Ashley Pun Eveson

This week’s reading (Mosiah 4–6) plunges us into a mystery. These wonderful chapters continue Mormon’s narration of what is said and done at the Temple of Zarahemla as King Benjamin gathers his people in preparation for his transfer of the kingdom to his son, Mosiah.

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye was an eight-leaf clover. Rare in every field she graced, yet tenacious and humble, she brought a spirit of pragmatic peace-making into seminar rooms, hospital rooms, and (figurative) war rooms. A scholar of Chinese history, Melissa turned her clear eyes to the global dynamics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the community that nurtured and challenged her from birth and that elicited her best thinking. Melissa hardly slackened the energy of her writing and speaking over many years of treatment and illness with cancer, continuing to spearhead projects and address audiences until the end of her life.

This artwork and its accompanying caption were created by Meranda Brodowski, a student artist and designer at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Meranda is from California and has worked at the Maxwell Institute since January 2023. She is a Fine Arts Major at Brigham Young University, with an emphasis in technology. She strives to create inspiring artwork that represents her faith and testimony.

In her 2024 New Year’s message, Queen Margarethe II of Denmark announced she would step down and hand over the crown to her son, who would become King Frederik X. A similar scene, including an aging monarch, a royal transition, and a new beginning, introduces the book of Mosiah.

When we open the three single-chapter books of Enos, Jarom, and Omni, what we notice first is how short they are. After the beginning account of Enos’s wrestle before God, narrative time accelerates dramatically and we see big swaths of history speed past in just a few verses.

In Jacob 5, Jacob transcribes onto the plates the words of an extrabiblical prophet named Zenos. As elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, Jacob assumes his immediate audience and his later readers are already familiar with Zenos.

For years, BYU has diverted its food waste from landfills to produce its own mulch, a combination of table scraps, leaf litter, grass clippings, and wood chips. And for years, we’ve spread that mulch in tree rings, flower beds, and hillsides.

This collection of new artworks was commissioned for "Approaching the Tree: Interpreting 1 Nephi 8." Published by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University, this book is an invitation to view again one of the Book of Mormon's best-known texts. From the fresh interactions of an array of artists and scholars from Angola to Portugal and BYU to Oxford, the theological significance of Lehi's dream emerges anew. Together these able guides show, once again, both book and dream to be rich and deep, and worthy of repeated reflection. "Approaching the Tree: Interpreting 1 Neph 8" is co-edited by Jennifer Champoux, Benjamin Keogh, and Joseph M. Spencer.

Congratulations to Laurie Maffly-Kipp—a visiting scholar at the Maxwell Institute in 2019 and 2023—on her appointment as the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia!