My friend Michael Cleverly sent me a book entitled Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction, by Richard Lyman Bushman (along with
God’s Mechanics, which I reviewed some time ago). It’s a brief book, unsurprisingly; I found it to be sympathetic yet balanced, accentuating the positives about Mormonism without whitewashing the low spots in Mormon history.

I read it with some interest, as we have many Mormon friends and acquaintances, Michael not least, and because my previous exposure to Mormon belief has been minimal. I once read a book on Mormonism, plucked from a friend’s bookshelf in a fit of boredom, that was written by an evangelical Christian of the Dispensationalist variety. It was a highly polemical work, and I’ve never regarded what I read in it as particularly authoritative. So far as that goes, I found the author’s Dispensationalism almost as odd as what he had to say about Mormonism. Consequently I received it gratefully, as an opportunity to correct (or verify) the things I think I know about the religion.

I don’t intend to talk about Mormonism as such here, though I may later; I’ll simply say that it’s different in many ways from what I believe, but that we Catholics could learn a great deal about dedication from them.