Religion Commons^™

Adolescents, Mental Health, And The Benefits Of Private Religious Worship, Mark D. Ogletree, W. Justin Dyer

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

Over the years, there has been a wealth of research on religious participation[1] among adolescents and their mental health.[2] The impact of public religious behaviors, such as attending church services and participating in church activities, has been beneficial to teenagers. However, are there benefits to private religious practices, such as personal prayer and personal scripture study, to adolescent mental health? Can private religious practices provide youth with the spiritual strength and fortitude to mediate anxiety or depression? These questions will be explored in our study on adolescent mental health and religion.

Biblical Hesed And Nephite Covenant Culture, Noel B. Reynolds

BYU Studies

The devastating late-nineteenth-century attack on traditional assumptions concerning the preexilic dating of the Pentateuch may have provoked the eventual explosion of twentieth-century scholarly investigation of the covenant culture of the Old Testament. Covenantal texts related to Abraham, Moses, David, and others had long been assumed to be foundational for the religion of ancient Israel, however limited modern understanding of that covenant culture might have been. But the new scholarly paradigm that dated those texts to 621 BC or later gave rise to a wave of skeptical scholarship about the whole tradition of divine covenants as the basis for ancient Israelite …

After Whose Order? Kingship And Priesthood In The Book Of Mormon, Avram R. Shannon

BYU Studies

The Book of Mormon represents itself as a strand of Israelite and Judahite religious tradition that flourished somewhere in the New World. Its acceptance by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as scripture means that the Book of Mormon forms part of the essential worldview of the Church. It certainly informs practice and liturgy in the Church, as the adoption of the sacrament prayers from Moroni 3 and 4 as the regular sacrament prayers for the Church indicates.1 The interpretive road is not one-way, however. Just as the Book of Mormon informs and undergirds much of the teachings …

Marrying Principles Of Religious Freedom With Equitable Teaching Practices For Latter-Day Saint Public Educators, Derek R. Riddle

BYU Studies

A couple of years ago, a colleague recommended I read a young adult novel titled How It Went Down authored by Kekla Magoon. This fictional novel tells the tragic story of Tariq Johnson, a sixteen-year-old fatally shot by a police officer. The story, written from a multicharacter perspective, creates an intentional effect through which the reader may find it challenging to discover the truth about the book’s pivotal event because of the varied perspectives and accounts of its many characters. As a former secondary-school English teacher who taught in settings where conversations regarding police brutality and racial profiling were prevalent, …

Sixty Years Of Byu Studies Quarterly, 1959–2019 The Narrative And The Numbers, Brad Wilcox, Timothy G. Morrison, Kyle C. Lyons, Jake M. Robins

BYU Studies

Publishing for scholarly audiences has a long history. Some propose that the first learned society on record was founded in Toulouse, France, in 1323. The Royal Society of London was established in 1660 and published Europe’s first scholarly journal five years later. In 1848, the American Association for the Advancement of Science published the journal Science, and since that time, the number of academic journals has proliferated. According to Philip G. Altbach and Hans de Wit, over thirty thousand academic journals are in circulation today; Ben Mudrak mentions the appearance of many free open-access journals on the internet since 2006. …

In The Garden, John Alba Cutler

BYU Studies

Tumbling about in nervous flight still getting the feel for the lift— it flutters and keeps to shadow its blue eyes melting into dark. Papilio Machaon, after Asclepius’s son, or swallowtail because of its wings like feathers all geometry and movement the mute beauty of givenness.

Full Issue

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

For Our Good, Lindon J. Robison

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

“Know thou, my son, that all these [hard] things shall give thee experience and shall be for thy good.” (Doctrine and Covenants 122:7)[1] Our faith can sometimes falter when we face hard times that are difficult to reconcile with a God who loves all his children infinitely and completely, both everywhere and all the time. We may sometimes feel like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, who complained to God, “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But [sometimes], can’t You choose someone else?”[2] How do we respond to Tevye and others who wonder why hard things happen— …

Latter-Day Houses Of The Lord: Developments In Their Design And Function, Richard O. Cowan

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

This essay traces the modern-day usage and understanding of temples from the Kirtland Temple to Nauvoo and the Salt Lake Temple. Architecture was used to teach principles. While the Kirtland Temple was preparatory (think of the vision of Christ and the conference of keys by Abraham, Moses, Abraham, Elias, and finally Elijah), the Nauvoo Temple was dedicated to ritual usage. In 1879, the Church reduced temple usage to rituals, and thus assembly rooms are missing from later temples. Through his paper, Cowan shows how temples have changed according to revelation and how prophets have seen models in vision that then …

There Are Two Sides To Every Story, Keith A. Erekson

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

This article is the fifth chapter in his Real vs. Rumor: How to Dispel Latter-day Myths (Deseret Book, 2021), 62–76. Each chapter introduces a “Thinking Habit” that serves as an antidote to poor thinking. Along the way, the book also identifies applications for daily life in “Everyday Encounter” sidebars and each chapter ends with a summary section that identifies quick ways to identify poor thinking – the “Sniff Tests”—and restates important points from the chapter. Believing (and teaching) that “There Are Two Sides to Every Story” is an unhelpful mental framework—one of the “Myths within Us” that impede our thinking …

Be Ye Therefore Loyal, Even As Your Father Which Is In Heaven Is Loyal, Taylor Halverson

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

The scriptures are saturated with covenantal words and terms. Any serious or close reading of the scriptures that misses or ignores the covenantal words, phrases, and literary structure of scripture runs the risk of missing the full purpose of why God preserved the scriptures for us. This is especially true for the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon, which emerged out of an Old Testament cultural context. Research during the past century on ancient Near Eastern covenants has brought clarity to the covenantal meaning and context of a variety of words and literary structures in the Old Testament and …

Mind The Gap What A Learner Needs To Experience To Learn Deeply, Kyle J. Patterson

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

On September 6, 2011, Brigham Young University–Idaho president Kim B. Clark stood before his faculty and staff to detail his view of what learning and teaching should look like when it is done in the Lord’s way. In that setting, President Clark stated, “When I speak of learning today, I speak of it as an increase in the capacity or power to know, to do, and to become.”[1] This learning framework of know, do, and become, while not unique to President Clark,[2] appears to have played an important role in laying the groundwork for what he refers to as “deep …

“Same-Sex Marriage?! What Next Polygamy?”: Mormonism In Us Political Culture, K. Mohrman

Mormon Studies Review

In his dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision

that determined marriage was a right that could not be constitutionally

denied to same-sex couples under the Free Exercise and

Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chief Justice

John Roberts queried, “if ‘[t]here is dignity in the bond between

two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to

make such profound choices,’ . . . why would there be any less dignity

in the bond between three people, who in exercising their autonomy,

seek to make the profound choice to marry?”1 In …

Margarito Bautista, Mexican Politics, And The Third Convention, Elisa Eastwood Pulido

Mormon Studies Review

In 1935, after a twenty-five-year residency in the United States, Margarito
Bautista, a well-known evangelizer of Mexican and Mexican American
Mormons on both sides of the US-Mexico border, repatriated to Mexico.
Bautista had converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
in central Mexico in 1901. Of particular appeal to Bautista and his family
were Book of Mormon narratives offering an exceptional spiritual identity
to Indigenous Americans as lost members of the House of Israel and
promising them a glorious future destiny. Motivated by a desire to know
more about the religious movement he had joined, Bautista relocated …

Does Being Liberal Push Some Members Out Of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints?, Jana Riess, Benjamin Knoll

Mormon Studies Review

Conservative religionists’ political activism is pushing some Americans, particularly younger ones, out of religion altogether. Disgusted by what they see as an unholy merger between the Republican Party and the Religious Right, these people are voting with their feet—not only avoiding Republican affiliation but also wanting nothing to do with organized religion. Such is the argument, at least, of a growing number of scholars and researchers who track the intersection between religion and politics in the United States. Is this claim true? And if so, how does it play out with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day …

Review: Hayes Peter Mauro. Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation In America. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 2019., Sarah Dees

Mormon Studies Review

In Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America, art historian Hayes Peter Mauro analyzes images of Native Americans and non-Natives produced within the context of evangelical Christian movements in the United States. While some of the images he examines are what we would usually define as “art”—visual works created by artists for aesthetic purposes—he considers other examples of visual culture as well, including historical and scientific illustrations, photographs, and images found in government documents, forty-six of which are reproduced in the text. These images share a common theme: they depict different categories of people—of (Native) American, European, and African descent—and …

Review: Konden Smith Hansen. Frontier Religion: Mormons And Americans, 1857–1907. Salt Lake City: University Of Utah Press, 2019., Tammy Heise

Mormon Studies Review

Through a series of thought-provoking case studies, Konden Smith Hansen breathes new life into Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous (or, perhaps more accurately, now infamous) “Frontier Thesis” as a paradigm for examining Mormonism as a distinctly American religion. This historical survey revolves around a deft historiographical argument that the Frontier Thesis functioned and, in many respects, continues to function as a religion by defining American national identity and purpose not just for Mormons but for all Americans. Hansen’s attention to Turner’s theory serves to reopen an old frontier for historians of the American West, and by uncovering traditional and innovative forms …

Coming Down And Bringing Down: Pejorative Onomastic Allusions To The Jaredites In Helaman 6:25, 6:38, And Ether 2:11, Matthew L. Bowen

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Mormon uses pejorative wordplay on the name Jaredites based on the meaning of the Hebrew verb yārad. The onomastic rhetoric involving the meaning of yārad first surfaces in Helaman 6 where Mormon also employs wordplay on the name Cain in terms of qānâ or “getting gain.” The first wordplay occurs in the negative purpose clause “lest they should be a means of bringing down [cf. lĕhôrîd] the people unto destruction” (Helaman 6:25) and the second in the prepositional phrase “until they had come down [cf. yārĕdû/yordû] to believe in their works” (Helaman 6:38). Mormon uses these pejorative wordplays as a …

An Ingenious And Inspiring Literary Analysis Of Alma 30–42, Blake T. Ostler

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Mark A. Wrathall’s analytic treatment of Alma 30–42 is a sheer gift that inspires insight into the theological depth of Alma’s thought. His reading of Alma teases out insights not previously recognized and not easily discovered regarding belief and knowledge and their relation to faith and committed action. This extremely rewarding introduction provides a glimpse at the best any writer in the Latter-day Saint tradition has written on Alma’s thoughts and goals.

Resurrection Month, Claudia L. Bushman

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

We tend to have big events and a full month celebrating Christmas, but here we are in a very Christian church that has come to almost ignore the events of the crucifixion and the resurrection. The Last Supper and the events that followed it are the important events of the season. With some planning and creativity, we can immerse ourselves in a Resurrection Month by thinking about the gift of life and promise for the future that we have been given, reading the old scriptures, and reliving the life and times of our elder brother and great teacher.

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Becoming Zion: Some Reflections On Forgiveness And Reconciliation, Deidre Nicole Green

BYU Studies

Some years ago, I was confronted with the realization that other people’s betrayal and deception, which eventually crescendoed into blatant and dehumanizing cruelty, might result in the loss of much of what I had worked for in my professional, ecclesial, and personal life. This situation drove me to a deep need to understand forgiveness, which I pursued through studying philosophical and theological perspectives on the topic as well as through personal reflection. Through specific academic opportunities that included fieldwork in Rwanda and South Africa, I discovered the voices of Latter-day Saint women who had gained hard-won knowledge and wisdom about …

The Bible In The Millennial Star And The Woman’S Exponent, Amy Easton-Flake

BYU Studies

Despite the gradual erosion of the Bible’s significance in American consciousness after the Civil War, the Bible remained “the most imported, most printed, most distributed, and most read written text in North America up through the nineteenth century.”1 The Bible’s authority was not static but was continuously established as individuals and the nation turned to it for direction on living a Christian life as well as for the answers to religious, social, and political issues.2 For most members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the nineteenth century, the Bible likewise remained their primary religious text even …

Writing Mormon History: Historians And Their Books, Tina Hawley

BYU Studies

In Writing Mormon History: Historians and their Books, edited by Joseph W. Geisner, well-known historians reflect on their influential publications in the field of Mormon studies. These historians describe their interest in their respective topics, key points and resources they discovered, and their obstacles and successes on the path to publication.

Event Or Process? How “The Chamber Of Old Father Whitmer” Helps Us Understand Priesthood Restoration, Michael Hubbard Mackay

BYU Studies

Recent studies describing the restoration of the priesthood have noted and demonstrated that we have been anachronistically shaping our 1829 restoration narrative around twentieth-century notions that the Melchizedek Priesthood represents a separate “authority” or “power” that is distinctly independent from the body of ordained men (it has become something we hold rather than something we join). Jonathan Stapley argues that by the early twentieth century General Authorities explicitly defined priesthood as “the exclusive authority and power of God,” whereas before then it was used more ecclesiastically.¹ Though Joseph Smith was certainly a restorationist, like many antebellum Americans, scholars have …

The Book Of Moses As A Temple Text, Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

In this fascinating article, Jeff Bradshaw details how the Book of Moses might be understood as a temple text, including elements of temple architecture, furnishings, and ritual in the story of the Creation and the Fall. Bradshaw shows how the second half of the Book of Moses follows a general pattern of a specific sequence of covenants that will resonate with members of the Church who have received the temple endowment. The story of Enoch and his people provides a vivid demonstration of the final steps on the path that leads back to God and exaltation.

'Fraught' Chineseness: 'Chinese Christians' In The Vancouver Sun, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This chapter explores the ways in which Douglas Todd, a journalist for the Vancouver Sun, has covered stories about Chinese churches in Vancouver, BC, for over three decades. It shows how Todd has focused on Chinese Christians as a way to offer a particular perspective on religion and cultural diversity in Vancouver, and as a window into their relationship with the civil society. Ultimately, this chapter highlights the ways in which Todd essentializes “Chineseness” and reinforces a problematic public narrative of homogeneity among Vancouver’s Chinese Christians.

Examining The Relationship Between Acculturative Stress And Religion/Spirituality Among International Students, Ly'jerrick Ward

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between acculturative stress and religion/spirituality of international students. This study utilized Sandhu and Asrabadi’s (1994) Acculturative Stress Scale for International Students (ASSIS) as well as the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire (SCSORF) created by Plante and Boccaccini (1997). Much research exists on how international students adapt and acculturate to a host country. This research will add to the body of literature that exists regarding how international students use their religion/spirituality to deal with acculturative stress. Students in this study were asked a number of questions from the ASSIS …

An Exploration Of The Perception Of Faith Development At A Midwestern Public Institution, Zachary Sandoval

Masters Theses

Despite research indicating benefits to religious or faith involvement, there is an increase in individuals that claim to have no religious affiliation. Additionally, most research that has investigated faith development of college students has been conducted at private religious institutions. This qualitative study utilized semi-structured interviews to examine students’ perceptions of various interactions on their faith development at a public, rural Midwestern institution. Moreover, this study investigated how the institution of interest can better support spirituality on campus and the role student affairs can have on spiritual development. Thematic material was developed through Parks’s (2000) theory of faith development. Results …

Faith Down The Rabbit Hole: A Critical Rhetorical Interrogation Of Q-Anon And Parasitic Christianity, Nate Carlson

Masters Theses

Over the course of the last six years, the conspiracy theory community known as Q-Anon has risen to prominence across the internet, coming to encapsulate a significant portion of the United States’ conservative and protestant populations. This study applies the act of Critical Rhetoric as proposed by McKerrow (1989) to the Q-Anon “drops”; message board posts wherein Q, the enigmatic leader of Q-Anon, preached conspiratorial ideology and misinformation to his followers. A pattern of Christian theology being usurped and retooled by Q as a method of faith-based political radicalization emerged throughout the texts, and this phenomenon was named “Parasitic Christianity.” …