As you probably already know, the new Relief Society/Priesthood manual for next year in the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church series is Joseph Smith.

It is already available online for free in PDF format for anyone interested:

Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith (6.34 MB)

At 610 pages, it is the longest volume in the series so far, surpassing the Brigham Young book (385 pages) and the Joseph F. Smith book (481 pages) by over a hundred pages. However, the 610 pages are divided among 47 lessons, which is actually one lesson fewer than the other two manuals (as if it weren’t already difficult enough to cover the lesson material in a single class period!). It will be the curriculum for the the next two years.

I’ve been re-reading Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling , and I just finished the chapter on the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon. When reading about the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, I recognized an interesting parallel to the early Norse and Anglo-Saxon origins of English Common Law that I had not noticed previously and thought I’d write a little about it.

The Classicist bent of our modern American education system often focuses on the real, but overemphasized contribution of the Greek and Roman civilizations to our modern legal system and government while unduly minimizing or ignoring the contribution from the medieval legal traditions of the Norse and Germanic cultures from which English Common law, and subsequently American law, developed.