[Key Excerpts] On the Book of Mormon's cultural significance: "No book in the religious history of America has provoked more sustained and heated debate, inspired more devotion and more derision, or been the subject of more elaborate vindication and more sweeping dismissal. Yet ironically, few have taken the Book of Mormon seriously as a text deserving of close critical attention." On the dialogic nature of revelation: "The Book of Mormon may be most productively read not as a historical record of ancient peoples, nor as a pious fraud of a nineteenth-century author, but as a text that operates in the space between those two poles — a work that participates in a 'dialogic' process of revelation." On reception history: "From the moment of its publication in 1830, the Book of Mormon has been the focus of a cultural contest between those who see it as evidence of divine intervention in human history and those who see it as evidence of human credulity or deception. What is remarkable is that neither camp has succeeded in definitively settling the matter." On the translation question: "The manner in which the Book of Mormon was produced is significant precisely because it resists easy categorization. Neither the fraudulent genius theory nor the purely mechanical dictation model fully accounts for the complexity, internal consistency, and literary sophistication of the resulting text." On scholarly engagement: "The Book of Mormon deserves to be studied and debated on its own terms, as a work of religious imagination that has shaped the spiritual lives of millions, regardless of where one stands on the question of its ultimate origins."