A Voice in the Wilderness
The 1888-1930 General Conference Sermons of Mormon Historian Andrew Jenson
Reid L Neilson editor Scott D Marianno editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:12th Jul '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In April 1888, Andrew Jenson, Danish immigrant and convert to the Mormon faith, received an unexpected invitation from church leaders to speak at their general conference. Jenson was an outsider to this conference tradition, a layman whose only standing before the main body of Latter-day Saints came from a contracted position with the Church Historian's Office. Forty-two years later, in April 1930, Jenson offered his twenty-eighth and final general conference sermon. He had become the voice of institutional record keeping in his over forty-year career as an Assistant Church Historian. His sermons demonstrated the growth and expansion of the Mormon general conference tradition in the twentieth century, as they placed the Latter-day Saint story front and center for church members to learn from and celebrate. In addition, Jenson urged conference goers to keep better personal and institutional records and believed he was often the solitary advocate for church record keeping and historical preservation. A Voice in the Wilderness presents all twenty-eight of Andrew Jenson's general conference sermons, with introductions and annotations that set them within their historical and religious contexts. His speeches capture a unique period in Mormon history, one of institutional change, accommodation, and growth. This study of Jenson's sermons uncovers the richness and diversity that thrives just beneath the surface of official ecclesiastical discourse.
The book is invaluable to anyone interested in the beginnings of the LDS Church, their relationship to the state in the early years, their initial phenomenal growth, and the sacrifices they made to maintain their moral and spiritual decadence in a world that was becoming progressively secular and antagonistic to their way of life. * Jonathan S. Nkhoma, Mzuzu University, Religious Studies Review *
This fascinating collection of Andrew Jenson's talks, most of them given at the general conferences of the church during the first decades of the twentieth century, puts us inside the mind of one of the church's most influential historians. To add to the collection's value, the editors' introduction brilliantly illuminates Jenson's views of history and the church's destiny. The book is an important contribution to Mormon intellectual history. * Richard Lyman Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling *
The editors provide readers historical gems, page after page. Jenson's sermons offer windows into a largely forgotten Latter-day Saint past and remind us, again, how profoundly historical sensibility shapes the tradition. * J. Spencer Fluhman, Executive Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University *
Neilson and Marianno have produced a book that will be a boon to both serious scholars of Mormonism and lay history buffs. Their thoughtful introduction lays out persuasive reasons why Jenson, even though not an LDS General Authority, significantly contributed to the integration of Mormon narrative history for lay members and to the shaping of Mormon institutional identify in the twentieth century as a global church. The detailed annotations and chapter prefaces that contextualize each of Jenson's twenty-eight general conference sermons reproduced in this volume constitute almost an underlying secondary book of early Mormon history snippets. * A. Gary Shepherd, co-author with Gordon Shepherd of A Kingdom Transformed: Early Mormonism and the Modern LDS Church *
ISBN: 9780190867829
Dimensions: 160mm x 236mm x 31mm
Weight: 617g
336 pages