The Promise of Discipleship

I love what Neal Maxwell writes and have had this book for years and just felt the urge to take it out and read it again. He is not an easy guy to understand so reading this takes some time. I find myself slowing, down, thinking and rereading often. But, his views on the journey of following the Savior are profound, insightful and strike at the heart of what we must do to be true Christians. He doesnt pull any punches, and discusses events and situations of our day, foretold, and what we can and must do to have a successful journey. He is always a tough read for me but I always end up enjoying the work and learning a great deal.

This is Elder Maxwell's latest book. It's a summing-up of his favorite themes: warnings about the final days, the divine plan for each of our lives, adversity, the prophet Joseph Smith. By now, we take for granted his eloquence; we shouldn't. It's an unusual thing for a contemporary church lead to construct literary sentences that stay with you for years afterward. You could call Elder Maxwell "the Great Contextualizer." He puts the social dimensions of the gospel into perspective. It's easy to get discouraged these days reading the newspaper; Maxwell offers elegant commentary on those headlines through allusion and metaphor. I especially liked his chapter on "The Gift of the Holy Ghost" and "The Spirit World." They are marvels of concise explication of "Mormon doctrine." And here is a guy who reads *a lot* in order to fit the pieces together: in the bibliography (alongside respected LDS authors) you will find Alan Bullock, Robert Frost, Will Durant, Barbara Tuchman, Michael Harrington, Gertrude Himmelfarb, John Lukacs, Malcolm Muggeridge, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and George Will, among others. There's a splendid, pungent quote on page 40 from the great neo-comnservative historian Eugene Genovese. A must for any LDS literature collection.