Abstract: This review essay looks at certain problematical issues in the recently published collection of essays honoring Latter-day Saint historian Richard Lyman Bushman. Problems emerge from the title itself, "To Be Learned is Good," as a result of the failure to note that the Book of Mormon passage "To be learned is good" is a conditional statement. In addition, since these essays are billed as "Essays on Faith and Scholarship," it is odd most of them do not touch on this subject at all. I examine four essays in depth, including Adam Miller's "Christo-Fiction, Mormon Philosophy, and the Virtual Body of Christ," which is offered as a form of clarifying Mormon philosophy but provides more confusion than clarification. Jared Hickman's essay, "The Perverse Core of Mormonism: The Book of Mormon, Genetic Secularity, and Messianic Decoloniality," presents Mormonism as a religion that has much in common with Marxism, Frantz Fanon, and Sean Coulhard. While not as bold as Hickman, Patrick Mason looks at Mormonism as a modern religion and suggests that premodern thinkers are largely irrelevant to Mormonism and the modern world. Mason argues that "Mormonism is a religion that could meaningfully converse with modern philosophies and ideologies from transcendentalism, liberalism, and Marxism." I discuss the weaknesses of this view. Attention is also given to the distinction between apologetics and "Mormon Studies" that arise from essays by Grant Wacker, Armand Mauss, Terryl Givens, and Brian D. Birch, who suggests "'a methodological pluralism'" in approaching Mormon studies. I note that several of the essays in this volume are worthy of positive note, particularly those by Bushman himself, Mauss (who does address the presumed theme of the book), Givens, Mauro Properzi, and Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye (who also addresses the titled theme of the book in a most engaging manner).

[Page 78]Review of J. Spencer Fluhman, Kathleen Flake, and Jed Woodworth, eds., To Be Learned is Good: Essays on Faith and Scholarship in Honor of Richard Lyman Bushman (Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2017). 368 pp. $24.56 (hardcover).

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship has undertaken a project that on its face should have been excellent — a collection of essays honoring Latter-day Saint historian Richard Bushman. It consists of 26 essays by scholars who have been students of Bushman or been influenced by him. It "reflects the vibrant exchanges from a memorable scholars' colloquium in June 2016 in honor of … Bushman" (ix). Not surprisingly, some of the most prominent figures in contemporary Mormon intellectual circles are contributors, including Bushman himself; his wife, Claudia Bushman; as well as Terryl L. Givens, Armand L. Mauss, Adam S. Miller, Philip L. Barlow, Matthew J. Grow, Laurie F. Maffley Kipp, Patrick Q. Mason, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Grant Underwood, and Jed Woodworth (who assisted Bushman in the research and editing of Bushman's monumental biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling).

For all its promise, this collection goes seriously off the rails in several ways. Most notably, the book presents itself as a series of essays on faith and scholarship, implying that the essays, or at least some of them, will consider the relationship between the two. But this important topic seems at best an afterthought for many if not most of the essays. There is even a problem with the volume's title. Latter-day Saints will recognize that the phrase "to be learned is good" comes from Second Nephi in The Book of Mormon: "But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God" (2 Nephi 9:29). I may have missed it, but I saw no place in this book that recognized that the statement "to be learned is good" is a cond...