Buried Treasures: Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time

Over the course of a year, Michael Austin--an English professor and literary critic who was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--read the Book of Mormon for the first time in more than 30 years and wrote weekly blog posts detailing his insights and challenges with the text. The 44 essays in Buried Treasures, adapted from those original posts, show a trained scholar and literary critic grappling with the foundational text of his own religious tradition and finding surprising things that he had never seen before. The essays in this volume draw a picture of the Book of Mormon that is rarely seen in the devotional writings of those who consider it a scripture or the polemical writings of those who consider it a fraud. For Austin, the Book of Mormon, whatever its origin, is a complex literary and spiritual text full of sophisticated narratives, recurring patterns, and big ideas that can sustain a high level of critical analysis. Buried Treasures shows what happens when a well-trained reader approaches this text with fresh eyes and an open mind and unearths the treasures that have been hidden in plain sight for almost 200 years. Michael Austin is the author of seven previous books, including Rereading Job, We Must Not Be Enemies, and the bestselling textbook, Reading the Ideas that Matter. He is currently the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of Evansville in Evansville Indiana. “I discovered in the Book of Mormon a profoundly human record of people struggling with their relationship to God and to each other. It has all the messiness one would expect of a record compiled over a thousand years, with multiple narrative perspectives, biases, agendas, and blind spots—as the authors and narrators groped towards an understanding of the Kingdom of God. It is a book that can bear multiple readings from multiple perspectives without exhausting its treasures. And it is a book that Latter-day Saints should never be ashamed to place alongside the great books of the world’s traditions, both religious and secular.” --Michael Austin, from the Introduction