News & Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.