With my Zerah Pulsipher biography being published last week, and my next book manuscript off for some review and feedback, I’m turning my thoughts towards what to work on next. I have no shortage of ideas, but I also want to make sure I’m tapping into things that people are interested in. So, I would love some thoughts from the readers at Times and Seasons.

Here are the main projects I’m debating between:

Annotated Doctrine and Covenants

• I introduced an early example of what this might look like at the start of last year, here.
• The basic idea would be to present a version of the Doctrine and Covenants with the formatting that has become standard in modern Bible translations (i.e., paragraph, etc.), with some commentary in footnotes to bring in thoughts from scholarly discussions about the Doctrine and Covenants.
• I would plan to include a couple of analytical essays as well as appendices with the following:
  • The sections of the Pearl of Great Price that we study during the D&C years of “Come, Follow Me”
  • Documents previously included in the D&C that were later removed
  • Later examples of the different genres of documents in the D&C that have not been canonized
  • Closely related documents to the contents of the D&C (i.e., the poetic rendition of D&C 76, Oliver Cowdery’s draft of the Articles and Covenants, and the Proclamation of the Twelve Apostles that fulfilled D&C 124’s instructions)
• It would be a stretch to get this finished by the end of 2027 to make sure it comes out before the next D&C cycle, but I would be aiming for that timeframe.

 

Rey L. Pratt biography

• When I was working on building my background context about the Church in Mexico for my Mexican Mission Hymns Project, I noticed that Rey L. Pratt’s name came up a lot. He was the mission president over Mexico and the Spanish-speaking missionary work in the United States from 1907 until his untimely death in 1931. He was called to the First Council of the Seventy in 1925 and was among the trio of general authorities sent to Argentina at the end of that same year to open missionary work in South America.
  • He has been called the “father of the Mexican mission” for his efforts.
• I was surprised to realize there isn’t a biography out there about him, given how important he was during a formative and tumultuous period of the Church’s development in Mexico, so it’s been on my radar for a little while now to write one, if no one gets to it before me.
• Mentally, I’ve had the thought of modeling this one on the brief Mormon lives series that Signature Books has been publishing, but I have no idea how long that series is planned to go.

 

George A. Smith biography

• This is another major figure in Latter-day Saint history that I’m surprised that it seems like there hasn’t been a major biography published about. (Though it would not surprise me to find out there is one and I just missed it.)
• George A. Smith was Joseph Smith Jr.’s cousin and the namesake grandfather of George Albert Smith. He was one of the younger members of the Camp of Israel (Zion’s Camp). He was later called as an apostle and then a member of the First Presidency. Smith was one of the Church historians who worked on compiling Joseph Smith’s history, and was a key figure in the settlement of Southern Utah (including cultivating the intense climate that allowed the Mountain Meadows Massacre to occur). He was also a father figure for Joseph F. Smith for a while.
• That just scratches the surface, so there is a lot there that would be interesting to explore in a biography.

 

Collection of Important Latter-day Saint documents, 1830 to 1930

• The goal would be to compile documents that apply to modern Latter-day Saints, illuminate the evolution of praxis and doctrine (particularly regarding temple work and Church leadership), and demonstrate ongoing revelation in the Church.
• The target audience would be a general Church membership, rather than an academic audience.
• I’m probably furthest along on this project out of any of the ones listed, but I’m also most hesitant to try and publish this one, since the selection criteria and documentary editing approach are things that tend to draw criticism, no matter how they are done.

---

Again, I’m looking for people’s thoughts about what they would be most interested in reading. Let me know!