Book of Mormon Reflections
Short essays on the Come, Follow Me readings for 2024 from Maxwell Institute scholars.
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Alma 43-52: The Irreplaceable Weapon
Shortly after I started my PhD program at the University of Edinburgh, my parents came to visit us in Scotland. Walking along the busy Princes Street, my dad couldn’t take his eyes off of the iconic Edinburgh Castle, which sits atop an extinct volcano in the center of the city.
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Alma 39-42: The Justice of God
Corianton was not the only soul to be disturbed by the scriptural language of punishment, misery, and retribution. What Christian has not been troubled by the prevalence of images of anger and doom that await the wicked?
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Alma 36-38: Judgment and Transformation
Alma the Younger’s conversion is one of the more memorable stories in the Book of Mormon-- not only because it is recounted three times (first in Mosiah 27, then to his sons Helaman and Shiblon in Alma chapters 36 and 38) but because of its tenebristic drama.
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Alma 32-35: Planting Love
Scripture does not read itself; no text does. It takes a reader to come along and make sense of the language on the page for it to have meaning that persists in the world. Scripture is a particularly rich site of meaning-making because of all the ways that we, as a community of faith, invest it with authority.
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Alma 30-31: Foolishness and Covenant Knowledge
We often focus on Korihor’s worldview. We zoom in on his shift between agnosticism and atheism. Another way to approach this text is to examine how Korihor frames the church. Paul taught that the wisdom of God is foolishness to the world (see 1 Corinthians 2:14).
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Alma 23-29: Superman, Strawberry Ice Cream, and Stains
As a young boy, my favorite superhero was Superman. I often wore a blue t-shirt with the iconic S symbol under a white dress shirt like Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent. Sometimes, I even wore a clip-on tie.
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Alma 17-22: Before Faith
These chapters sketch a cluster of encounters, principally between Ammon and Aaron (converted missionary sons of King Mosiah II and friends of Alma the younger) and two Lamanite kings: Lamoni and his unnamed father and sovereign.
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Alma 13-16: What Should We Do with Terrifying Scripture?
“In this book, my task is to tell sad stories as I hear them. Indeed, they are tales of terror with women as victims.” These are the opening words of a difficult and important book, Texts of Terror, by the biblical scholar Phyllis Trible.
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Alma 8-12: Cultivating a Soft Heart
Let's think about hearts. At the close of Alma chapter 11, Amulek has just confounded Zeezrom, not by defeating him in a contest of logic nor by the force of his superior skills in the art of debate and persuasion. Instead, he has looked into this man's heart and has begun to help him recover a deeper and truer self.
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Alma 5-7: Remembering and Experiencing Redemption
In chapter 5, we see Alma the Younger recount the origins of the church of God that his father Alma founded after Abinadi’s preaching. Alma the Younger reminds the people of the three occasions of deliverance from bondage that his father’s people experienced in the events of Mosiah 18-24: deliverance from the people of King Noah, the Lamanites, and sin.
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Mosiah 29-Alma 4: The Ratatouille Principle
There are many reasons to love the principle that the “preacher was no better than the hearer” (Alma 1:26). I want to speak in favor of one small such reason. I can’t stop thinking of it as “the Ratatouille Principle.”
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Mosiah 25-28: Generational Ruptures and Reconciliations in the Book of Mosiah
The chapters at the end of the book of Mosiah see an important change in the shape of the story we’ve been following (or trying to follow, at any rate). From the time of the first King Mosiah, peoples and records have divided and re-divided into ever-narrower strands of story: Zeniff’s colony splits from the Zarahemla-based group; then Alma’s people depart into the wilderness; then Noah and his cronies leave their families, and their group fractures into multiple sub-factions.
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Mosiah 18-24: To Know the Lord Is to Live in Covenant with Him
I’ve always thought that these chapters were a story of two peoples—the people of King Limhi and the people of Alma. But on closer reading I noticed a third group of people that undergoes dramatic change in these chapters—the Lamanites. All three groups learn something that changes their physical conditions, but their spiritual change and relationship with the Lord vary.
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Mosiah 11-17: A Lonely Prophet and a Lost King
The book of Mosiah is built around a contrast between two kings, the righteous King Benjamin and the wicked King Noah. This pair of kings and their character differences are central to the book’s political theology. But there’s another study in contrast presented in these chapters: the prophet and the king. Where Benjamin combines these roles at the opening of Mosiah, the two archetypes are teased apart in Mosiah 11-17 and pasted onto the opposed figures of Abinadi and Noah.
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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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