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

A Voice in the Wilderness: The 1888-1930 General Conference Sermons of Mormon Historian Andrew Jenson
ISBN-10
0190867825
ISBN-13
9780190867829
Series
A Voice in the Wilderness
Category
Religion
Pages
360
Language
English
Published
2018
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Author
Andrew Jenson

Description

In April 1988, Andrew Jenson, Danish immigrant and convert to the Mormon faith, received an unexpected invitation from Mormon leaders to speak at the General Conference. The twice-yearly events on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, generally privileged sermons from the church's FirstPresidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and had become the primary cultural site for reinforcing Mormon doctrine and practice. Jenson was initially an outsider to this conference tradition, a layman whose only standing before the main body of Latter-day Saints came from a contracted positionwith 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 at the Historian's Office. His sermons demonstrated the growth andexpansion of the Mormon general conference in the twentieth century, as they placed the Mormon story front and center for Latter-day Saints to learn from and celebrate. In addition, Jenson urged conference-goers to keep better personal and institutional records and believed he was often the solitaryadvocate for church record keeping and historical preservation. His sermons capture a unique period in Mormon history, one of institutional change, accommodation, and growth. In an era of transition, Jenson clung to the distinctiveness of the Latter-day Saint tradition, even while anticipating amore global identity for the North-American faith. A Voice in the Wilderness features all twenty-eight of Andrew Jenson's general conference sermons, with introductions and annotations that set them within their historical and religious contexts. As a body of work, Jenson's sermons serve as a case study on the intersection of oral tradition, groupidentity, and ritualized history. This study of Jenson's sermons moves the focus off the Mormon hierarchy at general conference, uncovering the richness and diversity that thrives just beneath the surface of official ecclesiastical discourse.

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