This post was written by Adam Miller and Joseph Spencer, co-directors of the Latter-day Saint theology seminar.
Thanks to the generous support of the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Studies, and the Institute’s Executive Director, Spencer Fluhman, we were again able to direct a co-sponsored summer seminar in Latter-day Saint Theology, this time at Columbia University in New York City from June 19 to July 1, 2022.
We were able to liveand work on the Columbia University campus for two weeks without distractionsor the ordinary obligations of everyday life. This greatly facilitated theintense focus and sense of close-knit community that are crucial to theseminar’s success. It also facilitated the participation of guest scholars fromHarvard, Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins University, scholars who wouldn’thave been able to join us otherwise.
As in the past, the seminar’s directors and six participantsworked for two weeks on this year’s text, Enos 1:1-18. These eighteen verses inEnos constitute an extraordinarily rich and deeply personal text about Enos’sown “wrestle” with God as he sought forgiveness for his sins and then, in turn,pled for the future of his own people and his brothers, the Lamanites.
The first week of the seminar was dedicated to generating close,collaborative readings of the text, treating just three or four assigned verseseach day. Seminar participants focused each morning on writing a short, formalpaper on the day’s assigned verses. They then spent five hours each afternooninformally discussing the details and implications of the day’s verses andsharing the formal work they’d prepared that morning. This first week ofseminar-style work is extremely intense, with participants often working ten totwelve hours each day to prepare for and then participate in the day’scollaborative work.
The second week of the seminar then centered on writing individualpapers, grounded in the first week’s shared work, to be presented at a public conferenceon the seminar’s final day. Participants drafted full conference papers in lessthan three days, workshopped those papers on Wednesday, and then presentedpolished drafts at the conference on Friday.
These papers will now be collected, published, and preserved in anew volume of the seminar’s proceedings.
When we began organizing the seminar in 2008, we had a vision ofwhat the project might accomplish over the coming decades. That vision turnedon the conviction that, as a long-term project, the value of these seminarswould be compounding, with each new seminar expanding the community of scholarswho have participated and with each new volume of proceedings deepening thevalue of the publications that preceded it.
With more than a decade’s worth of work under our belt, we believethis vision is proving true. And we hope that it will continue to prove truefor many years to come.