Mob Attack at Carthage Jail
A new narrative telling of the attack that killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, based on recent archaeological surveys and all primary source documents of the event.
Historian, Church History Library, Salt Lake City
Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University
History of Christianity & Religions in North America
I’m a historian of missions, Mormonism, and American religion.
I graduated with a Ph.D. in the history of Christianity and religions of North America at Claremont Graduate University.
I specialize in transdisciplinary research methods, drawing from the field of religious studies.
I have written and lectured on missionaries and their interactions with proselytes.
I have taught courses on world religions and Mormon history at Brigham Young University.
Visit David’s Amazon author profile.
Co-edited with Christopher Cannon Jones
In The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender
In Producing Ancient Scripture
Chapter 8 in World Religions and Their Missions
Chapter 13 in Mormon Women Have Their Say
In Journal of Mormon History
In Journal of Mormon History
In Journal of American History
In Anglican and Episcopal History
In Anglican and Episcopal History
Co-Edited with Christopher Cannon Jones
American missionaries, both Mormon and Protestant, have embarked on intrepid and audacious campaigns to evangelize the world.
Despite sometimes wide differences in religious belief and practice, these groups shared in dividing the world categorically along lines of race, status, and exoticism, and in occupying liminal spaces between proselytizer and proselytized, feminine and masculine, colonizer and colonized.
This series of essays offers an often overlooked juxtaposition between Protestant and Mormon missionary efforts during periods of sustained outreach and features top scholars in the field of missionary history.
Foreword
Introduction
Heathen Landscapes: Of Souls and Soils
Before “Woman’s Work for Woman”: Protestant Missionary Applications and Gender
Humanitarian Encounter in Late Ottoman Turkey: State, American Protestant Missions, and the Christian Herald Armenian Relief Fund
Dueling Orientalisms: The Scottish Imagination in the Mormon Missionary Mind
Shoshone Worlds, Bannock Zions: Protestant and Latter-day Saint Missionary Work among the Shoshone and Bannock
Traveling Elders: The Latter-day Saint Gaze on Africa in the Early Twentieth Century
Earthquakes, Mudslides, and Hurricanes: Natural Disasters and Humanitarian Aid in Evangelical Missionary Strategy
Inventing Rupture in India and America: Adivāsi Converts, Hindu Nationalists, and American RLDS Missionaries, 1966–1996
Technological Christianity: Transferring Processes, Forms, and Organizational Tools within Global Missionary Encounters
Missing Missiology: Latter-day Saint Missionary Pragmatism and the Search for Scholarship
American Missionaries and the Struggle for Control of Christianity’s Symbolic Capital
A reader-friendly column layout bringing the Four Gospels into parallel view.
Many “gospel harmonies” lay the gospel texts side by side. This edition offers the King James Version in a parallel format arranged by pericope—the story units that circulated among the earliest followers of Jesus as narrative traditions before they were written down.
This synopsis affords students of the gospels a new reading sequence in a familiar translation. Released under a Creative Commons license and free to download.
Ph.D. Dissertation, Claremont Graduate University
In 1800, the first missionary periodicals to be published in the United States entered circulation.
Readers would soon rely on this growing literature for information about the world beyond.
This dissertation traces the ways missionaries abroad defined the “foreign” for home audiences, and in turn, shaped early ideas of American exceptionalism.
Featured essays and musings on religious studies and history
A new narrative telling of the attack that killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, based on recent archaeological surveys and all primary source documents of the event.
January 9, 2023
It’s well known that nothing Jesus wrote, if he wrote anything down, has survived history. And there’s his letter to Abgar V that Eusebius of Caesarea claimed to have read and translated from Syriac into Greek.
January 5, 2023
We pull out our trusty King James Bible, turn to the New Testament, and see Matthew, chapter 1, verse 1. Where did this text come from?
July 27, 2022
Another purported daguerreotype of Joseph Smith has surfaced. Should we accept this as authentic? Not yet. We’re not nearly there.
September 22, 2021
A thorough resource for reading all published and previously published sections of the Doctrine and Covenants and all published and unpublished revelations of Joseph Smith.
March 3, 2021
An initial review of the documentary about the infamous Mark Hofmann forgeries and murders.
December 24, 2020
Strict historicity of narrative elements in the Nativity Story brings out some novel revisions to how we imagine the birth of Yeshua (Jesus).
January 9, 2020
Missions touch virtually every congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and are managed by the Missionary Department headquartered in Salt Lake City. Despite such scope and activity, this department’s administrative history has yet to be written.
July 31, 2018
Some newly discovered sources allow us to consider Fanny Alger Custer independently of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and even get a sense of a more complete biography. Here is a highlight from the new sources, something stunning from Fanny herself—her own voice.
July 20, 2018
It’s true: Neil Armstrong led an expedition into an Ecuadorian jungle to search for gold plates. The story begins with a Latter-day Saint mission president, an eccentric anthropologist, and an Italian Catholic missionary. It ends with Donny Osmond. And there are aliens in the middle.
May 25, 2016
If we were to craft the perfect graduate seminar syllabus or the perfect comprehensive exam reading list on Joseph Smith, what works would it include?
Feel free to contact me.