Husband is reading American Crucifixion

[MerrieMiss]

I haven’t been to church for a couple of months due to some health reasons in the family. My husband came home from church on Sunday and asked if I had heard of American Crucifixion by Alex Beam, which I said I had not (although a brief search shows it has been mentioned here on NOM). Anyhow, during Sunday School he downloaded it and began reading. He asked me if I was aware that Joseph Smith was a treasure digger and practiced water divining. We had quite a conversation off and on all afternoon. I tried not to offer too much in the way of information or opinion unless he specifically asked. Instead, I asked open ended questions like: What do you think it means? How do you think that fits into the historical context? Can you think of other people of the time who were doing x, y, or z? Are there parallels to today? Why do you think we never learned any of this? In fact, during the course of the day, I never even brought up the subject, but just waited for him to bring it up off and on as he was thinking about it, letting it percolate a bit. I did not want to go into lecture mode; and I think we had a good conversation.

It’s a huge step because my husband, who is not a reader of almost anything (except perhaps a manual or coding book) found a book and has been reading it himself and asking questions on his own. I can try to push all I want, suggest things to read, listen to, talk about, whatever, but it has never worked. For the first time I feel like he is looking into things on his own and it’s his journey, not mine. Even if we don’t come to the same conclusions, even if the same things don’t bother us, I feel like he’s actually looking at these things and thinking about them instead of just going with what he is told.

Oddly enough, when I asked why he began reading it he said Sunday School was boring (I wasn’t there to make sarcastic remarks or draw funny doodles) so he began reading the Joseph Smith Papers, some Wikipedia about the burned over district, it led him to Richard Bushman, the library didn’t have an ebook version of Rough Stone Rolling he could download, so he took the book the library suggested. Here’s to non-correlated history and the boredom of the three hour block!

[profit_seizer]

It is absolutely hilarious that he's going down this road out of sheer boredom. I love this story, hope DW goes that way soon.