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I Own My Testimony!

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by John Lynch

I own my testimony!

I wasn’t raised in the Church. I had no family heritage, no traditions or expectations within the framework of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that pressured me or gave me reason to favor faith in the Church’s claims of restored priesthood authority, restored and revealed scripture, new revelations, restored and new covenants, and ongoing guidance from heaven. To the contrary, I was raised in a family environment where faith in God was largely absent and a secular view was what surrounded me.

I came to believe in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints specifically because the principles taught in the scriptures, revelations, and covenants, and exemplified in the priesthood resonated so fully and completely with conclusions I had already reached about God, that I could not argue against it. My faith came because, as I applied the associated teachings, practices, and principles to my life by making and keeping covenants, my life changed! I had a different outlook, a different set of desires, a new vision of my purpose, a new joy, a commitment to be my best, and a desire to bind myself to the Father who gave all this to me. [Read more…] about I Own My Testimony!

Interpreter Conference

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by Jeffrey Bradshaw

Beginning in the 1970s, a few scholars, most notably Hugh W. Nibley, began to point to evidence relating to the ancient context of the Book of Moses. However, over-enthusiastic scholars (admittedly, at times, including myself) have not always been careful in their research and sometimes have gone farther in their claims than the evidence warrants. As a result, some of the early enthusiasm for comparative studies has waned and, paralleling the course of biblical studies, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme where comparisons of scripture to the ancient world became less common.

Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way. We hope that the presentations at the conference will reflect the still increasing maturity of the field, relying on more well-defined methodologies designed to better assure the reliability of their results — avoiding the extremes of both parallelomania and parallelophobia. In addition to more well-defined methodologies, recent research has also benefitted from new discoveries and better understandings of the manuscripts and other material remains of the cultures and religious traditions of the ancient Near East.

The conference is based on the premise that significant patterns of resemblance to ancient manuscripts not available during the lifetime of Joseph Smith and of unexpected conformance to conditions imposed by an archaic setting are potential indicators of antiquity that are best explained when the essential element of divine revelation is acknowledged. [Read more…] about Interpreter Conference