BYU Studies

Volume 59:4 (2020) - A timeline of important events beginning with the first mission call to the Holy Land in 1840 and ending in the year 2020.

Volume 59:4 (2020) - 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 scripture; for community outreach; and for promoting the concept that Israelis and Palestinians can work harmoniously together.

The thirtieth anniversary of the Center’s dedication provided a good vantage point from which to assess and commemorate this wonderful building and the study-abroad and other programs it houses. As the anniversary neared, several individuals approached the Jerusalem Center Provo Office suggesting something be done to celebrate it. We express gratitude to them for their interest in the Center and particularly note the encouragement received from Grant Underwood, Amber Taylor, and Jeffrey R. Chadwick.

Volume 59:3 (2020) - A poem by Tyler Chadwick.

Volume 59:3 (2020) - In the spring of 2015, I encountered two worlds within twenty-four hours—worlds yoked by creed but divided by demographic and disposition. On a crisp Wednesday evening in May, I was invited to attend a cocktail reception at the New York Yacht Club for a celebration among Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals honoring the legacy of a man named Dietrich von Hildebrand, a philosopher and anti-Nazi hero during World War II. The room was filled with intellectuals, politicos, bankers, and think-tankers, and they were largely male and all Caucasian. These were true believers, and yet they felt isolated in their faith amid a secular elite, beleaguered as well by a mainstream culture that seemed increasingly hostile to some fundamental principles. …

Not twenty-four hours later I was sitting in the front row of Bethel Gospel Assembly Church in Harlem, waiting for graduates of Nyack College to walk down the aisle and receive their hoods. Nyack is a Christian university whose campus in Battery Park draws from the hundreds of storefront churches that line the boroughs beyond Manhattan. The pews were overflowing with immigrant families, Asians, Latins, and African Americans hailing from Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and beyond, with the bulk of the international students coming from the Majority World. I watched a seventy-nine-year-old grandmother ascend the stage and collect her diploma for the first time, followed by a Chinese woman in a wheelchair, followed by a single mother, followed by an ex-offender.

Volume 59:3 (2020) - In their work An Apostolic Journey: Stephen L Richards and the Expansion of Missionary Work in South America, authors Richard E. Turley Jr. and Clinton D. Christensen have compiled a documentary history of the 1948 journey of Apostle Stephen L Richards and his wife, Irene Merrill Smith Richards, to South America. Turley is a former assistant Church historian and former managing director of the Department of Public Affairs for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Christensen has spent much of his career at the Church History Department collecting Latter-day Saint history from Latin America. An Apostolic Journey recounts how Richards inspected missionary work in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil and offered suggestions to missionaries, to mission presidents, and later to General Authorities of the Church about the growth of missionary work in the postwar era. His journey marked the first visit of a General Authority to South America in over two decades.