News & Blog
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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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What is a Disciple-Scholar? Featuring Rosalynde Frandsen Welch
"Whatever our particular fields of scholarship, the real test is individual discipleship, not scholarship. But how good it is when these two can company together, blending meekness with brightness and articulateness with righteousness." –Elder Neal A. Maxwell
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Art Highlight: Palm Sunday
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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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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2 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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2 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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2024 Book of Mormon Resources from the Maxwell Institute
As saints from across the world gather together to study the Book of Mormon for Come, Follow Me in 2024, there are many resources available to assist individuals in their studies. The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship has always been committed to nurturing disciple-scholars, encouraging students, faculty, members, and non-members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to combine study and faith.
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Pursuing Joseph in Early Syriac Literature (from Ancient Jew Review)
Kristian S. Heal. Genesis 37 and 39 in the Early Syriac Tradition. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2023. In the late 1990s, when I first thought about writing a PhD thesis on the figure of Joseph in the Syriac tradition, I did what most aspiring graduate students did at that time and consulted Sebastian Brock. He suggested focusing on the long and especially beautiful narrative poem on Joseph written in the fifth century and attributed to both Balai and Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373).
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2 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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Announcing the 2024 Book of Mormon Art Contest
The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship is seeking original art created by BYU students for the 2nd Annual Book of Mormon Art Contest. Artwork will be featured in the new Book of Mormon Art Catalog, in an art display on BYU campus, and winners will receive prize money.
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2 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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Art Highlight: Here by Thy Help I've Come
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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2 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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An Invitation to Discover the Book of Mormon Studies Podcast
I'm Rosalynde Welch, host of the new Maxwell Institute Book of Mormon Studies podcast. I've been on a lifelong journey not only to understand the meaning of the Book of Mormon, but to let its message change my heart. The words of prophets and the influence of the Spirit have lit the way.
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2 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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Art Highlight: Happy New Year!
This artwork and it's 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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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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