Scott D. Marianno

Andrew Jenson undertook a lifelong quest to render the LDS historical record complete and comprehensive. As Assistant Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jenson tirelessly carried out his office's archival mission and advocated for fixed recordkeeping to become a duty for Latter-day Saints. Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno offer a new in-depth study of Jenson's long life and career. Their account follows Jenson from his arrival as a Danish immigrant to 1860s Utah through trips around the world to secure documents from far-flung missions, and on to his public life as a newspaper columnist and interpreter of LDS history. Throughout, Jenson emerges as a figure dedicated to the belief that recorded history united past and present Latter-day Saints in heaven and on earth--and for all eternity. Engaging and informed, Restless Pilgrim is a groundbreaking study of an important figure in Latter-day Saint intellectual life during a transformative era in Church history.

The search for a distinctive Latter-day Saint place carried followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from New York to the western frontier of the United States over the church's first two decades. The prophet-colonizer Brigham Young declared a spot for a temple at the edge of a valley in 1847. He imagined the temple as the centerpiece of a new kingdom headquartered in what would become Salt Lake City, Utah. It took forty years for Young's vision to materialize, and much would change for the religion in the intervening years. The Salt Lake Temple tells the story of the building's transformation from an improvised community project to the premier icon, symbol, and sacred space of a now global religion. Marianno and Neilson examine the evolving meaning and significance of the temple to the present day as the church globalized and built more temples. The Salt Lake Temple explains the shifting interactions between sacred space, identity, and religious meaning, revealing the contemporary importance of a granite temple in the American West to a twenty-first century worldwide religious movement.

Andrew Jenson undertook a lifelong quest to render the LDS historical record complete and comprehensive. As Assistant Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jenson tirelessly carried out his office's archival mission and advocated for fixed recordkeeping to become a duty for Latter-day Saints. Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno offer a new in-depth study of Jenson's long life and career. Their account follows Jenson from his arrival as a Danish immigrant to 1860s Utah through trips around the world to secure documents from far-flung missions, and on to his public life as a newspaper columnist and interpreter of LDS history. Throughout, Jenson emerges as a figure dedicated to the belief that recorded history united past and present Latter-day Saints in heaven and on earth--and for all eternity. Engaging and informed, Restless Pilgrim is a groundbreaking study of an important figure in Latter-day Saint intellectual life during a transformative era in Church history.