News Release
Director of Church History Publications to Give Devotional April 19
Matthew Grow, director of publications at the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will give a devotional address titled “‘Liberty to the Downtrodden’ — Thomas L. Kane’s Defense of the Latter-day Saints” on Friday, April 19, at 11 a.m. in the Stoddard Center at Southern Virginia University.
Grow also is a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, a project with the goal “to gather together all extant Joseph Smith documents and to publish complete and accurate transcripts of those documents with both textual and contextual annotation.” Previously, Grow was an assistant professor of history and director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana.
Grow co-authored the book “Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism” with Terryl Givens, which received the Best Book Award in 2012 from the Mormon History Association. His earlier book, “‘Liberty to the Downtrodden’: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer” also received the Best Book Award from the Mormon History Association as well as the Evans Biography Award from the Mountain West Center at Utah State University. Grow has published articles in a number of scholarly journals including the Journal of the Early Republic, Church History, American Nineteenth-Century History, Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies, and Utah Historical Quarterly.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University in 2001 and a doctorate in American history from the University of Notre Dame in 2006.
He and his wife, Alyssa, live with their four children in Sandy, Utah.
Community members and Southern Virginia faculty, staff and students are invited to hear forum and devotional speakers each Friday morning at 11 a.m. in the Stoddard Center. Recordings of past forum and devotional speeches may be accessed online.