I'm How did I not see this coming?

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the year of polygamy podcast.

I'm your host, Lindsay.

And now is a good time to remind you that this podcast is meant to go in order.

So if you're one of those wicked devils who is skipping around, you need to repent, back up, and start in episode one.

The context really helps you understand what we're talking about.

Today I'm excited to start a new project that I think is pretty remarkable.

You know I'm a history nerd. I love this kind of stuff. And Mormons are a record keeping people and we're really truly

lucky in that fact. We also have a treasure trove of sermons left behind by frontier leaders.

The Journal of Discourses, of course, is one of the major ones, but we have things like the

Joseph Smith Papers Project that shows that

there's more than just the journal discourses. I've often quoted from this kind of source material

before, but then I got this idea. What if we try and record these sermons as if we were listening

to them ourselves? Because here's the thing, when you're Mormon, you spend decades of your life listening

to your Mormon leaders talk. That's just part of the gig. I've spent hours and hours listening

to contemporary Mormon leaders, speak their sermons at pulpits, at general conference, or at

firesides and things like that. And there really is something different about the spoken word. You know, we quote these sermons a lot. They're quoted in books. We read them.

Or people take them out of context, you know, the little salacious quote of Brigham Young said

something terrible and put it on a meme. But I wanted to see what it looked like in this sort of

context. So as an experiment, I had a friend read me one of young

sermons out loud. And it was kind of a crazy experience. All of a sudden, I was transported.

New meaning and life came to this sermon. Little jokes in terms of phrases that were previously lost

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