author
R. W. Beers
b. 1860
Best known for a late-19th-century study of Mormonism, this Presbyterian minister wrote with the urgency of someone trying to explain a major public controversy to a general audience. His surviving record is slim, which makes his work itself the clearest window into his life and concerns.
1 Audiobook
The Mormon puzzle, and how to solve it
by R. W. Beers
About the author
R. W. Beers is known today for The Mormon Puzzle; and How to Solve It, first published in the 1880s. The title page identifies him as Rev. R. W. Beers, A.M., pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Elkton, Maryland, placing him clearly in Protestant church life as well as in the religious debates of his time.
In that book, he takes on Mormonism as a pressing national question and presents his argument as the result of extended reading and research. Whatever modern readers make of its conclusions, the work shows him as a minister-author who wanted to address religion not just as theology, but as a social and political issue.
Little else about his personal life could be confirmed from the sources found here, so a full biographical sketch remains uncertain. For now, his reputation rests mainly on this single surviving work and on the glimpse it gives of an American clergyman writing into one of the most heated religious controversies of the late nineteenth century.