Religion Commons^™

Biblical Theology Exegesis Of 1 Timothy 4:1-5, Samuel Hardy

Biblical Studies Student Projects

This research paper takes a close look at Paul's theology from a short excerpt of his letter to Timothy. It is applicable to the lives of believers still today. Paul's letter touches on topics such as prophecy, apostasy, eschatology, and creation theology which are overarching themes throughout all of Scripture and this paper attempts to make those connections.

A Biblical Theological Analysis Of Hebrews 3:7-14, Caleb Rolling

Biblical Studies Student Projects

In Hebrews 3:7-14, the author of Hebrews encourages his distraught audience to persevere in faith while also warning of the consequences of apostasy. Throughout this paper, the text is examined in its canonical and immediate contexts, its meaning is explained within these contexts, and finally, the text is applied to the lives of contemporary Christians.

In Quest Of A Coherent Portrait Of Paul: A Rejoinder To Michael Bird, Joel Kaminsky, Mark Reasoner

Religion: Faculty Publications

This rejoinder to Michael Bird's critique of our argument in Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner, "The Meaning and Telos of Israel's Election: An Interfaith Response to N. T. Wright's Reading of Paul," HTR 112 (2019) 421-46, acknowledges that Wright recognizes a dimension of intrinsic value in God's election of Israel, while it shows how Wright's metanarrative is not only unduly skewed toward an instrumental view of Israel's election but also, in effect, totally redefines Israel. Our rebuttal first reiterates some of our original claims and also presents new arguments against an exegesis of Second Isaiah that portrays Israel as divinely …

Outside Perspectives, Amber Taylor

BYU Studies

I think most of us are familiar with a recent trend in storytelling to revisit and tell a traditional tale from the perspective of the antagonist. The live-action Disney movie Maleficent, for example, provides an empathetic backstory to the terrifyingly evil, but otherwise flat, character of Maleficent in the iconic animated version of Sleeping Beauty. The popular musical Wicked, by Stephen Schwartz, does the same with the character Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Even children’s books have gotten in on the postmodern storytelling action. In The True Story of …

Connections Between The Jerusalem Center And The Local Israeli Academy, Jeffrey R. Chadwick

BYU Studies

It is a privilege to participate in this symposium marking the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 dedication of the Jerusalem Center. It is also a privilege to have been a repeating member of the BYU Jerusalem faculty since 1982, two years before the ceremony which broke ground for the Jerusalem Center in the summer of 1984. I vividly remember watching the various phases of the Center’s construction (fig. 1) and being among the first to live and teach in the beautiful new building when it was occupied by students in 1987.

Understanding Covenants And Communities: Jews And Latter-Day Saints In Dialogue, Bradley J. Kramer

BYU Studies

Organized topically, this book’s sixteen essays provide a wealth of information about Jewish and Latter-day Saint perspectives, scripture, experience, worship, culture, and politics. However, at least for me, the true treasure of these essays is not so much informational as it is relational.

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.

Editors’ Introduction, James R. Kearl, Dana M. Pike

BYU Studies

The Brigham Young University Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies was dedicated on May 16, 1989. Located on Mount Scopus, the Center offers an amazing view of Jerusalem and puts the Center’s students in the heart of Jerusalem within easy walking distance of the Mount of Olives and the Old City. During the past thirty years, the Jerusalem Center has made a significant impact on Jerusalem as well as on all those who have studied and worked there. Known locally as “The Mormon University,” this beautiful building with its many arches provides an inspiring venue for studying history, culture, and …

The Lead-Up To The Dedication Of The Jerusalem Center, David B. Galbraith

BYU Studies

I’ve been asked to focus on the construction period of the Jerusalem Center rather than the student program that, at this point in time, is the heart and soul of the Center. My wife, Frieda, and I lived for twenty years in Israel, where we also raised our family of five children. We were blessed to witness some marvelous miracles while living there, but none more marvelous than those that were intimately linked to the Center. I had the great opportunity to be personally involved with the story of the Center that follows here.

Breeze, Daniel Teichert

BYU Studies

What if our prayers were the wind to God, and carried our thoughts like the smell of cut grass and barbecued meat and skunk musk and cow dung and tire-kicked dust?

Peace Offering, Elena Jarvis Jube

BYU Studies

I killed a peace dove once.

It was spring. I was driving down a stretch of road lined with leftover remnants of apple and cherry orchards not yet bulldozed for new houses, new subdivisions. I don’t know where I was coming from, down that particular road, though one corner of my brain thinks it might have been the hospital, and that I was anxious and strung out from lack of sleep, which is why I didn’t see the dove in the road there, small, grey, invisible against the asphalt. I seem to remember it was early morning, the light just …

Faculty Perspectives And Experiences At The Jerusalem Center, Gaye Strathearn, Andrew C. Skinner, S. Kent Brown, Ed Stratford, Kent P. Jackson

BYU Studies

Strathearn: In 1985, my friend and I decided to backpack around the world. I said that if we were doing that, the first thing I wanted to do was get to the Holy Land. We were on a dime traveling, and we just had a Bible in one hand and a Let’s Go Europe in the other. That visit to the Holy Land started a fire within me, a love of that land. I was home about a year and a half when Elder James E. Faust spoke at our stake conference in Australia. He began by noting that “the …

Surprise!, Joseph Khabbaz

The Main Thing Devotional

God's surprises might be perplexing, but they are always life-changing.

And it happened, as they were greatly perplexed about this, that behold, two men stood by them in shining garments. - Luke 24:4

Byu Jerusalem Center Timeline

BYU Studies

April 6, 1840 - Joseph Smith calls Orson Hyde and John E. Page on a mission to the Holy Land. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Elder Page returns to Nauvoo and, as a consequence, Elder Hyde travels to Palestine alone.

October 24, 1841 - Elder Hyde ascends the Mount of Olives and offers a prayer dedicating the Holy Land for the gathering of the Jews.

The Restored Church Of Jesus Christ And The Holy Land: Beginnings, David M. Whitchurch

BYU Studies

It is a privilege to be with you as we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the dedication of the Jerusalem Center and the impact it has made on the lives of so many students, faculty, administrators, members of the Church from around the world, and those who currently reside in the Holy Land. A heartfelt welcome to all.

The Jerusalem Center In The Community, Eran Hayet

BYU Studies

It is great to be here with so many friends to celebrate this special event. When I first arrived at the Jerusalem Center in 1994 and assumed responsibility for, among other areas, the Center’s security, I inherited from my predecessor a file with policies for how to deal with potential threats. Here are some of those policies: Procedure to evacuate the building in case of a bomb threat

Procedure to deal with riots at the lower gate

Procedure to deal with ultra-Orthodox demonstrations at the upper gate

Student Panel Discussion, David Rolph Seely, April Giddings Cobb, Julie Jenkins Elcock, Heidi Hatch Gilbert, Christopher Meldrum, Raven Alard Ngatuvai, Richard Reber

BYU Studies

The Jerusalem Center has lots of different functions, but it was made for students. Our family has been there both at times when the Jerusalem Center was closed to students and when it had students in residence. There’s nothing emptier or sadder than the Jerusalem Center without students.

The Road To Dallas, Kimberly Webb Reid

BYU Studies

On November 21, 1993, the world dozed in watery light and I felt off-balance as the northern hemisphere listed away from the sun. Seasonal blues made watching PBS all day seem like a reasonable choice. Onscreen, a Ford Lincoln Continental zipped through Zapruder’s frame. Tomorrow would be the thirtieth anniversary. Old news footage aired to commemorate the assassination, and I watched as if America’s end of innocence were happening live along with my own. Seeing Jackie statuesque in bloodied nylons, I mourned like I’d discovered the thirty-fifth president was my long-lost grandfather. I was thirteen and had never heard of …

Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons And The Unfinished Business Of American Secularism, Michael Hubbard Mackay

BYU Studies

Borrowing its title from Joseph Smith’s far-reaching Nauvoo theology, Make Yourselves Gods is somehow even more provocative than its title. The average Latter-day Saint reader will chafe under its vocabulary, struggle through its detailed contributions to the study of secularism, and be at odds with its use of queer critique. Furthermore, to the average reader’s disdain, this book will be chewed and discussed for a generation to come. It is not likely to be forgotten.

Documents: The Joseph Smith Papers, Richard E. Bennett

BYU Studies

Almost fifty years ago, my wife, Patricia, and I had the distinct privilege to work for incoming Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington in combing through the archives of the Church History Library in Salt Lake City for source materials long since shelved, considered lost, or otherwise off-limits. Along the way, we also enjoyed working with a team of other dedicated scholars brought in to work under Arrington’s kind and learned tutorship. Among them was a talented archivist/historian named Dean Jessee, who was an assiduous student of the document, particularly the papers of the prophet Joseph Smith Jr. Owning a passion …

The Annals Of The Southern Mission: A Record Of The History Of The Settlement Of Southern Utah, Alec Joseph Harding

BYU Studies

Author James Godson Bleak (1829–1918) was a British convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and veteran of the Edward Martin handcart company. In the early 1860s, Bleak accepted President Brigham Young’s charge to be a clerk and historian for the Utah South Mission in St. George. The Annals of the Southern Mission is the result of decades of Bleak’s fulfillment of this commission.

Distinction Between Indigenous And Western Cultural Conceptions Of The Earth And Its Relation To The Environment, John M. Zak

Student Publications

The differences between Indigenous and Western cultural conceptions of the Earth is a major cleavage between both communities and a source of tension and misunderstanding. Native American religious beliefs in communal ethics, the belief in the Earth and nature more broadly being a source of spiritual fulfillment and enlightenment, has encouraged Native Americans to work to safeguard the environment they feel a spiritual connection to. This is contrasted in Western notions of human centrality that encourages Western consumer economies to exploit resources for commercial profit that has led to the dispossession of Native lands and desecration of its sacredness in …

Restoration Quarterly: Vol. 62, No. 4

Restoration Quarterly

PDF of the cover of Restoration Quarterly: Vol. 62, No. 4.

This repository hosts selected Restoration Quarterly articles in downloadable PDF format. For the benefit of users who would like to browse the contents of RQ, we have included all issue covers even when full-text articles from that issue are unavailable. All Restoration Quarterly articles are available in full text in the ATLA Religion Database, available through most university and theological libraries or through your local library’s inter-library loan service.

Our Silent News, October-November-December 2020

Our Silent News

A newsletter published for Deaf Catholics in Fort Worth, TX

Our Silent News Finding Aid

Feminism, Religion, And Work In The United States, Margaret R. Halpin

Student Publications

Feminism in the contemporary United States is a diverse field of thought with several strains of ideological leanings, including liberal, neoliberal, and the contested conservative feminism. Each is uniquely situated in the American context due to the heavy influence of American values and culture-specific definitions of justice, success, and progress. Entrenched in the Western conceptions of secularism and advancement, “modern” feminism in the United States prides itself as the example of peak progressivism, yet does so without critically engaging with its definition of modernity or secularism. In particular, the relationship between religion and feminism is complicated in the U.S., with …

The Power Of Faithfulness In Relational Evangelism, Lance C. Hahn

Great Commission Research Journal

Many evangelistic efforts bear little fruit. It may be due to our inability to convey the right information, but it may also be due to an inappropriate environment for the information to be interpreted correctly. This article describes a process that God may use to engage a person whose heart has been prepared, so that the seed sown is received, not only as truth, but with joy. Relational evangelism carried out faithfully allows consistent sowing until chaotic moments open the heart.

Book Review: Planting Reproducing Churches By Elmer L. Towns, David Thiessen

Great Commission Research Journal

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of The Ethnographic Turn, Bharat Ranganathan

Religion Faculty Publications

This article reflects on the ethnographic turn in recent comparative religious ethics (CRE). Comparative religious ethicists should be lauded because they privilege engagement with non-Western intellectual sources. Such engagement is important since it undermines the erroneous view that non-Western sources are either soft or are part of someone else's commitments and therefore irrelevant. Yet some recent comparative work stops at merely describing these non-Western sources, moving ethics away from its normative tasks. If CRE is to remain relevant to broader conversations in moral and political theory, comparative religious ethicists should perform two tasks: they should evaluate the object under consideration …

Does Christian Faith Impact Loneliness?, Jeffrey M. Kelly

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Loneliness is on the rise within the United States, particularly within younger adults ages 18-37 (Bruce et al 2019). Although much is known about the negative dimensions of loneliness, and some about protective factors to help ease loneliness, the potential impact of religious and spiritual beliefs and behaviors on loneliness remains largely unexplored. This study focused on the relationship between a committed religious faith and perceived feelings of loneliness among university students. Participants include 1,182 undergraduate students from George Fox University who participated in the National College Health Assessment (NCHA). Religious commitment was evaluated using a supplemental 6-item self-report measure …

Belarus: Religious Freedom Survey, October 2020, Olga Glace

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Before the UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Belarus on 2 November, Forum 18 notes continuing violations of freedom of religion and belief and of interlinked freedoms of expression, association, and assembly. These have worsened amid widespread continuing protests against falsified results of the August 2020 presidential election, and against the regime's other serious violations of the human rights of the people it rules.

This was originally published by Forum 18, reposted with permission. Glace, Olga (2020) "Belarus: Religious Freedom Survey, October 2020," Forum 18. Available at: http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2612