Articles

How did early Latter-day Saints read the Book of Mormon? And how did that book, which the Prophet Joseph Smith called 'the most correct of any book on earth' and 'the keystone of our religion,' help Latter-day Saints make sense of their lives? In this episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast, Dr. Janiece Johnson, a Willes Center Research Fellow at the Institute, shares from her research into early Latter-day Saint readings of the Book of Mormon.

AML Press Release

Joseph Smith left a lot of documents behind when he died in 1844, from the mundane to the intriguing. Some of the more puzzling documents deal with a book of scripture in the Latter-day Saint canon called the Book of Abraham. Said to be translated from ancient papyrus, the scripture broadens the story of the Hebrew Bible's figure of Abraham.

For over ten years the Maxwell Institute has been happily nestled in its little building down the hill on the south side of campus, across from the duck pond on 8th North.We're really going to miss those ducks.We're thrilled to announce today that BYU's Board of Trustees announced it is relocating the Institute to a brand new campus building which will stand where the Faculty Office Building has long stood on the west side of campus, up the hill, adjacent to the beautiful Joseph F. Smith Building. Construction begins in early 2019 with expected completion of the new facility in spring 2020.'In that new space,' said Institute executive director Spencer Fluhman, 'the Institute will be poised for a significant campus role long into the future. Close to our colleagues in the Humanities and Religious Education and near the BYU Library and other important campus locales related to our work, the Institute will bring interested campus members together more easily and more regularly to pursue disciple-scholarship together. Our new space itself will reflect in its very design our new mission and priorities.'The Institute's new space in the West View Building will better accommodate small lectures, weekly brown bag sessions, faculty gatherings, advisory board sessions, student mentoring, the research of our resident and visiting disciple-scholars, and all the other Institute happenings. (It'll be the new home of the Maxwell Institute Podcast, for example.)In the meantime, the Institute won't quite be like Israel in the wilderness; by this December we'll be stationed in a nice corner of the Clyde Building.More updates to come! Computer engineers and artists have scrupulously labored to create this digital rendering of the Institute's future BYU home: the West View Building.