News & Blog
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3 Nephi 8-11: Christ Comes to Bountiful, or Egypt Meets Sinai
The events described in 3 Nephi 8 at the death of Christ are a catalog of disaster. Tremendous thunderstorms spark wildfire, three days of total darkness isolate survivors in cells of grief, and the face of the land is contorted by earthquake into a death mask.
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3 Nephi 1-7: Back Where We Started
A few Sundays ago, a bishopric counselor sat on my living room couch, all smiles, to extend me a new calling: primary chorister. My heart sank. Primary chorister has been, for many years, high on my list of Church Assignments That Scare Me and That I Think I’ll Be Really Bad At.
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Fall 2024 Wonder of Scripture Lecture Schedule
This year, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship will be hosting a Wonder of Scripture Lecture Series, every Friday at 11 AM. These lectures will be held in 3714 HBLL and uploaded to our YouTube channel for on-demand streaming.
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Helaman 13-16: Spreading Rumors and Contentions Upon all the Face of the Land
While an undergraduate at BYU, I spent six weeks in a large log cabin called Timp Lodge at Aspen Grove near the Sundance Ski Resort. At this biology camp, I took courses in Ecology, limnology (the study of lakes), and aquatic entomology.
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BYU’s Maxwell Institute Announces New Research Initiatives, Full-time Fellowships for BYU Faculty, and Expanded Campus Offerings
Brigham Young University’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship has adopted four key research initiatives, says J.B. Haws, executive director. The Institute will center its efforts on the fields of Book of Mormon, Bible, Interfaith Understanding, and Latter-day Saint Discipleship.
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Helaman 7-12: Pride is More Than We Might Assume
Pride is a danger oft targeted by Latter-day Saints: in our scriptures, our lesson manuals, and our general conference addresses. We did not, of course, invent this orientation.
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Helaman 1-6: The Hero's Journey
Do you know this story? A young person of no special consequence happens across a seemingly nondescript object that turns out to be imbued with power. The object leads them on a journey through magical lands and unknown regions, toiling up forbidding mountains and facing their fears in murky forests.
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Alma 53-63: Happy for Someone Else’s Miracle
The stories associated with Helaman’s 2000 stripling warriors always stand out at the end of the book of Alma, even in a block of eleven chapters (Alma 53-63) filled with all kinds of action-packed episodes and characters. And rightly so, given how remarkable and memorable—and miraculous—the experiences of Helaman’s band truly were.
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Art Highlight: I Will Stand As the Oceans Roar
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. 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.
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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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Art Highlight: Our Title of Liberty
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. 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.
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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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Remembering Thomas F. Rogers
It is with sadness that we learn of the passing today of Thomas F. Rogers, an emeritus professor of Russian at BYU and the author of an award-winning collection of essays in our Living Faith series, Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty.
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