The author, a resident of Idaho who set out to meet her Mormon neighbors half way, prepared this translation of the Book of Mormon to help others understand the basics of this, perhaps the fastest growing religion in the United States. Susan Stansfield Wolverton is a pen name.

Faith, dictionaries inform us, is an unquestioning belief in something: in a person, a religious doctrine, or an ideal. Faith asks the believer to accept an absence of proof, and to overlook contradictory evidence. There are countless religious sects, past and present, that ask their members to believe, on faith, that their religion is exclusively the correct one, and that all others are incorrect. In this respect the Mormon religion is no different from many others.

Before 1991, I had virtually no knowledge of the Mormon faith, or The Book of Mormon from which that faith is derived. It was in that year that my husband accepted a company transfer to an office in southern Idaho, and our young family moved west. Having grown up in the East, my vision of the West was one of mountains, broad open spaces, and clean air. The idea that we would be moving to a predominantly Mormon community never even occurred to me. Since then, I have become a student of the Mormon faith and its doctrine. I did this to understand the community I live among.

As we settled into our new home that summer, we were very soon approached by our neighbors. Most of them were Mormons and they wanted to share their faith with us. Our children were invited to attend church social functions and we were all welcomed to Sunday services. Before I’d been there a week, I was given my first copy of The Book of Mormon and was earnestly told that it was the true gospel of Jesus Christ. I opened it with great curiosity but was blocked from reading very much of it by language such as this: “Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the Devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men.”1 When I asked if there was a modern language version of The Book of Mormon, I was told that there was not. . . .

When I asked my neighbors about their understanding of its content, I discovered that I was not the only one who had difficulty reading and clearly understanding it. Surprisingly, most of the Mormon women that I knew had found it as impenetrable as I had, and had put it aside, devoting themselves instead to the social and cultural aspects of the broad Mormon community. The more I learned, the more curious I became….

Library Journal, October 2004

The Book of Mormon, official scripture for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), is said to have been revealed to Joseph Smith in the 1820s. Wolverton,...