Category: Uncategorized

Come Follow Me: Revelation 5-6, 19-22

December 17, 2023 /
Gustav Doré's Destruction of Leviathan

Gustav Doré’s Destruction of Leviathan

Well, the end is upon us. It’s the end of the world/New Testament/year as we know it, and I feel fine.

Today’s chapters… today’s chapters, well. Let’s be blunt. If you pick up a commentary from a believing scholar who has spent his/her entire life studying Revelation, they are likely to admit that no one has any real clue. Just about every passage is disputed in some way by somebody. I am skeptical of the lesson manual’s ability to navigate us through this material, and I’m not about to hold myself out as any expert. Revelation to me is like Isaiah in the Old Testament; I’ve just never really had any particular interest. So, apologies to anyone who came to today’s post looking for the keys to unlock the universe. These chapters contain a lot of things that sound familiar, and a lot of things that sound crazy. Be prepared for lots of potentially crazy comments and wild doctrinal inferences. This is fertile ground, historically speaking, for rampant speculation.

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Ben contemplates his words, at Petra.

Phoenix Fireside, November 5. Reading Scripture as a Disciple and a Scholar: How Disciple-Scholarship Can Build Faith

October 15, 2023 /

Update 11-01-2023: Barring technical issues, this will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube!

Nov 5 at 7Pm in Phoenix, I will give a fireside on “Reading Scripture as a Disciple and a Scholar: How Disciple-Scholarship Can Build Faith.” I’ll discuss the different goals and methods of these ways of reading, and offer some good examples from scripture of what reading as a scholar can get us, and also… how to read like a scholar while NOT being a scholar 🙂

You can download a flier here with more details and address.

Hope to see you there.

Ed Berret, from the BYU website.

Tales from the Archive: William Berrett on Scholarship in 1958

June 14, 2022 /

William E. “Ed” Berrett (1902-1993)  figures prominently in 20th century LDS education history. He taught seminary, wrote manuals for the Church and served on the General Sunday school board, briefly became assistant US attorney in Alaska before opening his own practice in Salt Lake, and then returned to Church service. He became a BYU Religion professor, served as vice-president of BYU and CES, and eventually head of Seminaries, Institutes, and Church colleges (excluding BYU.)

On July 11, 1958, President Berrett gave an address to Seminary and Institute faculty at BYU, titled “Scholarship.” It’s quite surprising, in some ways. Below, some excerpts.

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Come Follow Me:3 Nephi 11-15

October 11, 2020 /

Today we enter into a very interesting section of the Book of Mormon. Like the Isaiah chapters, it closely parallels a section of the Bible. Like the Isaiah chapters, there are some subtle differences. 3Ne 12-15 parallels the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew 5-7. It’s been lined up so that if you want to compare verses (and you should!), take the Book of Mormon chapter number and subtract 7 to get the right verse in Matthew, e.g. 3 Nephi 12:48  ≈ Matthew 5:48.

Let’s compare those. Continue reading