A Voice in the Wilderness: The 1888-1930 General Conference Sermons of Mormon Historian Andrew Jenson

by Reid Neilson (Editor), Scott Marianno (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190867829
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/03/2018
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Reid Neilson is the Assistant Church Historian and Recorder and Managing Director of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Scott Marianno is a Historian/Writer for the Church History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Editors' Preface
Introduction

General Conference Sermons
Chapter 1: "Every Man and Every Woman Should Have a Testimony," April 1888
Chapter 2: "God Is No Respecter of Persons," April 1903
Chapter 3: "The Power of God Is with His Servants," October 1905
Chapter 4: "We Want to Make You All Historians," October 1906
Chapter 5: "This Gospel of the Kingdom Shall Be Preached in All the World," April 1907
Chapter 6: "Let Us Place Them and Ourselves on Record," October 1907
Chapter 7: "The Great Principle of Gathering," April 1908
Chapter 8: "A Pleasant Abode for the Pure in Heart," October 1908
Chapter 9: "Every Member of the Church Is Entitled to Revelation," October 1912
Chapter 10: "Becoming 'One Nation upon the Mountains of Ephraim,'" April 1913
Chapter 11: "Come, Come, Ye Saints," April 1914
Chapter 12: "Ye Shall Know Them by Their Fruits," April 1915
Chapter 13: "Many Things Are Not Recorded That Ought to Be," April 1916
Chapter 14: "Those Pioneer Fathers and Mothers of Ours," October 1916
Chapter 15: "The Eastern States . . . the Cradle of 'Mormonism,'" April 1917
Chapter 16: "Records Have Been Kept from the Beginning," October 1917
Chapter 17: "A Kingdom That Shall Endure Forever," April 1918
Chapter 18: "A Most Extensive Labor at the Historian's Office," October 1919
Chapter 19: '"Mormonism' for One Hundred Years," April 1920
Chapter 20: "God Is with the True Latter-day Saints," October 1921
Chapter 21: "A Far Greater Future than We Have Had a Past," October 1922
Chapter 22: "Why Do We Build Temples?," October 1923
Chapter 23: "The Necessity of Record Keeping," April 1924
Chapter 24: "Faithful and Diligent in Preaching the Gospel," April 1925
Chapter 25: "Places That Have Become Sacred to the Latter-day Saints," October 1925
Chapter 26: "A General Awakening in Regard to the Importance of Record Keeping," October 1926
Chapter 27: "The Missionary Operations of the Church," April 1927
Chapter 28: "This Centennial Conference of the Church," April 1930

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher