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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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

"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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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. Over the years, we have published many Book of Mormon-related resources, and now we've compiled them here for this very special Book of Mormon year. We seek to help all disciple-scholars find deeper insights and spiritual growth as they explore the Book of Mormon and its teachings during 2024.

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).

“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.”