This series is unlike any other, in that it tenderly follows their existence through four separate very real world--earth life, millennial life, after-life, and pre-mortality. This bok is the first installment in this sweeping drama. Through heart-warming events and real-life tragedies, their lives are traced through the struggles and triumphs which bring them the great blessings sought by the faithful of every age. This is a timeless romance of lives forever intertwined, of vast blessings gained at incredible cost. It is an immensely engaging story for all who have pondered the sweeping drama of existence, or who have gazed upn the battlefields of life, and wondered why.

    

    Arrington was historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1972 to 1982. The first professional historian and the first noncentral authority to occupy this position, Arrington opened archival resources and presided over an unprecedented era of enlightenment in Mormon scholarship. Arrington's appointment came at a crucial point in LDS history -- as the institution was being transformed from a regional church whose ecclesiastical hierarchy presided directly over its congregants into a modern, worldwide church with an elaborate bureaucracy. Riveting chapters on the actions of the controversial Historical Department reveal details of his release and replacement as the old system gave way to the new.

    William S. Godbe and his associates         revolted because they disliked Young's authoritarian community and resented         what they perceived as the church's intrusion into matters of personal         choice. Expelled from the church, they established the "New Movement,"         which eventually faltered. Both a study in intellectual history and an         investigation of religious dissent, Wayward Saints explores nineteenth-century         American spiritualism as well as the ideas and institutional structure         of first- and second-generation Mormonism.

    This volume tells of the Mormon church leaders' struggle to establish in Utah an independent, theocratic Kingdom of God.