But unless you were raised a Mormon, you probably don't have a clear picture of LDS beliefs and practices. Covering everything from Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon to tithing and family home evening, this friendly guide will get you up to speed in no time. Discover: * How the LDS Church differs from other Christian churches * What Mormons believe * What happens in Mormon temples and meetinghouses * The history of the LDS Church * LDS debates on race, women, and polygamy

    It is literally a gift - a gift of God's power. While carefully maintaining the sacred confidentiality of the temple ordinances, this book provides scriptural correlations which will open up rich new areas of understanding. Once you read this inspired information, you will be better informed about the scriptural authority and symbolism of the sacred ordinances. You will be better prepared and motivated to apply scriptural symbols in your life and strive to become more like Christ. Within these pages are more than twenty scriptural symbols which correlate with the temple service. The central focus of these symbols is found in Brigham Young's oft-quoted statement of the ceremony's ultimate purpose: to enable recipients to pass by the angelic sentinels who guard the entrance to God's kingdom as they "walk back to the presence of the Father." Endowed from on high teaches that revelation occurs during the endowment, that promises are required before blessings are granted, that covenants are the channels through which blessings flow, and that the Lord is voluntarily "bound" when we obey His commandments. This is a unique and reverential guide to growth in the most sacred of all areas of our relationship with the Savior and our heavenly Father. Reading and pondering Endowen From On High will be a choice experience for all Church members.

    Petrey's trenchant history takes a landmark step forward in documenting and theorizing about Latter-day Saints (LDS) teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage. Drawing on deep archival research, Petrey situates LDS doctrines in gender theory and American religious history since World War II. His challenging conclusion is that Mormonism is conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of sexuality in modernity itself.As Petrey details, LDS leaders have embraced the idea of fixed identities representing a natural and divine order, but their teachings also acknowledge that sexual difference is persistently contingent and unstable. While queer theorists have built an ethics and politics based on celebrating such sexual fluidity, LDS leaders view it as a source of anxiety and a tool for the shaping of a heterosexual social order. Through public preaching and teaching, the deployment of psychological approaches to "cure" homosexuality, and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders hoped to manage sexuality and faith for those who have strayed from heteronormativity.

     She begins her story with an account of how as a young woman her family had converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and how she had attracted the attention, and subsequently married, T. B. H. Stenhouse. Living in Europe they were unaware of how their religion was developing in the Midwest and how the practice of plural marriage was beginning to become ever more prevalent among the members of their faith. Responding to encouragement and counselling they eventually emigrated to the promised land of Utah and to their horror they began to learn that the rumors of Joseph Smith’s polygamic revelation were true and that some of the church leadership, such as Brigham Young, had over fifty wives. Tell it All provides fascinating insight into how the Mormon faith was developing in the mid-nineteenth century and how women such as Fanny were struggling to come to terms with doctrines such as polygamy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints largely distanced itself from polygamy in the later-nineteenth century, much due to the work of women such as Fanny Stenhouse and others including a former wife of Brigham Young, Ann Eliza Young. This book also uncovers some of the other darker moments of Mormon history such as the Mountains Meadows Massacre, in which the men and women of an emigrant wagon train were indiscriminately slaughtered by Mormons of the Nauvoo Legion. “added more details on polygamy, on Brigham Young’s life in polygamy, and on the Mountains Meadows Massacre” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal Fanny Stenhouse was an early Mormon pioneer who, along with her husband T. B. H. Stenhouse, defected from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, largely due to their disagreements with the church about polygamy. Tell it All A Woman's Life in Polygamy was first published in 1872 and Fanny passed away in 1904.

    

    

    

    The author also examines the surprising and significant effects of the Fall on the earth itself.It was not until the original writings of Moses and Abraham were restored that modern students of the earth's creation story were in a position to begin assembling the illuminating facts that are resented in this book.For those who enjoy contemplating both the findings of science and the revelations of God, this will be an extremely stimulating and provocative study.Among the questions addressed and answered in this book are:Where did the earth's creation take place? Who participated?Did the creation take 6,000 years or millions of years?How did life begin on the earth? How did it develop?Where did the dinosaurs come from? Why were they here?Did human beings live on the earth before the arrival of Adam and Eve?What really happened in the Garden of Eden?Are there evidences of God's handiwork in the rock record of the earth?Are there answers to the unresolved questions of earth scientists in God's revealed record of the creation?Why did the Fall have such important astronomical and geological implications for the earth?And finally: What we hear in church about the creation doesn't always match wat we learn in school--or does it?

    This is not as easy as one would imagine: She was born in the church, educated at BYU, married in the temple, and is raising more Mormons. She faced a serious conundrum: keep quiet (and avoid losing everything dear to her), or tell the world what being raised LDS does to a person's psyche, especially when they realize that everything they were taught and everything they hoped to believe is a lie. To expose the difficulty faced by Mormons who leave the Church and to seek support for their plight, Regina offers a first-person confessional memoir recounting her many atrocious experiences, managing to weave in enough humor to keep you turning pages, and enough brutal honesty to bring you to an understanding of what it is to be a Mormon, and to try to leave it behind...

    "Some of my gay friends—as well as some of the LDS friends—are a little surprised that I think it's possible to be a gay Mormon."In That We May Be One, Tom Christofferson shares perspectives gained from his life's journey as a gay man who left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then returned to it. After having asked to be excommunicated from the faith he was raised in, Tom spent two decades in a loving relationship with a committed partner. But gradually, the love of family, friends, and strangers and the Spirit of the Lord worked on him until he found himself one night sitting in his car in front of the bishop's house...This book is about the lessons Tom, his family, and his fellow Saints learned while trying to love as God loves. It is about the scope and strength of this circle of love and about how learning the truth of our relationship with God draws us to Him. For anyone who has wondered how to keep moving forward in the face of difficult decisions and feelings of ambiguity; for anyone who needs to better understand the redeeming power of our Savior, Jesus Christ; for anyone who seeks to love more fully; this book offers reassurance and testimony of God's love for all of His children.

    “We gave that up long ago.” Not so, claims noted LDS poet and author Carol Lynn Pearson, who examines the issue as it has never been examined before. Any member of the LDS Church today who enters the practice of polygamy is immediately excommunicated. However, Pearson claims, polygamy itself has never been excommunicated, but has an honored and protected place at the table. It has only been postponed, a fact confirmed by thousands of “eternal sealings” giving a man an assurance that he will claim as wives in heaven the two, three, or even more women he has sequentially married during his lifetime. No such opportunity is available to women. Through her own personal stories, those of her ancestors, and the thousands of stories that came to her through an Internet survey, Pearson shows the power of the Ghost of Eternal Polygamy as it not only waits on the other side to greet the most righteous in heaven, but also haunts the living—hiding in the recesses of the Mormon psyche, inflicting profound pain and fear, assuring women that they are still objects, harming or destroying marriages, bringing chaos to family relationships, leading many to lose faith in the church and in God. Mormon historian and author Dr. Gregory Prince says of The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: “Carol Lynn Pearson has hit a home run in her quest to illuminate both the damage that Mormonism’s de facto practice of polygamy continues to inflict, and the route to a better, more humane place. Those who truly hope for eternal polygamy or who resent any call to institutional reform will be upset, but countless others will rejoice that she has shown ‘a more excellent way.’"

    Clamorous and angry, they were hunting down a man they saw as a grave threat to their otherwise quiet lives: the founding prophet of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. They wanted blood.At thirty-nine years old, Smith had already lived an outsized life. In addition to starting his own religion and creating his own “Golden Bible”—the Book of Mormon—he had worked as a water-dowser and treasure hunter. He'd led his people to Ohio, then Missouri, then Illinois, where he founded a city larger than fledgling Chicago. He was running for president. And, secretly, he had married more than thirty women.In American Crucifixion, Alex Beam tells how Smith went from charismatic leader to public enemy: How his most seismic revelation—the doctrine of polygamy—created a rift among his people; how that schism turned to violence; and how, ultimately, Smith could not escape the consequences of his ambition and pride.Mormonism is America's largest and most enduring native religion, and the “martyrdom” of Joseph Smith is one of its transformational events. Smith's brutal assassination propelled the Mormons to colonize the American West and claim their place in the mainstream of American history. American Crucifixion is a gripping story of scandal and violence, with deep roots in our national identity.

    *Includes a bibliography for further reading.*Includes a table of contents. “A feller came up to me the other day and said ‘I don’t know whether this means anything to you but you’ve given me and my family a lot of enjoyment over the years.’ And I said to him, ‘Does it mean anything to me? It means everything to me. That’s the ballgame. That's it.’ And I think that if I have done that to that man, and maybe a couple more…then I’m proud of that.” – Jimmy StewartA lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. When the American Film Institute assembled its top 100 actors of all time at the close of the 20th century, Jimmy Stewart ranked third, behind only Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant. There is a certain inevitability to these three actors ranking at the top of the list; after all, they were the dominant faces of Hollywood during the height of the era known as classical Hollywood cinema, a time before the onset of television when the movies still enjoyed relatively uncontested supremacy over American entertainment. The popularity of Stewart, Grant, and Bogart also extends well beyond the success of any of their individual films, reflecting their much broader cultural significance as monuments of Hollywood during its Golden Age. In fact, if the list was reconstructed today, it is entirely possible that Stewart would rank first. Not only have movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vertigo (1958) continued to gain in popularity even into the 21st century, but Stewart has come to embody an accessible image of American values that is easy for everyone to embrace. The wholesome, happy-go-lucky persona he cultivated represents perhaps a more palatable image of American masculinity than the gritty realism of Bogart or the erudite but occasionally snobbish tendencies of Cary Grant. If there is any actor that embodies not only classical Hollywood but also American culture more generally, it’s difficult to argue against Jimmy Stewart.The phenomenon of Jimmy Stewart becomes even more remarkable when considering the incredible harmony between the characters he portrayed in his films and his personality off the movie set. Most actors and actresses cultivate a persona in order to achieve success, and in most cases it’s an image that bears only a tangential relationship to an actor’s true personality, but there was no such division for Stewart. The all-American image conveyed in films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life corresponds seamlessly with Stewart’s off-screen pursuits, which included a degree in architecture from Princeton and an extended tenure as a pilot during World War II. There were elements of his life story that resisted cultural norms - he waited until age 41 before marrying, and his very decision to pursue acting in 1930s America could be seen as a deviation from more characteristically masculine professions - but there was an almost seamless congruence between the Stewart that audiences saw on screen and the man he was in real life. Naturally, his defining traits developed out of and in response to the values instilled in him by his family and cultural background, and for this reason, examining his filmography alongside his life story paints a complete picture of the delicate unity of Jimmy Stewart’s life.

    

    During our journey we will explore stories from Babylon, Greece, Ireland, Ethiopia, and various other cultures to fill in the missing pieces to one of the biggest mysteries on our planet. This 2nd Edition includes 40+ hours of additional audio and video content for your enjoyment. Make sure you download a free QR code scanner for your smart phone or tablet so you can take full advantage of the features in this book.