Religion Commons^™

A Cross-Cultural And Cross-Ethnic Model Of Integrated Ministry To Second-Generation Immigrant Youth In The Seventh-Day Adventist Church In Dublin, Dan-Gheorghe Serb

Doctor of Ministry Projects

Problem

Dublin, like most major cities in Western Europe, is a multicultural and multiethnic city. Most members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Dublin are first-generation immigrants who tend to import their native brand of Adventism into Dublin local churches. Moreover, outside the church worship experience, immigrant members are inclined to gravitate toward mono-ethnic and mono-cultural interactions. Their children are the New Irish and are thus better integrated into Irish culture and society. This situation seems to destabilize young people in the church, with many second-generation immigrant Generation Z youth showing disinterest in church life, and some of them leaving …

A Faith For Today: Saving The Planet, Oystein S. Labianca

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Russia, Orthodox Church In, Vera Shevzov

Religion: Faculty Books

No abstract provided.

Renegotiating Liminal Spaces: Catholic Nuns As Spiritual And Feminist Activists, Emily M. Lauletta

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The objective of this thesis is to recognize the critical work being done by the women in two Sister-led organizations, Talitha Kum, and Network. Throughout this thesis, I make note of how the actions of these groups of nuns align with several values attributed to spiritual activism. Simultaneously, I discuss the complications that arise from doing social justice work within the confines of an institution that has perpetuated settler colonialism and white supremacy. My analysis is grounded in three theoretical frameworks; spiritual activist theory as articulated by Gloria Anzaldúa, Indigenous Feminism(s), and Womanism. In reference to the nuns' status as …

How Can We Account For The Extraordinary Culture Of Biblical And Religious Scholarship In Churches Of Christ?, Richard T. Hughes

Churches of Christ Scholarship Oral History Project

Richard T. Hughes paper presented at the Christian Scholars Conference at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee on June 5, 2014.

Is The Enneagram Compatible With The Catholic Faith?, Connie Burianek

Religious & Theological Studies Student Work

Within the past several years, the Enneagram of Personality’s popularity has increased significantly in terms of public attention. As a result, social media contains many “memes” primarily focusing on stereotypes of “9 personality types.” Like all stereotyping, this focus is often damaging from a psychological standpoint. Additionally, some have appropriated the material into a form of New Age Spirituality. Use of the Enneagram in this way has led to much suspicion and criticism of the Enneagram. In 2000, the US Bishops’ Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices drafted A Brief Report on the Origins of the Enneagram (US bishop' Secretariat …

Immigrant Catholic School Educators: Working Across Cultures, Opportunities And Perspectives, Melodie Wyttenbach, Anne Marie Funk, Marissa Browne

Journal of Catholic Education

While the majority of our Catholic schools in the United States today are far from their roots as schools run by immigrants for immigrants, the stories of immigrant teachers in our Catholic schools remain. With the majority of immigrants coming to the United States today from Mexico and Latin America, the Hispanic educators in our Catholic schools are highly diverse. A striking finding from the “Cultivating Talent” report is that nearly 40% of Hispanic teachers and 27% of Hispanic leaders in Catholic schools are immigrants, proceeding from nearly every Spanish- speaking nation, mirroring the backgrounds of students and families in …

Sowing Hope Where There Is Despair (Chapter 4 Of Practicing The Prayer Of St. Francis), Patrick Allen

Faculty Publications - College of Education

Excerpt from the Introduction:

So, how do we sow hope where there is despair? That is the major question we will address in this chapter. First, we’ll look a bit more at despair and why it troubles our spirits so deeply before turning to the subject of hope, something we all can embrace. Then, we’ll pick up the story of Elijah once more. I believe that it is a textbook example for how to sow hope in the wilderness of despair. Before closing, I will offer a few practical steps we can take when we despair or walk with those …

Guns And Practical Reason: An Ethical Exploration Of Guns And Language, Mark Ryan

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

There is no shortage of words and rhetoric being offered up in relation to the topic of guns, much of it directed to the political standoff regarding how to respond to gun violence. Yet the debate over guns in America, especially as it concerns putting in conversation the positions of “gun people” and “non-gun people,” barely scratches the surface of substantive convictions held on both sides about the place of guns in our lives. A critical reason for this is that the language and rhetoric of the debate suppresses such convictions, keeping the discussion shallow and antagonistic. This, I argue, …

Sustainable Canons: Gadamer's Hermeneutics And Theatre, Charles A. Gillespie

Catholic Studies Faculty Publications

This essay investigates Gadamer's hermeneutic theory and its application to theatre. Attention to Gadamer's views of theatre and performative interpretation provides a foundation to theorize a more sustainable canon. Classics that constitute a sustainable canon operate within a tradition through a community of interpretation that continually returns to interpret them anew. This structure also describes the theatrical repertoire. Several of Gadamer's central themes find easy analogues on stage: play, the history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte), the participation of an audience in the fusion of horizons, and art's making present continuity the past. Gadamer provides a framework for understanding the …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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.”

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 …

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.”

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.

Gethsemane, Darlene Young

BYU Studies

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

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.

Seeing, Dave Nielsen

BYU Studies

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

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 …

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. …

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 …

End Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

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 …

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.

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). …

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).