Book of Mormon that began life, not merely as a dissertation, but as a German dissertation.  Let us tell you more.

Though the German-born scholar’s name, Kleiner, technically means “smaller,” there is nothing small about Experiment Upon the Word. At 506 pages, it may well pack the most scholarly insight for your money anywhere in the Mormon-Studies world. And it comes with a hefty analytical rigor of the sort that the German academic system demands.

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?