The establishment of a lecture series honoring a library’s special collections and a donor to that collection is unique. Utah State University’s Merrill-Cazier Library houses the personal and historical collection of Leonard J. Arrington, a renowned scholar of the American West. As part of Arrington’s gift to the university, he requested that the university’s historical collection become the focus for an annual lecture on an aspect of Mormon history. Utah State agreed to the request and in 1995 inaugurated the annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture.

Utah State University’s Special Collections and Archives is ideally suited as the host...

Joseph Smith was steeped in the experience of scriptural insufficiency. As a youthful seeker, he quickly lost any illusions aboutsola scriptura, “for the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”¹ Significantly, Smith never dated his prophetic call from 1820, but from 1827, when he began his Book of Mormon translation. This experience radically reconfigured his understanding of restoration, a term that for centuries had emphasized removing, stripping away, and distilling down, Christian forms and practices to...