Alright, I finally get to talk about this publicly.
Early this year I started working on submitting a version of my 2017 essay “A Proposed Reinterpretation of Jacob 2:30” for peer-review.
In the last decade the topic of polygamy in the early church had had a resurgence with the Joseph Smith papers being published and old information being reexamined.
In the midst of all of these conversations, I thought it was critical that whatever the premises they are built upon are valid.
Given that I’ve seen my essay being referenced frequently on YouTube videos and such, I decided to put my research to the test and officially submit it for the scrutiny of peer-review.
I chose the Journal of Mormon Polygamy because the topic seemed like something they would be willing to consider and take seriously.
I submitted around March, I think, and the process was very rigorous. I can’t even tell you how many revisions we went through and how much time was spent on every single word. We got to a point where we thought it was close but we all felt like we really needed to do some major restructuring one more time. This surfaced some new insights, which surfaced others. I really have to credit Tiani Coleman and Cheryl Bruno for their amazing attention to detail and their contributions to bringing the paper to this point. They were simply brilliant to work with and the push-back and discipline all around was the type of experience that I hoped for.
The peer-reviewers were very good and although their feedback was incredibly thorough and required a great deal more time, attention, research, reading, re-thinking, it pushed me to places that I didn’t think to go and what I found there was so valuable to my work.
I feel like I made the right decision to publish with this journal and encourage others to do the same.
There’s a lot more to say and it will be said later, but for now, here’s a link to the paper below, enjoy!
