A Voice in the Wilderness

Reviews / Votes

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 *