Maxwell Institute Podcast

In 2007, the Museum at Eldridge Street opened at the site of a restored nineteenth-century synagogue originally built by some of the first Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City. Visitors to the museum are invited to stand along indentations on the floor where footprints of congregants past have worn down the soft pinewood. Here, many feel a palpable connection to the history surround...

One of the most interesting days of my life took place a few years ago when I co-conducted a tour of the Jordan River Temple in Utah for non-Latter-day Saint specialists in American religion. As we walked from room to room, my co-tour guide, my second mission president, did his best to anticipate questions that my scholarly friends may have had. He did a great job! The most interesting part of the...

In Adam S. Miller’s lecture, “The Necessity of God: First person, Present Tense, Imperative Mood” Miller talks about Tim Farnsworth, a man who cannot stop walking from the fictional book  The Unnamed . Miller said that everyone has different crosses to bear, and although we cannot change them, like Farnsworth cannot stop walking, we have to learn how to love and accept these challenges in order to...

The Book of Mormon Art Catalog seeks to provide unprecedented access to visual imagery inspired by the Book of Mormon through a comprehensive, open access, and searchable digital database. In this role, the Book of Mormon Art Catalog supports research and education, aids scholarly and artistic work, promotes a greater knowledge of artists worldwide, provides a study and devotional resource for mem...

The post Abide: Nahum; Habakkuk; Zephaniah appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Institute | BYU .

One of my favorite sermons in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a sermon delivered by President Hugh B. Brown at BYU. It’s entitled God is the Gardner; I’m confident that many of you have heard this before. But I love the part at the end where, when dealing with a massive professional disappointment, that Brother Brown says that, he takes his fist and he shakes it a...

The post Abide: Amos and Obadiah appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Institute | BYU .

Throughout the scriptures, the Lord and His prophets teach of covenants, the ability for us to bind ourselves to God through the power of the priesthood. Sometimes, though, we forget that we are also in covenant relationship to those we hold most dear. Indeed, that not only are we covenentally bound to our family members, but to all those in our community. We’ll discuss covenants, and much, much m...

Andrew Jenson undertook a lifelong quest to render the LDS historical record complete and comprehensive. As Assistant Church Historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jenson tirelessly carried out his office’s archival mission and advocated for fixed record keeping to become a duty for Latter-day Saints. Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno offer a new in-depth study of Jenson...

The post Abide: Daniel 1-6 appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Institute | BYU .

We are blessed to live in a time of prophets. I define this in two ways. The first is that we are fortunate to live in a time where the priesthood has been restored and that the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints speaks for the Lord under priesthood authority. The second is to live in a time where God conveys His word to use through good people of all faiths or no faith a...

Latter-day Saints recognize the Book of Mormon as the “keystone of our religion,” a book that will bring a person closer to Christ than by any other book. How do non-Latter-day Saints read the Book of Mormon, though, especially in their academic work? To answer that question, we’ll speak to Dr. Rosalynde Frandsen Welch, Research Fellow and Associate Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute, about...

In last week’s episode, we discussed how Jeremiah introduces ideas about seemingly disparate events, including the apocalyptic here-and-now and the hope of a better future for all of humankind. As we continue into our second episode on Jeremiah, we take a turn to earthy practicalities. How do we commit ourselves to God’s work? How do we recognize prophetic teachings? And what’s important about the...

The post Abide: Jeremiah Part I appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Institute | BYU .

In June 2022, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship and the David O. McKay Center for Intercultural Understanding hosted a conference based upon Patrick Mason’s and David Pulsipher’s new book  Proclaim Peace: The Restoration’s Answer to an Age of Conflict .  Participants–scholars and non-scholars alike–reflected together on the interpersonal, ethical, and social dimensions of Chr...

Today we are joined by Dr. Joseph Spencer, a philosopher, theologian and Assistant Professor of Ancient Scripture here at Brigham Young University. Dr. Spencer is the editor of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and a leading scholar of the Book of Mormon. He is a prolific author, and among his recent works are The Vision of All: Twenty-five Lectures on Isaiah in Nephi’s Record (Kofford, 2016)...

Listen to Pastor Derwin Gray and Vicki Gray speak on Derwin’s new book, Healing Our Racial Divide: What the Bible Says, and the First Christians Knew, About Racial Reconciliation! Link to book: Amazon The post Maxwell Institute Podcast #149: Healing Our Racial Divide, with Derwin and Vicki Gray appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Institute | BYU .

Jesus promises in the Gospel of John that he will not leave us comfortless, but that He will come to us. He promises in Matthew that he will give us rest when we are weary and heavy-laden. In my experience, though, that isn’t at the first instance of pain, whether it’s physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional. God asks us to find answers, to knock, to work and watch and fight and pray with all ou...

Richard Bushman once told me that “panic precedes revelation.” Dr. Bushman was discussing the process by which Joseph Smith received the First Vision (recall the line from the Pearl of Great Price that “at that moment of great alarm” that the Father and Son appeared to the boy prophet). While reading, Isaiah, though, I think that the same can be said for Isaiah. He lived in difficult times, with w...

Isaiah. Latter-day Saints have a special relationship to this Old Testament prophet. Not only do we recognize prophets across all dispensations, but his words were carried by Lehi’s family to the Americas. How do we think about Isaiah? What should we know about the construction of the book of Isaiah? We discuss this, and much more, on this episode of Abide: A Maxwell Institute Podcast. The post Ab...

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs can fall by the wayside when we study them in Sunday School. They don’t always fit into the narratives that we understand about dispensations of authority or give us sustained treatises in the way that a theologian might consider during personal scripture study. However, in preparing for this week, our team recognized the value of these books and under...

Kate Holbrook, PhD (1972–2022) was a leading voice in the study of Latter-day Saintwomen and Latter-day Saint foodways. As managing historian of women’s history atthe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints history department, she wrote, studied,and interpreted history full-time. Her major research interests were religion, gender,and food. Her primary professional activity was to discover, enc...

A book has many lives. It’s thought, it’s edited, it’s printed, it’s reprinted, it’s commentated on, and this repeats, if the book merits it, ad infinitum. This is certainly true for the Bible as a whole, but, I suggest, for the Psalms in particular. How do we think about Psalms as an ancient text conveyed for a modern people? The post Abide: Psalms Part Three appeared first on Neal A. Maxwell Ins...

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation’s sacred religious and legal texts – the Bible and the Constitution – to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters’ emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth...

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation’s sacred religious and legal texts – the Bible and the Constitution – to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters’ emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth...