Book of Mormon Reflections
Short essays on the Come, Follow Me readings for 2024 from Maxwell Institute scholars.
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Mosiah 7-10: Redemption from the Regret of Overzealousness
Regret is a singularly painful emotion. Who hasn’t been haunted by mental replays in which we hope against hope that somehow, impossibly, a moment from our past would just play out differently this time as we relive the agony
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Mosiah 4-6: King Benjamin and the Case of the Missing Ordinance
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.
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Mosiah 1-4: King Benjamin’s Address – Beginnings
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.
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Enos-Words of Mormon: Faith, Hope, and Data Compression in the Small Plates
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.
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Jacob 5-7: The Prophet Zenos and God’s Work of Preservation
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.
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Jacob 1-4: Anxious Love and a Firm Mind
The writings of Jacob, Lehi and Sariah’s “first-born in the wilderness,” are charged with a peculiar energy. His words skitter across waves of anxious responsibility, into troughs of grim prophecy and admonishment, through eddies of aching and tender compassion.
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Easter: Make a Little Space for Death
Easter is soon upon us. A comely season, no matter the weather. A time of promise and hope, of renewal and imminent or arrived beauty. Whatever can T.S. Eliot have been thinking when he decreed April the cruelest month?
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2 Nephi 31-33: Knowledge of the Lord Comes Only Through Discipleship
2nd Nephi 30 offers us a key to help us understand what Nephi is teaching in chapters 31-33. In chapter 30, we see the end; in chapters 31-33 we see the means.
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2nd Nephi 26-30: Familiar Spirits
Portions of this week’s reading (2 Nephi 26–30) are among the most clarion declarations in the Book of Mormon—or any scripture, really—of God’s universal love for the entire human family.
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2nd Nephi 20-25: Context or Prophecy? Embracing Cultural Difference in a Global Church
This is an exhilarating, beautiful, sobering, and hopeful ride. Yet it seems to leave Nephi with a serious problem: what can it have to say to his own people, who have left their old world to start over halfway around the globe?
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2nd Nephi 11-19: Scripture and Vision: Revelation in Audiovisual or Textual Form
“To be a prophet is both a distinction and an affliction,” writes Abraham Heschel. “The prophet bears scorn and reproach. He is stigmatized as a madman by his contemporaries, and, by some modern scholars, as abnormal.”
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2nd Nephi 6-10: They Shall Have A Perfect Knowledge of Their Enjoyment
Those words have always stood out as a peculiar formulation. We generally assume that we know when we are happy. The context of this scripture leaves unclear whether the enjoyment of which Jacob speaks is a present bliss or a future inheritance.
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2nd Nephi 3-5: Exodus
The central fact in the history of Israel is the exodus from Egypt and the settling of the Promised Land. Millennia later, the Puritans who settled in America would see themselves as exiles from the Old World, figurative Israelites who were guided to this Promised Land to establish a spiritual Zion.
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2nd Nephi 1-2: Men Are That They Might Have Joy
At dinner one evening, I asked Andrew Teal, a lecturer and Anglican chaplain at Oxford University, about his longstanding interest in and affection for the Latter-day Saints and their teachings. What was the catalyst that first intrigued him?
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1 Nephi 16-22: The Consolation of Prophecy
The journey of faith was not easy. Yes, the ball directed them to the “most fertile parts of the wilderness” (1 Nephi 16:14), but still, the travelers were “much fatigued … because of their sufferings and afflictions” (1 Nephi 16: 19-20).
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1 Nephi: 6-10: Family and Faith in the Wilderness
The urgency and difficulty of creating the conditions under which faith can take root in one’s children is a major theme in these chapters of 1 Nephi, and it’s a theme that resonates powerfully today.
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1 Nephi 1-5: God’s Generosity and a new beginning of the Book of Mormon
To encounter scripture is to encounter God’s generosity. And God knows how to give generously, “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.” (Luke 6:38). The purpose of God’s generosity is to nourish and reinforce his relationship with his children.
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Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Reflections
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
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