Dave Butler is not an academic. He has been a lawyer, a consultant, a corporate trainer, a registered investment banking representative, and an entrepreneur. He is now Editor-in-Chief of Plain and Precious Publishing.
 
Dave also writes fiction, principally science fiction and fantasy and principally for adults. His twenty-first novel will be published late in 2025. His books have won the Dragon Award, the Whitney Award, and the Association for Mormon Letters Award for Novel. In early 2021, Dave co-curated “A Desolating Sickness,” a literary response to the Covid pandemic that was displayed in BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library. In Winter Semester 2025, for the third time, his novel The Cunning Man (co-written with Aaron Michael Ritchey), which in July 2022 made the AML’s list of 100 Works of Significant Mormon Literature, was taught in a Mormon Lit class on BYU campus.
 
Dave takes the position that the Book of Mormon is an ancient document and also that the Book of Mormon is a work of temple literature. The Nephite prophets were members of an esoteric lineage that wrote for an audience that they expected to possess eyes to see and ears to hear, and the intended way to understand the meaning of their writings is to read through the lens of our own temple experience. He embodied his early thoughts in this vein in a pair of short books, Plain and Precious Things and The Goodness and the Mysteries, both self-published under the pen name D. John Butler. More recently, he published In the Language of Adam.