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John A. Widtsoe
Scientist and Theologian, 1872-1952
Thomas G. Alexander
Signature Books, 2023

Born in Norway, John A. Widtsoe (1872–1952), was renowned for his expertise in irrigation and dry farming. His pioneering work pushed the boundaries of and contributed significantly to advancements in agricultural practices. Moreover, his forays into the field of biochemistry exemplified his relentless pursuit of scientific understanding.

Widtsoe’s journey came with challenges especially after he was called as an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As president of both Utah State Agricultural College (1907–16) and the University of Utah (1916–21), he faced controversies and obstacles head-on. Additionally, he played a significant role in overseeing the expansion of the LDS gospel in both Europe and the United States. He was highly esteemed within his church due to his ability to provide thorough and insightful explanations of various aspects of church doctrine and reconcile them with scientific truths. Throughout the early-to-mid-twentieth century, he symbolized to many members the successful integration of religious faith with secular knowledge, inspiring countless individuals to embrace both realms in harmony.

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Things in Heaven and Earth
The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff
Thomas G. Alexander
Signature Books, 1993
 Wilford Woodruff converted to the LDS church in 1833, he joined a millenarian group of a few thousand persecuted believers clustered around Kirtland, Ohio. When he died sixty-five years later in 1898, he was the leader of more than a quarter of a million followers worldwide who were on the verge of entering the mainstream of American culture.

Before attaining that status of senior church apostle at the death of John Taylor in 1886, Woodruff had been one of the fiercest opponents of United States hegemony. He spent years evading territorial marshals on the Mormon “underground,” escaping prosecution for polygamy, unable even to attend his first wife’s funeral. As church president, faced with disfranchisement and federal confiscation of Mormon property, including temples, Woodruff reached his monumental decision in 1890 to accept U.S. law and to petition for Utah statehood.

As church doctrines and practices evolved, Woodruff himself changed. The author examines the secular and religious development of Woodruff’s world view from apocalyptic mystic to pragmatic conciliator. He also reveals the gentle, solitary farmer; the fisherman and horticulturalist; the family man with seven wives; the charismatic preacher of the Mormon Reformation; the astute businessman; the urbane, savvy politician who courted the favor of prominent Republicans in California and Oregon (Leland Stanford and Isaac Trumbo); and the vulnerable romantic who pursued the affections of Lydia Mountford, an international lecturer and Jewish rights advocate. He traces a faithful polygamist who ultimately embraced the Christian Home movement and settled comfortably into a monogamous relationship in an otherwise typically Victorian setting.

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Bruce R. McConkie
Apostle and Polemicist
Devery S. Anderson
Signature Books, 2024

Although he served as an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for only twelve and a half years, Bruce R. McConkie’s twenty-six years’ service in the First Council of Seventy had already made him a household name within the church. Called to full-time church service at age thirty-one, McConkie quickly gained a reputation as a theologian and doctrinal teacher. He became a prolific writer, and his controversial book, Mormon Doctrine, remained a bestseller for decades. His writing style, dogmatic approach, and quickness to reprimand others he believed in error made him many enemies, while others endeared themselves to him because of those very traits.

McConkie the man was far more complex than the serious and focused general authority most church members saw and heard at the pulpit. Those who knew him best experienced his profound sense of humor. His passion for jogging, rock hounding, and jewelry making occupied much of his free time. Those who witnessed his final address delivered days before his death felt compassion toward him, no matter how they had always viewed him as a writer, speaker, or leader. Truly, to understand Bruce R. McConkie one must look closely at the entire picture.

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Salt Lake School of the Prophets, 1867-1883
Devery S. Anderson
Signature Books, 2017
Ministerial training was an early goal of Mormonism. The priesthood-led institution called the School of the Prophets, established in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833, was basically a divinity school for prospective missionaries. However, topics of study included, instead of prophecy and revelation, penmanship, English grammar, arithmetic, philosophy, literature, government, geography, and history. For seven weeks there was even a course in Hebrew, but it was discontinued. Still, it was in this setting that Joseph Smith received his revelation on diet and health and some of the spiritual manifestations associated with the Kirtland temple dedication. Brigham Young re-established the school in the Salt Lake Valley in 1867; his successor, John Taylor, resuscitated it for a while in 1883. Young’s emphasis was theology, first as an appendage to Deseret University, and then as a separate institution. Presented here for the first time are all available minutes for the Utah period.
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Joseph Smith's Quorum of the Anointed, 1842-1845
A Documentary History
Devery S. Anderson
Signature Books, 2005
 “Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed” The first Latter-day Saint temple ceremonies were performed, not in Kirtland, Ohio, but on the second floor of Joseph Smith’s Red Brick Store in Nauvoo, Illinois. For nearly four years beginning in 1842, the prophet’s modest mercantile functioned as the de facto temple?the site of the first washings, anointings, endowments, and sealings. In contrast, the grand edifice known as the Nauvoo Temple was in operation for only two months before the Saints left Illinois for the West.

Preparations to initiate the first members of Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, or Holy Order, as it was also known, were made on May 3, 1842. The walls of the second level of the Red Brick Store were painted with garden-themed murals, the rooms fitted with carpets, potted plants, and a veil hung from the ceiling. All the while, the ground level continued to operate as Joseph Smith’s general mercantile.

In this companion volume to The Nauvoo Endowment Companies and The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History, the editors have assembled all available primary references to the Anointed Quorum and its regular gatherings, both in the Red Brick Store and elsewhere (women were initially washed and anointed in Emma Smith’s bedroom and then escorted to the store) prior to the opening of the Nauvoo Temple. The sources include excerpts from the diaries of William Clayton, Joseph Fielding, Zina D. H. Jacobs, Heber C. Kimball, John Taylor, Willard Richards, George A. Smith, Joseph Smith, Wilford Woodruff, and Brigham Young; autobiographies and reminiscences by Joseph C. Kingsbury, George Miller, and Mercy Fielding Thompson; letters from Vilate Kimball and Lucius N. Scoville; the Manuscript History of Brigham Young; General Record of the Seventies, Book B; Bathsheba W. Smith’s unedited testimony from the 1892 Temple Lot Case; other manuscripts such as the Historian’s Office Journal and “Meetings of Anointed Quorum”; and published records such as the History of the Church, Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate and Times and Seasons.
from the jacket flap:

Despite the secrecy imposed upon members of the Anointed Quorum, word of the gatherings above Joseph Smith’s store soon spread. In one instance, housekeeper Maria Jane Johnston helped prepare the special ceremonial clothing for John Smith to wear at the group’s meetings. In another, Ebenezer Robinson innocently opened the upstairs door at the mercantile and was startled to see church apostle John Taylor in a long white robe and “turban,” carrying a sword. Only Nauvoo’s elite were invited to participate in these new ceremonies?never more than ninety individuals and even fewer during Joseph Smith’s lifetime?and, as the editors of the current volume write, only those who had been introduced to the prophet’s doctrine of plural marriage.

An unusual aspect of the Quorum of the Anointed, compared to the membership in the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge, was that women were initiated as regular members. However, the women effectively disappear after Brigham Young’s assumption of leadership in 1844, following Joseph Smith’s death, and remain virtually absent until the Nauvoo Temple is completed nearly a year and a half later. Readers will also note some of the differences in protocol between what Smith instigated and what Young eventually settled on, for instance that members could be washed and anointed repeatedly but were “endowed” only once. There were not yet proxy ordinances.

Among Latter-day Saints today, temple worship is a sensitive topic; but the editors of this volume do not reveal anything that would be considered invasive or indelicate. In fact, the accounts, which come almost exclusively from the early LDS leadership itself, manifest discretion about what to report.

Never before have these primary, authoritative sources been correlated by date for comparison and fuller understanding of the gradual development of the temple ceremonies. Readers may find an added benefit in discovering some of their own ancestors’ names included in these records; but in fact, anyone interested in LDS temple worship will find this compilation of primary documents to be invaluable.

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Faith and Intellect
The Lives and Contributions of Latter-day Saint Thinkers
Leonard J Arrington
Signature Books, 2019
Joseph Smith was not the first to found a Christian denomination, but his addition of a new book of scripture on par with the Bible set him and his movement apart. Even before 1830, Smith was both dismissed and admired, embraced and rejected. But most observers agree that he has rightfully earned a significant place in American religious history. Many of the followers he attracted in his day and after have also helped to shape LDS thought. This volume highlights the lives and contributions of Smith, his successor Brigham Young, and eleven others, including Lowell Bennion, Claudia L. Bushman, Hugh Nibley, Chieko Okazaki, B. H. Roberts, James E. Talmage, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Emmeline B. Wells. All together, the women and men profiled here span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and illuminate what the LDS Church has meant, and continues to mean, to its most thoughtful members. 
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Saints Without Halos
The Human Side of Mormon History
Leonard J Arrington
Signature Books, 1981
Unlike most Mormon histories, Saints without Halos is a treatment of the human, rather than institutional side of Mormon history. Through the fascinating experiences of seventeen Latter-day Saints, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton sketch Mormonism from its earliest beginnings to modern times. These are Saints presented not as objects of veneration, but as "human beings who, like the rest of us, struggle to be worthy of the title Latter-day Saint." Two were apostles. One was an enthusiastic supporter and friend of Joseph Smith, who eventually left the main body of the Church to lead his own band to Texas. The other was a link in the chain of a renowned Mormon family whose positions in the leading councils of the Church span virtually the entire history of Mormonism. The other fifteen individuals, except for one colorful non-Mormon advocate, are "ordinary" Latter-day Saints-faithful members who helped realize the vision of their prophetic leaders: a personal friend of Joseph Smith, missionaries and converts, a plural wife, an Indian woman, a widowed immigrant, pioneers and philosophers, bishops and blacksmiths, and even a historian. In this book, the authors of The Mormon Experience draw on their vast knowledge of Mormon diaries and other first-hand accounts to disclose the rich diversity of Mormonism as well as its unity of purpose.
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