Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Arts and Humanities Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2022

Discipline
Institution
Keyword
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 18511 - 18540 of 20694

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

In Memoriam, Orrin Glenn Hatch (1934-2022) Jan 2022

In Memoriam, Orrin Glenn Hatch (1934-2022)

BYU Studies

At the passing of Senator Orrin G. Hatch on April 23, 2022, BYU Studies joins in honoring this outstanding public servant, who has been called “the most important Utah politician since Brigham Young.” Senator Hatch served seven terms in the United States Senate (1977 to 2019), the longest period in office of any Republican. During his tenure, he presided over three major Senate committees: Labor and Human Resources, Judiciary, and Finance. In 2017, he also was elected to the position of president pro tempore of the Senate.

Go to article

Gold, Silver, And Grain, Shinji Takagi Jan 2022

Gold, Silver, And Grain, Shinji Takagi

BYU Studies

In this paper, I discuss, from the perspective of a monetary economist, the operational aspects of the system of fixed prices for gold, silver, and all kinds of grain described in the Book of Mormon (Alma 11:3–19), based on internal evidence, economic logic, and historical precedents from antiquity. Previous authors have noted several unique features of the Nephite system, which was purportedly created by king Mosiah in the early first century BC. For example, John Welch, approaching the system strictly as one of weights and measures, argued that, in this otherwise binary system (in which denomination increases by a multiple …

Go to article

Oracles Of God, Ryan S. Gardner Jan 2022

Oracles Of God, Ryan S. Gardner

BYU Studies

When President Russell M. Nelson read the “Restoration of the Fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: A Bicentennial Proclamation” at the 190th annual general conference on April 5, 2020, several articles appeared explaining this newest proclamation in the context of its predecessors. These articles revealed that these historically and spiritually valuable documents were not readily accessible in a single digital repository.

Go to article

Covenant Language In Biblical Religions And The Book Of Mormon, Noel B. Reynolds Jan 2022

Covenant Language In Biblical Religions And The Book Of Mormon, Noel B. Reynolds

BYU Studies

Because twenty-first-century public discourse in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to feature the language of covenant more and more often, it may be helpful to step back and reexamine the scriptural and historical backgrounds for covenant theology and terminology. When the Restoration took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was dependent primarily on the language of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible and contemporary Protestant teachings for a context in which to interpret the language of Joseph Smith’s revelations and the Book of Mormon. After two centuries of modern linguistic …

Go to article

Sally In Three Worlds: An Indian Captive In The House Of Brigham Young, By Virginia Kerns (Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2021), Julia Harrison Jan 2022

Sally In Three Worlds: An Indian Captive In The House Of Brigham Young, By Virginia Kerns (Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2021), Julia Harrison

BYU Studies

In Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young, Virginia Kerns relates the story of the settlement of Utah through the life of Sally, a Pahvant Ute woman who lived in Brigham Young’s household. On its surface, the book is a narrative of the life of one woman, but Kerns argues that “a single life can illuminate an entire cultural and social world, or reveal an unremarked but vital part of the human story.”

Go to article

A New Witness To The World, By Robert A. Rees (Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2020), Lane Welch Jan 2022

A New Witness To The World, By Robert A. Rees (Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2020), Lane Welch

BYU Studies

This book provides a series of essays that analyze and contextualize the text of the Book of Mormon while providing Professor Rees’s faithful perspective on the text. Though each essay stands on its own as a separate work, the later essays, handling the context of Joseph Smith’s work as a nineteenth-century American writer, do reference and build off one another. These later essays handle the backgrounds and processes of various American writers contemporary to Joseph Smith, providing an effective survey of the literary milieu into which the Book of Mormon first entered; the earlier essays are more focused on the …

Go to article

An Experiential Pathway To Conversion, Robert K. Christensen, Matthew D. Wride, Neil R. Lundberg Jan 2022

An Experiential Pathway To Conversion, Robert K. Christensen, Matthew D. Wride, Neil R. Lundberg

BYU Studies

Joseph Smith’s formal education did not extend beyond the third grade. His life did not extend beyond the final years of his thirties. The person he became and his work in restoring the gospel of Jesus Christ, however, extend into eternity. John Taylor observed that “Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it.”

Go to article

Sacred Space, Jacqueline Price Jan 2022

Sacred Space, Jacqueline Price

BYU Studies

My painting is about how an ordinary space can be made sacred when we invite the heavenly and earthly realms to align more closely. As a young woman reading her scriptures looks up towards heaven for inspiration, light and the Spirit of God fall upon her, and a connection is made.

Go to article

Gethsemane, Darlene Young Jan 2022

Gethsemane, Darlene Young

BYU Studies

I want to tell the story. But— there is no approaching this, strange crux of everything.

Go to article

Holy Places, Merrijane Rice Jan 2022

Holy Places, Merrijane Rice

BYU Studies

I watch the sunset from the corner of Country Mill and Western Drive and note how rooflines echo Frary Peak on Antelope Island—bent pyramids black against the sky and rimmed with light like glowing magma.

Go to article

Seeing, Dave Nielsen Jan 2022

Seeing, Dave Nielsen

BYU Studies

Grandpa Lewis is losing his sight. None of us knows what he can or can’t see.

Go to article

Terrible Revolution: Latter-Day Saints And The American Apocalypse By Christopher James Blythe, Tona Hangen Jan 2022

Terrible Revolution: Latter-Day Saints And The American Apocalypse By Christopher James Blythe, Tona Hangen

BYU Studies

When a costume-clad man wielded a Captain Moroni “title of liberty” flag at the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, it was a notable reminder that revolutionary end-times ideology has a long and evocative presence in the culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and adjacent religions. Christopher Blythe’s timely and wide-ranging book explores these themes across time, geography, and even denominational boundaries. He defines apocalypticism both as a distinct Jewish- Christian scriptural literary form found in Hebrew and Christian texts and malleable perfectionist ideology embracing “catastrophic millennialism,” to borrow Catherine Wessinger’s coinage. In brief, apocalyptic rhetoric …

Go to article

Joseph Smith For President: The Prophet, The Assassins, And The Fight For American Religious Freedom By Spender Mcbride, Jordan T. Watkins Jan 2022

Joseph Smith For President: The Prophet, The Assassins, And The Fight For American Religious Freedom By Spender Mcbride, Jordan T. Watkins

BYU Studies

In Joseph Smith for President, Spencer McBride provides an illuminating and reader-friendly account of Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign. McBride, who is a scholar of American religious and political history and an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, firmly situates the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints within antebellum contexts. In doing so, he contributes to a body of scholarship that examines the early Saints’ experiences in ways that shed light on and correct assumptions about American historical developments. In one recent example, which addresses some of the same themes, Benjamin E. …

Go to article

Mormon Studies: A Critical History By Ronald Helfrich Jr., Roger Terry Jan 2022

Mormon Studies: A Critical History By Ronald Helfrich Jr., Roger Terry

BYU Studies

This short but dense critical history of Mormon studies is unique in several ways. First, author Ronald Helfrich Jr. is a self-described “Gentile” scholar who spent “probably far too many years,” including a year as a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Brigham Young University, researching and writing this history. Second, the book is surprisingly thorough. I have been the editorial director at BYU Studies for the past sixteen years and thought I had a fairly decent grasp of Mormon studies, past and present, but Helfrich repeatedly describes the work of historians and other scholars with whom I …

Go to article

End Matter Jan 2022

End Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Front Matter Jan 2022

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Go to article

How Did Joseph Smith Translate The Book Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

How Did Joseph Smith Translate The Book Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Multiple sources associated with the coming forth of the Book of Abraham spoke of Joseph Smith “translating” the text from the papyri he acquired. The Prophet himself used this language to describe his own activity with the text. For example, an entry in his journal under the date November 19, 1835, indicates the Prophet “spent the day in translating” the Egyptian records. In an unpublished editorial that was apparently meant to be printed in the March 1, 1842, issue of the Times and Seasons (the issue that saw the publication of the first installment of the Book of Abraham), Joseph …

Go to article

Abraham And Idrimi, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

Abraham And Idrimi, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

The Book of Abraham narrates the life of the biblical patriarch in a first-person autobiographical voice. The book begins: “In the land of the Chaldeans, at the residence of my fathers, I, Abraham, saw that it was needful for me to obtain another place of residence” (Abr. 1:1). This first-person voice continues throughout the text as if Abraham himself was writing.

Go to article

The Blood Of The Canaanites, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

The Blood Of The Canaanites, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

The first chapter of the Book of Abraham contains a short detail about the ancestry of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt: “Now this king of Egypt was a descendant from the loins of Ham, and was a partaker of the blood of the Canaanites by birth. From this descent sprang all the Egyptians, and thus the blood of the Canaanites was preserved in the land” (Abr. 1:21–22). Although he was a righteous man who “judged his people wisely and justly all his days” (v. 26), Pharaoh could not lay claim to any priesthood authority because of his ancestry (v. 27). …

Go to article

Zeptah And Egyptes, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

Zeptah And Egyptes, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

The Book of Abraham describes how “the land of Egypt [was] first discovered by a woman, who was the daughter of Ham, and the daughter of Egyptus” (Abr. 1:23). This woman “discovered the land [when] it was under water, who afterward settled her sons in it; and thus, from Ham, sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land.” Thereafter “the first government of Egypt was established by Pharaoh, the eldest son of Egyptus, the daughter of Ham” (vv. 24–25).

Go to article

The Name Of The Lord, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

The Name Of The Lord, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

On two occasions in the Book of Abraham, the Lord reveals to Abraham his true name: Jehovah. The first incident was when Abraham had a “vision of the Almighty,” wherein “the angel of [the Lord’s] presence” rescued him from being sacrificed in Ur of the Chaldees and made early allusions to a future covenant relationship (Abr. 1:15). “And his voice was unto me: Abraham, Abraham, behold, my name is Jehovah, and I have heard thee, and have come down to deliver thee, and to take thee away from thy father’s house, and from all thy kinsfolk, into a strange …

Go to article

Kolob, The Governing One, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

Kolob, The Governing One, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

One of the more memorable contributions of the Book of Abraham is its depiction of Kolob (Abr. 3:3–4, 9, 16; Facsimile 2, fig. 1). According to the Book of Abraham, Kolob is characterized by the following.

Go to article

The Foreordination Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

The Foreordination Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

One of the most important doctrinal teachings in the Book of Abraham is that of the premortal existence of humankind and the foreordination of many “noble and great ones” to be God’s “rulers” (Abr. 3:22–28). Abraham himself was singled out as one who was divinely preordained to a great mission. “Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones; and God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said: …

Go to article

The Son Of Man, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

The Son Of Man, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

In the Book of Abraham’s divine-council scene, God proposes to send a redemptive emissary to ensure that those premortal intelligences or spirits who entered their second estate and faithfully did “all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them” would have “glory added upon their heads for ever and ever” (Abr. 3:25–26). When the Lord asked whom he should send to be this emissary, “one answered like unto the Son of Man: Here am I, send me. And another answered and said: Here am I, send me. And the Lord said: I will send the first” (v. 27). This …

Go to article

The Fall Of Lucifer, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

The Fall Of Lucifer, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Similar to what is depicted in other books of Latter-day Saint scripture (for example Moses 4:1–4), the Book of Abraham’s depiction of the premortal council includes a brief mention of the fall of Lucifer. As readers encounter at the end of chapter 3 of the Book of Abraham, Lucifer’s fall from the divine council was an act of rebellion because he was not selected to carry out God’s plan of salvation.

Go to article

Creation From Chaos, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

Creation From Chaos, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Traditional Christianity teaches that God created the universe ex nihilo, or “out of nothing.” As explained by one scholar, “the most widely accepted theistic explanation of initial creation is the theory that God created the universe from absolutely nothing. . . . Most major theologians in Christian history—for example, Irenaeus, Augustine, Catherine of Sienna, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Karl Barth, and Paul Tilich—believed that God initially created the universe from absolutely nothing. . . . Many influential Christians throughout history have affirmed the theory.”

Go to article

Chiasmus In The Book Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

Chiasmus In The Book Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Chiasmus, or inverted parallelism, is “a two-part [literary] structure or system in which the second half is a mirror image of the first, [that is,] where the first term recurs last, and the last first.” Most Latter-day Saints who know about chiasmus have probably heard about its presence in the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Chiasmus, however, also appears in the Book of Abraham. For instance, the opening verses of the Book of Abraham contains a chiasm highlighting Abraham’s right to priesthood.

Go to article

The Ancient Egyptian View Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

The Ancient Egyptian View Of Abraham, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Some might ask how likely it would have been for the ancient Egyptians to have known anything about the biblical figure Abraham. In fact, evidence survives today indicating that stories about Abraham were known to the ancient Egyptians as early as the time of the composition of the Joseph Smith Papyri (ca. 330–30 BC).

Go to article

A Semitic View Of The Facsimiles, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

A Semitic View Of The Facsimiles, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Latter-day Saint scholars and interested laypersons have offered a number of different approaches to interpreting the facsimiles and the validity of Joseph Smith’s interpretations. One such scholar, Kevin L. Barney, has articulated an insightful theory for interpreting the facsimiles that is worth careful consideration.

Go to article

The Purpose And Function Of The Egyptian Hypocephalus, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson Jan 2022

The Purpose And Function Of The Egyptian Hypocephalus, Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, John S. Thompson

BYU Studies

Facsimile 2 of the Book of Abraham is a type of document called a hypocephalus. “The term ‘hypocephalus’ refers to a piece of Late Period and Ptolemaic [ca. 664–30 BC] funerary equipment. It is specifically, an amuletic disc, made of cartonnage, bronze, textile, and more rarely, papyrus, or even wood, emulating a solar disc.” The name was coined by modern Egyptologists beginning with Jean-François Champollion and comes from Greek, meaning literally “under the head.” Spell 162 of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead specifies that these amulets were to be placed hr tp of the mummy, which has been …

Go to article

First Prev Next Last