The Questions We Should Be Asking, with Melissa Faith Jensen and Sam Petersen
From Brigham Young University’s Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute Podcast: Faith Illuminating Scholarship
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Questions We Should Be Asking. My name is Rosalynde Welch, and I have something a little different for you today: interviews with two of our student researchers, Melissa Jensen and Sam Petersen. BYU is celebrating another graduating class, and amid all the pomp and circumstance we thought we’d spotlight two of our own graduates. The Institute runs on the energy and ideas of students: they staff our front desk, assist at our events, edit our podcasts, and film our lectures. And some work as research assistants with our fellows, where they receive one-on-one mentorship as they learn the methods of scholarly research.
I invited Melissa Jensen and Sam Petersen on the podcast to talk about their experience at the Maxwell Institute and share some ideas from the papers they recently presented at our annual student research symposium. Melissa and I reflected on the Book of Mormon’s theology of miracles, and how it has changed the way we look for God’s hand in our lives. Sam Petersen shared some thoughts on Joseph Smith’s prophetic teachings on sacred matter and what he calls the “sacramental” character of the material world. And Melissa and Sam both reflected on what “disciple scholarship” has come to mean to them during their time at the Maxwell Institute. I hope you enjoy my conversations with these two exemplary BYU graduates.
Interview with Melissa Faith Jensen
Rosalynde F. Welch: Melissa Jensen, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.
Melissa Faith Jensen: Thank you.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Melissa, I have the pleasure of knowing you well because you've worked as my research assistant for about a year now. I'd like you to introduce yourself to our audience. Tell them where you're from, what your background is, what you're studying, and then tell them how you first became aware of the Maxwell Institute.
Melissa Faith Jensen: Sure. Yeah, I study English here at BYU and I'm in the creative writing track. I love writing gospel scholarship and creative nonfiction and poetry. And I'm from Northern California and I have really enjoyed just studying here at BYU and meeting you Rosalynde and all the other mentors that I found here.
Rosalynde F. Welch: So when was the first time you heard about the Maxwell Institute? Do you know when that was? And how did you become acquainted and involved in the work we do here?
Melissa Faith Jensen: Yeah, I think my first semester back from the mission last year in January, I came to one of the Wonders of Scripture lectures and the executive director, Dr. Haws sat next to me and I didn't know who he was, but he introduced himself not as the director, but just as JB. And we struck up a conversation and as I realized that he was involved with the Maxwell Institute, that he was in the leadership here,
I started asking some more questions about what you do. And I was so intrigued by the presenter. I believe that the first lecture that I watched was Dr. Barlow's on Time and that really touched me. And I just wanted to get to know everybody here. And so I asked him how students could get involved and he put me on an email list and actually wanted some students to give advice for how to make the Institute more appealing and accessible to the students. And so I came to a few of those meetings and that's how I got to know everybody and decided I really wanted to work here. So I just asked around.
Rosalynde F. Welch: And I'm so glad you did. Yes, you emailed me and you showed a lot of initiative and I could tell right away that you were somebody who we wanted to work with. You are exactly the kind of student that we hope to bring through these doors. So you mentioned our Wonder of Scripture lectures. We hold those fall and winter semesters every Friday morning at 11. They're open to the public for anybody who happens to live in the area, but we also post them on our YouTube channel after the fact and they're well worth exploring. Every week we invite a scholar to reflect on the wonder of scripture, whether they focus in on a specific passage and offer us a new reading or think broadly about the role of scripture and the meaning of scripture. We get all kinds of things and it's always well worth our time.
Aside from Wonder of Scripture, I'm wondering,
Melissa Faith Jensen: Amen.
Rosalynde F. Welch: What else at the Maxwell Institute has been meaningful to you as a student?
Melissa Faith Jensen: I think the most meaningful thing for me at the Maxwell Institute has been the mentorship that I found both in you and in Dr. Barlow, who I worked for over the summer. And just other conversations that I've had with scholars here, I take a class from Dr. Terryl Givens, and he's really opened my mind, especially on the theme of the Atonement of Christ and how to see that in a new way. And so I've just learned so much, not only about the gospel of Jesus Christ, but also how to approach asking the right kinds of questions. And I think I'm coming away, not that I'm leaving anytime soon, but I'm coming away with a larger perspective as to what living the gospel looks like and how I can be more active wrestler in understanding what the Lord has for me and really coming to know Him, not just know about Him.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Hmm. Taking ownership for your own spiritual life. Feeling empowered and active in your relationship with God. Yeah.
Melissa Faith Jensen: Exactly. And that's really just been mediated or come about through one-on-one conversations that I've had with the scholars here. And I just feel so privileged to get to know them and their thoughts.
Rosalynde F. Welch: The work of the Maxwell Institute is organized in various ways. We have various different concentrations of our research. We have various different audiences, but they're all united by a focus on disciple scholarship. And what we mean by that is the academic study of religion that is informed by faith, right? So it's a believer who who enters into the academic world and uses academic tools to study their own faith tradition, maybe somebody else's faith tradition, scripture, theology, lived experience. So that's what I have in mind when I say disciple scholarship.
But Melissa, I'm wondering what disciple scholarship means to you. Were you familiar with that phrase before you became acquainted with the Maxwell Institute? And what have you come to understand during your time here?
Melissa Faith Jensen: Sure, I think I had heard the phrase once or twice in a BYU devotional, or I know that President Justin Collins has talked about it several times in his devotionals and speeches, but I really come to know what disciple scholarship means in my personal life and in my work here. I would say it's, it's comprised of three elements. The first would be just a focus on Jesus Christ and the source of truth. I think scholarship can easily become
Melissa Faith Jensen: superfluous. Discipleship can easily become… focused on the what and not the why. And so when we keep Jesus Christ at the center and our intent is to become one with him instead of just understand fascinating facts, that's the disciple part of disciple scholarship.
And secondly, I would say just asking curious questions. That's what stood out to me more than probably anything else during the Wonders of Scripture lectures and during my conversations here and as I read the scholarship that you've published, I'm just astounded at the questions that come to your minds that I've never considered before and how one verse of scripture or one selection from another book or piece of literature can spark so many curiosities. And I think that once you ask one question, it's so much easier to ask another. And that comes from a respect for the text as well, I believe.
The last aspect of disciples scholarship, I think, is knowing where to turn and what resources to look at and being open to going beyond the traditional sources. That's what I've seen to be unique here at the Maxwell is that when I have one of those questions that I'm researching, you or another scholar has turned me to other scholars in the larger Christian tradition or pieces of literature or ancient philosophy and you're all just so well read that there's some gem from the archives of the world that speaks to what I'm wondering about and asks similar or more elevated questions.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Well, that is music to my ears because that is exactly what we aim to do. That's a part of our mission statement, is to link Latter-day Saints to the broader world of religious ideas. The Restoration is a treasure trove and there is a trove of reflection and ideas and thought outside of our own tradition that can greatly enrich our own discipleship.
Elder Maxwell, who I believe is the first one to coin the phrase, Disciple Scholarship, he talked about our project as a form of consecration. In consecration, as you know, we bring our treasures and we place them on the altar for the good of our community, right? That's exactly what we strive to do here at the Maxwell Institute. Each one of our fellows brings his or her treasures, the methods and the knowledge, the wisdom and the questions, as you pointed out, that we have gleaned from our training and we offer them up on the altar in the service of our community.
So let's talk a little bit about the disciple scholarship that you and I have done together over the past year. I know the answer to the question I'm about to ask you, but I still want to hear you explain it. What's the project that you and I have been working on together, Melissa?
Melissa Faith Jensen: Yeah, we've been working on a reference guide that we're calling the Theological Dictionary of the Book of Mormon. It is. It makes me feel very important. I'm just kidding. But this dictionary addresses a wide array of themes that the Book of Mormon brings up, such as some more basic ones you might find in the index, such as
Rosalynde F. Welch: It's such a grand title, isn't it?
Melissa Faith Jensen: faith or gratitude or the plan of salvation. And then we go into some more theological themes such as eschatology or ecclesiology. And then we also just look at certain concepts or words that come up often such as prophets or miracles.
We have been asking questions to the Book of Mormon, letting the Book of Mormon answer for itself, rather than just turning to our background knowledge or what we're already thinking on the subject.
Rosalynde F. Welch: It's really impressive what you have accomplished during our time, Melissa. This is a document that now is approaching 100 pages. It has dozens of entries and it's going to be a living document for me that I can consult and add to and use as an ongoing resource for my research in the Book of Mormon. It's been just tremendously helpful.
One of the, today you presented at the Maxwell Institute's Student Research Symposium and you presented a little bit from your work, and in particular you talked about the entry you've written on miracles. This entry originated from a conversation that you and I had talking about the way that the word and the idea of miracles is used in our religious community.
Melissa Faith Jensen: Sure. Yeah, it was very edifying. I've wondered if we use the word miracle too generously or what a miracle really means, how God would define that. Just because, especially with the culture of here at BYU, so many returned missionaries who have been taught to seek and expect miracles, it's easy to call anything a miracle. And I just wanted to understand what the Book of Mormon had to say about that. And you Rosalynde also had some similar reservations about the topic. And by no means do I want to say that miracles are less probable or less common than we usually talk about them. But I just want to be accurate and understand what the Lord is really doing when we ask for divine assistance.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Yeah. So what did we find? What did you find when you went to the Book of Mormon and asked that question of it?
Melissa Faith Jensen: Yeah, the Book of Mormon calls specific events miracles very rarely. The prophets talk about miracles as a concept, as something that we can seek and expect, yes, that when we exercise faith, God will come through and perform miraculous works on our behalf. But as far as calling particular supernatural events a miracle, that happens very few times in the Book of Mormon.
And we thought, we realized that when an event is called a miracle, it's usually at a temporal distance, or in other words, a prophet is looking back and saying, remember that thing that happened to this other person 40 years ago? That was a miracle, wasn't it? Or Jesus Christ, when he comes in 500 years, he is going to perform this and that miracle. And so the Book of Mormon speakers hesitate to call something that they personally experience a miracle, but they'll use the word to describe past or future events.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Yeah, and one insight that was especially powerful to me is that when Book of Mormon writers talk about miracles, often they're describing the power that is given to someone to obey a commandment that God has given them. And that's slightly different from what we see in the New Testament, right? In the New Testament, I'm thinking of the Gospel of John here, miraculous signs are given to testify of the divine power of Christ. Of course, they do that in the Book of Mormon as well, but in particular, it seems as though miracles there are given in specific circumstances, and that is when God has asked us to do something, and he then enables us through his grace to accomplish that thing. That is what Book of Mormon authors are willing and eager to call a miracle.
Melissa Faith Jensen: For sure, yeah. It's much less about proving God's divinity or power or authority in the Book of Mormon and more about providing a way for us to accomplish what he's asked or delivering us from bondage or danger.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Yeah. So how has that insight influenced your own spiritual life? Has it changed the way you look for miracles in your life?
Melissa Faith Jensen: Yeah, when I look back on my questions about what to call a miracle and how to seek them, I think it orients me to what are God's purposes behind His especially conspicuous assistance for me. When I need help with something, I know I can turn to God and get that divine assistance. But when I'm just seeking proof or evidence of His presence, then it's not as readily available, you might say. Or I want to focus my efforts on seeking miracles that accomplish his purposes and that helped me to help others also accomplish his purposes rather than just get proof that he exists or that he's there.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Yeah, that's been a really powerful insight in my own life too, Melissa. I've thought about that conversation many times and it has really helped me. So I'm just delighted that we could work through these questions together. It's been so rewarding and so spiritually edifying.
As we wrap up here, I want you to share what's in your future. You'll be graduating here in just a couple of weeks from the date of recording. Tell us what's next for you. And then I want to know, as we say goodbye to our listeners, what's the most important thing that you'll take with you from your undergraduate experience here at BYU?
Melissa Faith Jensen: For sure. Okay, so after graduation, I am planning to keep working here at the Maxwell Institute over the summer, and I'm thrilled to be continuing on this project and looking into some more research with Rosalynde. And in the fall, I'm going to start a master's program here at BYU called Instructional Psychology and Technology that focuses on course design and developing curriculum. Ultimately, I want to be a religious educator. I would love to teach religion here at BYU.
And for my BYU experience, the answer is always the people, isn't it? So I would say that my most meaningful experience and blessing here has been the friendships that I've made, particularly those people who have just such elevated lifestyles and intentions that they invite me daily to repent. And I had never had a friendship like that before I came here to BYU. And I didn't really believe in the power of friendship before I came to BYU. But my roommates and my coworkers, the people that I serve with and that I go to church with, I just feel so uplifted and brightened by their presence and motivated to become closer to to my Savior. And so I hope to, that's why I'm sticking around because I don't want to leave these people
Rosalynde F. Welch: Well, Melissa, you have uplifted and brightened my life over the past year. You're a wonderful person. We've been so fortunate to have you with us at the Maxwell Institute. Thank you for joining me today on the Maxwell Institute podcast.
Melissa Faith Jensen: Thank you Rosalynde, it's a pleasure.
Interlude
You’ve just been listening to Melissa Jensen reflecting on miracles in the Book of Mormon. Next, I sat down with Sam Petersen, who has been working with Dr. Philip Barlow here at the Institute. Sam brought some fascinating ideas from his research comparing Joseph Smith and John Henry Newman, an 19th-century Anglican--and eventually Catholic--priest and theologian. The two men have more in common than you may think. Here's my conversation with Sam.
Interview with Sam Petersen
Rosalynde F. Welch: Sam Petersen, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast.
Sam Petersen: Thank you. I'm happy to be here with you.
Rosalynde F. Welch: We are spotlighting a few of our amazing student researchers here at the Maxwell Institute. And we've invited you on to talk a little bit about your project here at the Institute and your experience here. So tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, what you're majoring in, and how you first got involved with the Maxwell Institute.
Sam Petersen: Yeah, so I'm from a little town just south of Seattle called Maple Valley. It's about as quaint as it sounds. It's just nestled right up in the foothills of Mount Rainier. Matter of fact, Main Street lines up directly with Mount Rainier. And so on the rare day that there's not a cloud in the sky, it looks pretty gorgeous. Here at BYU, I study history, philosophy, French, and political science.
Rosalynde F. Welch: For those keeping track at home, that's one major and three minors, right? Amazing.
Sam Petersen: Yes, ma'am. Yeah, then then as to how I became familiar with the Maxwell Institute. So I spent the first two years of my college experience over at the Air Force Academy. And when I got back from my mission, I realized--I'd been training to be a pilot and I realized that that wasn't kind of the vocational path that I wanted to go on. And I decided I would transfer over to BYU. And I'd become familiar with Dr. Givens and some of the work that he did and just fell in love with that and wanted to be involved in one way, or form.
And so when I was visiting campus, I just kind of walked in and Dr. Barlow was here and was gracious enough to pull me into his office and have a chat and offered me a position to be able to work with him. And that's been, that's made all the difference over the last few years that I've been here at the Y.
Rosalynde F. Welch: That's amazing. So first of all, I love that you walked through our doors. We welcome visitors. We're located here in the south end of the main floor of the Westview building. And we love it when visitors stop by. Second of all, amazing that you met Dr. Barlow, who went on to become your mentor, on your very first visit here. Did you already know that you would major in American religious history when you met him, or was it his influence that guided you towards that course of study?
Sam Petersen: I think it was definitely, history has always been my passion. Matter of fact, I like to tell this story. I was a little kid, had this massive crush on this girl and her and my mom were in a Relief Society presidency together. And one day, I was on the bus and noticed that this girl was coming and as each stop came closer towards the house, she wasn't getting off. And I was starting to wonder, oh, is she coming over? so she ended up, she did end up coming over. And so, you know, first time, sixth grade boy, you know, had a girl over at the house. I decided what I wanted to do to impress her was I pulled out a picture encyclopedia of 18th century naval warships and decided that I would show her my favorite ones. And so I've always, I've, well, she's married now.
So, but, yeah, so I've always, I've always loved history. And, you know, in my first semester of the Air Force Academy, I declared that as my major and
Rosalynde F. Welch: How’d that work out for you, Sam?
Okay.
Sam Petersen: just fell in love with it and all the myriad forms that it, you know, can come in. But coming into BYU, particularly as I started working with Dr. Barlow and then also with Dr. Fluhman over in the history department, I kind of was able to narrow in on my niche. so kind of more generally studying American religious history has been, yeah, definitely a result of that. So, yeah.
Rosalynde F. Welch: That's so inspiring. And you really are kind of a success story for what we hope that students can take from the Maxwell Institute's efforts. I'm curious how you've come to understand what disciple scholarship is.
Sam Petersen: Yeah, that's a fantastic question.
There's this philosopher that I really love, Simone Weil, and she says something along the lines of, you know, prayer is an act of orienting attention. And I think when I look at scholarship, I think a way you could qualify that is an act of giving attention as well. And if you were to, you know, kind of equate the two, in that sense, I would say it's very much been kind of a form of prayerful worship.
You know, Elder Maxwell says the gospel is...inexhaustible. And I think as we orient our attention and combine that kind of with prayerful and worshipful attitudes, there's an abundance and a richness and an overall beauty to the work that I get to do here in the university--and hope to be able to continue to do on after graduation as well--that comes to bear that has just been so, has produced so much good fruit in my life. and continues to do so. So I think Discipleship is all about just cultivating that ground, cultivating that abundance, you know, putting the best ideas and everything that we can bring to bear into conversation with the Gospel because the Gospel is always worth having the best conversations about.
Rosalynde F. Welch: That's a really beautiful way of reformulating something that we say often around here. Elder Maxwell, of course, is our namesake and really our patron saint, as it were. He's our example and really was the first thinker to formalize, I think, this method or this practice of disciple scholarship. And he said, wrote that for a scholar, academic research is a form of worship.
And you've refined that a little bit more and you've specifically identified it as a kind of prayer. And it's a prayer inasmuch as it trains our attention.
But this raises a question for me. Prayers, of course, are offered up in praise of God. So if we think about our scholarship as a kind of prayer, that suggests to me that it has a very particular purpose or particular end, right? Which is for the glory of God or for the edification of his body in the form of the Church, rather than for maybe our own individual status or reputation or resume lines or whatever it be. You gave a wonderful talk at our Maxwell Institute Student Research Symposium last week.
Sam Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Rosalynde F. Welch: And this was actually a central theme of what you argued in that paper. So preview for our listeners what that paper was about and what you explored there.
Sam Petersen: Yeah, so the paper is titled “The Scandal of Sacred Matter: Comparing Joseph Smith and John Henry Newman.” So for those of you who don't know who John Henry Newman is, he's this revolutionary figure in the Church of England during the 1830s and he spurs this movement called the Oxford Movement which is in a lot of ways a kind liturgical reformation or revolution within the Anglican Communion. Newman himself ends up becoming Catholic later on down his life, but the movement generates...
Sam Petersen: generates a response within Anglicanism as to kind of act as a Catholic revival of sorts within the communion there.
And so normally, you know, John Henry Newman and Joseph Smith aren't two folks who are generally put into conversation with each other.
Rosalynde F. Welch: And Newman, of course, was this highly educated Oxford man, Highly cultured and refined. And then we have Joseph Smith, who's this rough frontiersman, uneducated--though deeply intellectually curious--American prophet. So on the surface, as you say, they are polar opposites.
Sam Petersen: Yeah, on the surface completely. But there are some underlying similarities, which I found interesting. And particularly, was both of them kind of growing up within this larger Anglo-American evangelical sphere. And it seems that in the process of both of their kind of like religious imaginations, a lot of their thinking is in response to that and kind of what they perceive as a deficiency of sorts in one way, shape, or form with that worldview and that frame, kind of religious framework.
And there was this book which particularly prompted me on this project, was History and Presence by Robert Orsi, where he argues that the central axis around which Christian history after the Reformation should be understood is between presence and absence. And you can think of presence in terms of like the Catholic Eucharist, right? Where, what happens when that priest holds up the wafer, right? At that moment of transubstantiation, there's something that mystically affects the wafer to become the body of Christ in a very real sense.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Protestantism would see a kind of evacuation of spirit from matter, right? So there's this stark divide: you have on the one hand, all things that are material, and they are inert, they are quantifiable, they are predictable, and overall, they are scientific above all, right? On the other hand, you would have all that is spirit, all that is immaterial, that is numinous and that's the realm to which religion belongs, right? So little by little religion and spirit get crowded out of this material world that we live in. And what's left is a kind of maybe beautiful and useful but ultimately unsacred, non-spiritual kind of husk.
Sam Petersen: Thank you. so, yeah, still finding the language to try and describe that all on the run. But yeah, so in the paper, I portrayed Joseph Smith and Newman as kind of mutual dissidents to that early modern Protestant disenchantment. And I portray them as dissidents in the sense that they both turned towards sacramentalism as a means of recuperating this belief that matter can bear God in a fundamental and really beautiful way.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Yeah. So by sacramentalism, we mean the sacraments, ordinances, rituals in which we invoke the power of God to enter our world and to fundamentally transform it in the moment. And you pointed to the Catholic Eucharist as a kind of paradigm case of a sacramental moment when matter is made sacred.
I think for me, the most powerful expression of Latter-day Saint sacramentalism is something like baptism for the dead, where we see there that through the matter, the material corporeality of these bodies, that the salvation of a soul can be accomplished, right? What more powerful expression could there be of the capacity of matter to effect profound and ultimate spiritual realities. For me, I come back to that, I think, as kind of the central sacramental expression of sacred matter in the Latter-day Saint tradition.
Sam Petersen: It reminds me of a… I was reading recently. Actually not reading, I was writing. God does not redeem from a distance. He meets us not only as logos, but as the word made flesh, breathing, touchable and smellable. The incarnation is not a metaphor for closeness, a reconciliation of the categorical error which proceeds from the material and the transcendent intermingling. It is an irrevocable enactment. And in the words of my friend, quote, “the word becomes flesh not because flesh is what truth endures, but because flesh is what truth needs.” To follow him then is to risk nearness, to carry the scent of one another's lives, to believe that redemption unfolds not in abstraction, but in shared air.
And I think there's something so beautiful about just the way in which our tradition renders material and what we can make of even the most mundane things from that view as self-sacred and meaningful for our own lives.
Rosalynde F. Welch: These ideas were developed, I'm sure, in conversation and collaboration with your mentor, Dr. Barlow, and in the milieu of faithful exploration that we try to cultivate here at the Maxwell Institute.
So Sam, tell us what's in your future after you graduate in December.
Sam Petersen: Yeah, so, I'm kind of trying to pursue a dual vocational path. I'm going to be commissioning into the Air Force as a chaplain, but then I also am very, very called to the academy and would love to be able to try and pursue a PhD and find a way to merge those two paths together, however, that may end up presenting itself.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Yeah, tell our listeners what a chaplain is. Not everybody may be familiar with that.
Sam Petersen: Yeah, so a chaplain is a minister within a military context. It's a minister who's assigned to a unit who helps to facilitate access to any and all spiritual needs that a member of that unit might have. So if I'm working with, you know, Jews, making sure that there's dietary options for them, that they have time to be able to celebrate their own religious rites. You know, if I'm working with other sorts of Christians being able to provide, know, whatever access to church that they might need.
Then also at a fundamental level, you're acting as a counselor, kind of a spiritual counselor. Chaplains are the only individuals within the military that have a hundred percent confidentiality. And so that creates a really unique relationship between soldiers, sailor, Marine, airmen, and then their chaplains.
Rosalynde F. Welch: Well, I think you're well suited to that work, Sam, and I think our listeners can sense your warmth and your intelligence and your faith, and we wish you well on both of those tracks.
As we wrap up today, I wanted to pitch you a question that I often pitch our guests at the end of interviews, and that is about questions. The title of this series is The Questions We Should Be Asking. So I'd like to know, How has your time at the Maxwell Institute shaped the way that you now approach the questions you encounter in your faith life?
Sam Petersen: That's food for thought right there.
I recently finished reading a book by Jurgen Moltmann called Theology of Play. And in it he articulates what are the stakes of believing that God is beautiful. And he says, well, the demand that subsequently follows from that is that we must be playful and that we're called to play in God's creation. And one of the things that really struck me while I was reading that book was how so many of my interactions with folks here at the Institute have opened me up to respond to the world in a more playful and vibrant way.
There's a quote from the book that I'll share. “Wonder, that edge state on the rim of understanding where the mind touches mystery is our best means of loving the world more deeply. It asks of us the courage of uncertainty because it is a form of play, and play, unlike games, is inherently open-ended without purpose or end goal, governed not by a will to win a point, but by the willingness to surrender to a locus of experience and be transformed by it.”
I feel like the Maxwell Institute has has oriented me towards continually asking, how can I love the world better? And how can I love those who are around me better?
I think it speaks back to what Elder Maxwell was saying when he described the gospel as inexhaustible. When we meet Jesus in a creative space, eternity lies before us.
Rosalynde F. Welch: I think that's the perfect place to wrap up. Sam Peterson, thank you so much for joining us today on the Maxwell Institute podcast.
Sam Petersen: Thank you, Dr. Welch.
Conclusion
Thanks to Melissa Jensen and Sam Petersen for joining me today. Their work reminds me why we do what we do here at the Maxwell Institute. If you'd like to learn more about our research and events, visit mi.byu.edu. And if you're a BYU student interested in getting involved, do what Melissa and Sam did—walk through our doors. We're in the Westview Building and we'd love to meet you.
I’ll be back again soon with another interview in the Questions We Should Be Asking series. Meanwhile, I hope you’ve been enjoying our weekly Old Testament Reflections audio essays, which are also available in text form on our website, mi.byu.edu. I’ve been learning a ton from these short pieces straight from our best scholars.
Thanks for listening. And congratulations to the class of 2026!