“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It’s one of the most easily recognizable opening lines from any literary work, the Book of Genesis, a book that has been interpreted in countless ways over the thousands of years of its existence. In this episode I speak about it with an expert on […]

Dr. Peter Enns just released a brand new book called The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It. Enns wants the Bible to be interpreted for what it actually seems to be [...]

Does academic study of the Bible undermine its value or diminish the religious messages it contains? In 2012, three scholars—a Jew, a Protestant, and a Catholic—came together at the intersection of their academic work on the Bible and their religious faith to discuss that very question. Their outstanding book The Bible and the Believer seeks to demonstrate […]

Miranda Wilcox and John Young recently published one of the most fascinating books ever compiled on the subject of Mormon studies. It's called Standing Apart. In the book, a group of Latter-day Saint scholars examine Mormonism's "Great Apostasy" narrative.

Although the Maxwell Institute focuses its attention primarily on religious texts of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, this episode examines a religious text from an eastern tradition (the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali) in order get a better understanding of the nature of religious texts in general.

What's it like to participate in the Summer Seminar on Mormon Culture? Six participants from this year's seminar answer that question in this episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Bernard McGinn recently completed the biography of one of the most influential theological works in Christian history: Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, and he joins us in this episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast to talk about it. McGinn’s book is part of Princeton University Press’s “Lives of Great Religious Books” series in which leading scholars write biographies of the birth […]

This episode features three scholars discussing the relevance of scripture. Last Wednesday, Zion's Books in Provo, Utah hosted a roundtable discussion on the subject featuring Joseph Spencer, David Bokovoy, and Adam Miller, who read a chapter from his recent release, Letters to a Young Mormon.

It’s all about Brigham Young on this episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

In this episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast, historian Molly Worthen joins us to discuss her new book Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Evangelical Christians comprise nearly 25% of the population of the United States, and although the tradition has produced a number of outstanding scholars, Evangelicalism has a reputation for promoting anti-intellectualism. Having [...]