Showing results by publisher "By Common Consent Press" in All Categories

In the bosom of Happy Valley, Utah, Keira Shae and her family weren't like everybody else. Their home was filthy, their mother was absent, and their cupboards were bare. What began as a disadvantaged existence quickly crumbled as Keira and her siblings grew up under the terror, abuse, and drug culture that their mother brought into the home. The only thing more incredible than their story of survival are the powers that transformed Keira's fears into love, kindness, and resilience.

The Burning Book: A Jewish-Mormon Memoir is the story of Jason Olson and his conversion from Judaism to Mormonism.

In January of 2015, I stood in an upper room of the Brooklyn Borough in New York City to see the St. Francis of Assissi exhibition. I reflected on our own history as a young church - our own cycles of decline and renewal, crisis and change. I specifically thought about the current crisis catering on rejecting behavior towards the queer Latter-day Saints.

Parent-child is the default relationship of church to member—the church as parent, the member as child. In this opening chapter, I propose that differentiation from the church is the most important developmental task we face while living on the inside of the edge.

Every book is an invitation to a journey. Not all journeys are worth the time, though. This book, Ali, by Joshua Sabey and Ali Alsamar, offers a journey worth taking—actually many journeys, including stories from the Qur’an and the Bible, family lore (from two families), and ancient glimpses into the human struggle through another Iraq's adventures: Sinbad.

Rachel panicked as she lay awake on the first night of her year-long honeymoon—a backpacking trip around the world. Though young and in love, she wasn’t sure she actually believed in marriage, let alone the lofty Mormon ideal of eternal marriage. This unconventional honeymoon felt like a brief reprieve from the crushing expectations for a Mormon bride. But this trip also offered opportunities: the chance to study wedding traditions in other cultures and the space to confront what marriage—including her own—meant to her.

A king who turns out to be a rather poor judge of character… A gigantic foam finger in sacrament meeting.… An elevator that does not go to the top floors.... Dementors.... The Missionary Guide used by missionaries in the '80s and '90s.... A risqué encounter between two Greek gods. A mastodon hunter named Doug who might be the reason why you sometimes feel inadequate.

The Book of Mormon For the Least of These offers an unflinching examination of some of the difficult and troubling sections of the Book of Mormon, while also advocating for a compassionate understanding of holy text. As a verse-by-verse close study, this book examines new layers of interpretation and meaning, giving even those deeply familiar with scripture innovative tools for engaging powerfully with the Book of Mormon.

Mette Harrison’s Book of Laman is not funny. It doesn’t use intentional archaisms to make fun of the Book of Mormon’s language; rather, it tells its story in a non-distracting modern style. The characters are not simply reversed. Nephi is sometimes an annoying brat, but he is also a real prophet who sees and speaks for the Lord. Laman is neither a comic book villain nor a long-suffering ironist. He is a flawed human being struggling to live well and usually coming up short. And in some of the book’s very best scenes, he is touched unexpectedly by grace and God.

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 central conceit of this book is that it is an oral history that women passed down from generation to generation, based on inspiration by God instead of genetic relationships or priesthood authority designations. The book is given to Christ at the end of the two volumes, when he appears to righteous Lamanites and Nephites waiting for him.

In soaring blank verse, Brighter and Brighter until the Perfect Day reimagines the entire scope of existence from premortal life through the creation, the fall, mortality, the Atonement, and beyond. This gorgeous epic poem blends theology (including the Latter-day Saint doctrine of a Heavenly Mother), science, and imagination in a way that is thoroughly engaging, elegant, and provocative.