Criticism of Mormonism/Books/The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power

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Response to The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power



A FAIR Analysis of: The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power, a work by author: D. Michael Quinn

Response to claims made in The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power by D. Michael Quinn


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Index of claims

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power indexed by page number.

Reviews of this work

Duane Boyce, "A Betrayal of Trust"

Duane Boyce,  FARMS Review of Books, (1997)
D. Michael Quinn's The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power has a narrative text of 630 pages; the appendixes and index add another 300. Of the narrative pages, more than 200 are composed of Quinn's endnotes. The notes themselves number over 2,286, and the references cited in them number far more than that. So a lot of research is on display here.


The question is, How good is the research? Are Quinn's readings and interpretations to be trusted? Is this the "magisterial," "brilliant," and "impeccably researched" study its admirers claim it to be? <br.

One way to begin answering this question is to look at a representative sample of Quinn's lengthy book—say, the first chapter—and see how it stands up to scrutiny. If our initial checks of that chapter reveal scholarly deficiencies we ought to check further. If those additional checks also fail we can begin drawing conclusions not only about our first-chapter sample but about Quinn's methodology and book as a whole.

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