https://www.timesandseasons.org/index.p ... -a-review/The fourth and final volume of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days was published today. This newest book, Sounded in Every Ear, tells the story of the Latter-day Saints from 1955 to 2020, bringing the history up nearly to the present day. It discusses an era in which conversion rates exploded in South America, the Pacific islands, eastern Asia, and Africa. The 1978 revelation that ended the priesthood and temple ban was an important event enabling that growth. Temple construction to support membership across the world became a big deal, with the number of temples jumping from 9 functioning temples in 3 countries in 1955 to 197 dedicated temples in scores of countries today.
As with previous entries in the series, Saints 4 has a lot of different goals, sources, and subjects to juggle. As an institutional history, it needs to inspire faithfulness and belief in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
First, this includes a focus on Jesus Christ and the impact involvement in the Church has on the lives of those who embrace it as well as sustaining the positions the Church takes on hot-button social issues. It also has to work to cultivate a positive image of the Church for any non-members who happen to read the books.
Second, it is a historical work that has positioned itself as a true account of the history of the Church, with painstaking efforts to research and present that history accurately. On this account, it needs to hold up under the scrutiny of the academic fields of history and religious studies.
Third, it tries to present that historical information in an engaging, narrative format that is appealing to people across many different education levels.
Fourth, this volume is about history that people who are alive and remember experiencing the events described within (historians aren’t usually writing about subjects that can talk back at them).
Those goals don’t always fit nicely together and create some tensions in what they were aiming to achieve. But Saints 4 does a good job of balancing and compromising between them while achieving the core of each of the goals.
I’m particularly interested in how this volume handles the Priesthood/Temple Ban, and also the veracity of its claim of being historically accurate.
