News & Blog
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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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Art Highlight: The Fruits of Our Labor
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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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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Last Call for Submissions to the 2024 Book of Mormon Art Contest
The 2024 Book of Mormon Art Contest closes on June 1, 2024 at 11:59 PM. Have you submitted your artwork yet? The contest is open to all BYU Provo undergraduate and graduate students. Winners will receive prize money, be included in an art display on campus, and be honored at a reception. All submissions will be added to the Book of Mormon Art Catalog.
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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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In Memoriam: Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
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.
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Art Highlight: The Wise Man & The Foolish Man
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.
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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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Earthly Stewardship: Lessons from the Compost Pile
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.
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Art in the Library: Approaching the Tree
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.
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Laurie Maffly-Kipp Appointed as Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies
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!
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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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