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Church releases final volume of ‘Saints’ history

Oct 29, 2024, 6:04 PM | Updated: 7:29 pm

SALT LAKE CITY — A major history project for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now complete.

The church has released the fourth and final volume of “Saints,” which aims to bring the faith’s past to life through the eyes of its members.

The Church History Department held a news conference Tuesday afternoon celebrating the volume’s release while talking about the work it took to get to this point.

The project was first approved by the faith’s governing First Presidency in 2010, and the first volume of the series was released in 2018.

Now six years after that, historian Lisa Olsen Tait – who worked on the project nearly the entire time – said it’s “really satisfying” to see it all come to fruition.

“It’s been really fun, really exciting, and a lot of work,” she said. “To see it all come together is just a really great day for us.”

Other histories of the church have been written before, but historians said this one is designed to be more relatable and readable.

“We don’t have a strong narrative voice that tells you here’s what happened and here’s what to think about it,” said Olsen Tait. “We just let people’s stories speak for themselves. That’s very powerful and, I think, very sacred.”

The four-volume series also aims to tackle some of the more complicated episodes in the faith’s past.

“When we face a challenging issue in history, we just tried to address it,” said Matthew Grow, managing director of the Church History Department, “and we tried to talk about it, and we tried to explain it as best we know how from the records we have.”

Grow said the stories of members are real and authentic.

“As Latter-day Saints, we don’t need to be afraid of our past,” said Grow. “We have an amazing history.”

Elder Hugo Martinez, a member of the faith’s Quorum of the Seventy, called the project an “inspired work.” He said the final volume tells the story of the church’s growth – especially outside the United States – in an accessible way.

“The style in which it is written is so conducive for us to understand it better,” he said, “and to be able to feel attracted to the story.”

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Church releases final volume of ‘Saints’ history