Testimonies

I grew up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My dad’s family has pioneer roots and my mom joined the Church with her family as a young teenager. Although I have vivid memories of spiritual feelings associated with singing hymns about Jesus Christ at a very young age, my own personal conviction of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ seemed to settle over me as I grew up. When I was serving as a missionary for the Church, I realized more definitively that what I had learned about the Church was true and the most important part of my life. A pattern I’ve identified in my life is that moments of spiritual enlightenment accompany serious study and efforts to reach out in helpfulness to others.

I have always believed that education, formal and informal, was just what Latter-day Saints did. That fit comfortably with my bookish personality. As a missionary and student, I began to recognize that the scriptures and teaching of Church leaders actually endorsed a more demanding standard of excellence in learning and scholarship and that these were to be accompanied by moral excellence. This thought has been helpful to me in my career on the fringes of academia but also in my efforts at personal discipleship.

My choice of personal scholarly focus has been influenced by the Church’s emphasis on the importance and eternal nature of family. I am convinced that the Church’s teachings about the family are bolstered by empirical research and the accumulated wisdom of human experience. In my academic work, I have also experienced spiritual insights that supplemented my research and writing on family issues. A number of times I have found an important scholarly source through a reference in a talk or article by one of the Church’s General Authorities. I believe that the Church’s teachings and practices enhance scholarly pursuits and are themselves worthy subjects for scholarly enquiry. I think that enquiry supports my essentially spiritual witness that the Church and its teachings have a divine source.

I love being a member of the Church. I love the community that comes with membership. I love the teachings of the Church and believe them completely. I love studying the scriptures. I love the opportunities to try to help others that come from formal Church responsibilities and the less formal, but more important, effort to follow the example of Jesus Christ. I love the Church’s leaders. I have found that they are personally committed to learning and that they combine that commitment with moral qualities of humility, kindness, and devotion to others. I love that the Church’s commitment to families is deep and profound and eminently practical.

One thing I have found particularly powerful is the Book of Mormon’s consistent message that each of us can experience a “mighty change of heart.” I know that this is true. Because of the atonement of Jesus Christ, no one has to be trapped by what they are today. We can aspire to and achieve real nobility and moral excellence and we can draw on the enabling help of the Savior to do so. This truth has made all the difference in the world for me.

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Bill Duncan is the director of the Marriage Law Foundation. He received his law degree from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. After graduation, he worked at the Columbus School of Law of the Catholic University of America in the Law and Religion Institute’s program, the Marriage Law Project. He served as a visiting professor in the BYU law school and now teaches courses in Family Law to BYU undergraduates as an adjunct professor. He also teaches a Constitutional Law course for American Heritage School. He has edited two books and has published dozens of articles for legal journals, including the Rutgers Law Review, Stanford Review of Law & Politics, Ave Maria Law Review, and many others.

Posted July 2010

I have always been interested in both religion and science. I come from a scientific background; my father Donald has a Ph.D. in plant pathology and his dad Eldon was a geneticist who had a successful academic career, mostly at Utah State University, which included stints as the dean of the college of science and as the dean of the graduate school. He discovered a type of cancer now called Gardner syndrome. My mother’s uncle (my Grandpa Gardner’s best friend) was a parasitologist, as was my father’s brother-in-law. From an early age I knew that my grandpa, who also served as an LDS bishop at one time, believed in evolution. He even authored a pamphlet called Evolution and the Bible in which he argued that the Bible tells us why the world was created, and evolution tells us how. This taught me that one need not “choose sides,” although I’m aware that certain scriptures can be interpreted to deny the possibility of “theistic evolution.” However, since the church has taken no official position, other than that God was in charge of the process (whatever it was), I haven’t taken an “official” viewpoint of my own, other than that the evidence for evolution is strong but that God created us.

I lived in Logan, Utah until age four, and grew up in various states, especially Hawaii, from age nine through high school. We traveled each summer to visit both sets of grandparents in Utah so I was somewhat exposed to “Utah culture.” And then I attended and graduated from Utah State University. Growing up outside of Utah I was often the only LDS student in my class (except for occasions when my twin sister and I shared a class), and so I became aware early in life of the differences of beliefs that people have.

Even as a teenager I used to read church books for fun and I had a pretty good handle on church doctrine. My parents were very good about teaching me the gospel, and I attended four years of early morning seminary. I have continued to read church history and doctrinal works, and online sources such as FARMS [Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies] (now called the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.)

I had always been a “good kid” and believed in what I was taught at home and at church; however, during my freshman year at Utah State I realized that I had better really know that the gospel is true prior to serving a mission. During that time I had read some anti-LDS literature; I’d seen some in high school as well, but this later exposure really made me feel that I needed to know more answers than I did. So I read and especially pondered, asking myself if anyone could or would write the Book of Mormon with the intent to defraud, or if an uneducated school boy in the early 1800s could write chiasmus, or understand Hebrew culture, or explain deep religious doctrine — that I believed was true — more clearly than the Bible explains it. I had several subtle but real answers to my prayers, prior to and during my mission in Curitiba, Brasil. However, even after my mission it was important to me to reconfirm what I had learned to be true. Often I found that confirmations of my testimony did not come immediately, or in the way I expected; while frustrating at the time, this helped me to know for sure that I wasn’t just “brainwashing” myself.

I spent much of my free study time on my mission, and after it, studying scriptures and finding cross references and trying to organize gospel principals in my mind as they relate to each other. I like to draw analogies to understand spiritual things, keeping in mind that analogies cannot be taken too far. Many of the analogies I have created draw on my science background. One seminar I attended on human development reminded me of our spiritual development, and helped me to understand spiritual development. I have also compared learning through the scientific method to learning spiritual truths through a similar method. There are actually more similarities than differences between understanding religion and understanding science. I’ve written up many of my thoughts into a couple of manuscripts which I hope at least my children and family members can someday benefit by.

I have learned that some people are naturally more believing, and others are naturally more skeptical. I have come to believe that these are not “good” or “bad” traits – they just are. It is ok to have doubts, and it is even ok to doubt things that others easily believe. But having a “desire to believe” (Alma 32:27) allows God to strive with us and teach us. Sometimes it requires a struggle on our part, but we can be stronger because of it. Struggles with spiritual things are nothing to be ashamed of; even Enos had a wrestle with the Lord (see Enos 1:2; see also Alma 8:10). I believe all Latter-day Saints should have these kinds of struggles. Rather than ignore our weaknesses and lack of understanding, we ought to tackle these things, in meaningful and deliberate ways (as opposed to fanatical or overzealous ways).

Three areas that I have struggled with (in the positive sense of the word) are anti-LDS claims (mostly from certain Protestants; Catholics generally aren’t anti-LDS); difficult issues in church history; and atheistic claims that we’re here by chance and all we really are is a bag of chemicals, in which even our consciousness is composed solely of chemical reactions.

It wasn’t hard to come to the conclusion that Latter-day Saints really are “biblical” despite the claims of some Protestants. Saints in Bible times had prophets, priesthood, and modern revelation, just as we do today. They worshipped a living God, not a book. Even a secular class in European history shows that the great apostasy was real. It just makes sense — both logically and scripturally—that Christ and God are separate people, that although we are in fact saved by Grace we must try to live the commandments for the atonement to fully apply (explained so well in Alma 42), and that, as God’s children, we can become as He is. I can see how, given centuries of beliefs to the contrary, it is hard for some people to step back and see the big picture of what the great apostasy has done to true religion. However, I have a great respect for other Christians for having the great faith that they do in spite of not accepting additional scriptures of the restoration. In fact, many non-LDS Christians have greater faith than I would probably have, absent the revelations of the restoration.

As for LDS history, there are some bothersome issues which I still don’t have answers for. But I have come to understand that I must trust in what I do know, rather than worry about what I don’t. I have learned that even though the Lord is perfect, he uses imperfect people to carry out his work; and in order for us to learn, we must often be allowed to make mistakes, up to a point. Also, we cannot judge people or record keeping/scholarship practices of the past, by present standards.

Regarding atheistic arguments that God is superfluous: In my current position at Southern Virginia University (a small four-year independent liberal arts institution in the LDS tradition — where most of our students and faculty are LDS, and the rest believe in God and live by LDS standards), this is not often an issue; but in previous educational and work environments, I have been repeatedly exposed to the idea that we are here by chance, and that religion is a crutch for people who can’t handle the idea that when they die, they cease to exist. I have considered arguments on both sides, including statistical analysis of the odds that life could form in the first place. I understand that to some scientifically enlightened people, the Bible is just a bunch of old traditions and myths. One of Christianity’s main counter-arguments is that the Bible is true because…it says it is true! (Another argument is based on archeological evidence of various biblical civilizations. But this doesn’t prove the miracles, or show that Jesus is really the Son of God, or that he resurrected.) This argument has never satisfied me. How do we know the Bible is true, and not, for example, the Hindu scriptures? We need an independent witness. God has provided two independent witnesses (actually more, but especially these two): The Holy Ghost and the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon proves, as one of its purposes, that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever (D&C 20:8-12 and 2 Nephi 29:9). When people ask why the God of the Bible would send angels and prophets and do miracles centuries ago, but not now, today’s Christians often reply that these aren’t for our day. That to me has always sounded like a cop out (it sure is easier to believe in angels and miracles in far away places, long ago), but we have the answer: God still does these things today, and the Book of Mormon is the main proof. Some people think that miracles and logic are contradictory, but the Book of Mormon is miraculous and shows that God’s plan is logical. It satisfies my need to have logical proof, even though that proof ultimately comes through ways other than our five senses; I know it is true by the power of the Holy Ghost. In my life, just as the Book of Mormon itself says (Mormon 7:8-9) the Book of Mormon has confirmed to me the truth of the Bible, and vice versa. The Book of Mormon is why I believe the Bible is true.

So to those scientists and humanists who can’t understand how a scientist can also believe in God, I say that:

1. You have to accept a larger definition of truth than what you can know by your five senses. Truth can come in other ways, such as through the Holy Ghost. However, I cannot expect those who have not experienced spiritual promptings to understand or accept them, any more than I could expect a person blind or deaf from birth to really understand sight or hearing. Try explaining how the color blue differs from green to a person who has never seen, or explaining how a C played on the French horn differs from the same pitch played by a clarinet.
2. Some scientists and humanists have been steeped so long in the “we are here by chance” idea that they no longer question it. It is reasoned that because science, by definition, cannot invoke God, we must look for scientific explanations of our existence. I have no arguments with this, except to say that we cannot a priori expect that all truth will be amenable to the scientific method. Our best scientific explanation of how life formed involves chance events. Then, atheists jump to, “since we know we are here by chance, god must not be needed or exist.” This turns into circular reasoning. Furthermore, many atheists equate a belief in God with a belief in magic or superstition. On the contrary, our LDS understanding of God is not magical or illogical, but rather just the opposite. The restoration has provided so many answers, and has showed us how logical, and merciful and just God is. Our knowledge of the purpose of life even tells us why there are so many things we don’t know: it is part of the test.

I still don’t know how God created the earth. I believe that much of what we learn and teach in evolution classes is true, but we don’t know the whole story, especially about life’s origin. What we as Latter-day Saints do know is that no matter the process, our bodies match our spirits, so our bodies’ existence and their form is not a matter of chance.

I have a large chart that shows many of the chemical reactions in a typical human cell, and how these reactions are all linked together and controlled by enzymes, which themselves can be turned “on” and “off,” so that all these reactions are tightly controlled. The chart is written in small print; my students are always amazed when I show my students how complex their cells really are. I like to suggest that instead of painting the universe behind the Cristus (aka Christus) statue in the North Visitors’ Center on Temple Square (and in other Church visitors centers) the artist could have painted these chemical reactions, for the Savior created them and understands them.

I still don’t know why each of us faces the particular trials in life that we do. But I have learned with Nephi that “[God”] loveth his children, nevertheless I do not know the meaning of all things” (1 Nephi 11:17). As God is patient with us and our lack of understanding, we need to be patient with Him and trust his understanding. And someday we will know the meaning of all things. In the meantime, God lives; Jesus is His Only Begotten Son in the Flesh and is our redeemer; He has restored His gospel through the prophet Joseph Smith, including the Holy Priesthood with its ordinances; and we have a living prophet today. Furthermore, the Holy Ghost can help us to know that all these things are true.

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Richard D. Gardner received a B.A. in biology from Utah State University in 1991 and, in 1998, a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in molecular and cellular biology. He did post-doctoral work at the University of Virginia 1998-2004, and has been a member of the faculty at Southern Virginia University since 2004. His graduate and postdoctoral studies were focused on the yeast cell cycle and mitotic control—specifically, on “checkpoints,” which delay entry into mitosis if the DNA is damaged or if the chromosomes are not correctly attached to the mitotic spindle. Dr. Gardner served a mission in Brasil Curitiba (1986-1988). He married Naomi Blair in 1990, and they are the parents of six children, five of whom are living.

Posted July 2010

No dramatic incident occurred to awaken me to the reality that God lives, that He knows and loves me, and that His plan for me will bring greater happiness and fulfillment than any other. All that I have experienced through life’s successes and disappointments, and all that I have learned through academic pursuits, have reinforced to me what I learned as a child: A compassionate, omniscient, and omnipotent God is the one constant in the universe.

Certainly, my family and the environment surrounding my formative years influenced and strengthened my awareness of God and His plan. I learned to pray and to recognize through small but miraculous ways that Someone I could not see heard and answered me. My parents were believing and practicing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We walked to church together every Sunday and spent Monday evenings together. My father made certain that we had a family prayer every morning. There was something in the consistency of these family devotions that contributed to the security I felt in my religious environment.

The lives of all of my great-great grandparents have contributed significantly to the family influence on why I believe. In various locations in Europe and the United States, these ancestors chose to sacrifice considerable security and comforts when they were baptized into the LDS Church. The more I learned of them, including visiting their homelands, the more awed I became with their fervent commitment to their new faith. Furthermore, when they arrived at their new home in the dry and desolate West, not one of them turned back or told their children to go back to their homeland. In every case, they taught their children to reverence the restored truth about God that they had embraced. Without question, their sacrifices have invited me to look more seriously into what they came to cherish and never deny.

When I was twenty-one years old and serving an LDS mission in an area of the world where no one seemed interested in scriptures and religion, I felt reinforced in my commitment to my faith because I knew my family, especially my father, believed in the gospel of Jesus Christ that I preached. My father was what I came to describe as a “healthy skeptic” about the practice of religion. A rational and critical thinker, he was not afraid to challenge standard explanations and encouraged us to find satisfying answers to our queries. For questions about doctrine, he trusted in the witness of scripture and latter-day prophets as valid arguments to support our conclusions. These doctrinal discussions with my father created a substantial foundation upon which to build my expanding understanding about the constancy of God and the consistency of His gospel.

Many families in the LDS Church, including mine, traditionally expected young women to marry and have a family for their primary focus in adulthood. When my life followed an academic-career path without including a husband and children until much later in life, I found that God still heard my prayers and His gospel continued to give me the best direction for my life. Doors of opportunity opened to me where I had not knocked and I discovered aptitudes in areas where I had not tried. Because my life’s trajectory differed from most of the LDS women around me, I was often asked by fellow-members how I could remain happy as a single woman and by those not of my faith why I remained faithful to such a family-focused church where women are often unnoticed. I found that my father’s training to search the scriptures (the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, as well as the Bible) had enabled me to know the answer, even when others were not convinced.

In random chapters and in times I would not expect, scriptures offered me the answers, insights, and solace to sustain my faith and keep me active in the Mormon Church. For example, I found profound personal connection with the Lord’s promise in D&C 6:14: “As often as thou hast inquired, thou hast received instruction of my Spirit. If it had not been so, thou wouldst not have come to the place where thou art at this time.” At any given point in my unexpected life, I could look back and see God’s influence and power leading me along. After so much evidence, I grew in trust that He would continue to do so in the future.

That is why I believe. God is constant—in His love, His plan, and His promises over all eras of time. Now that I teach numerous students with a myriad of gospel-related questions, I am struck again at the depth and breadth of God’s wisdom that is found in scripture. I am humbled at the wisdom of the Book of Mormon that is magnified in the New Testament and then reinforced in even greater clarity and power when viewed again in the Book of Mormon. I feel profound joy when I hear undergraduate students articulate clarifying connections that they discover in scripture to answer their own questions about God and their life’s path. And my confidence in God and His plan of happiness expands as I realize that He has a unique mission for each of us in life, with differing paths to follow. All that I have learned reinforces what I knew as a child: God lives, is keenly aware of each of us, and has the plan that will bring us joy in this life and in the eternities.

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Born and reared in Tremonton, Utah, Camille Fronk Olson is an associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in education from Utah State University, as well as a master’s degree in ancient Near Eastern studies and a Ph.D. in the sociology of the Middle East (her dissertation focused on Palestinian families in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). Before joining the BYU faculty, she taught institute and seminary in the Salt Lake area and was dean of students at LDS Business College. Dr. Olson served a full-time mission to Toulouse, France, and she is married to Paul F. Olson.

Posted July 2010

I was born to Catholic parents in Mandan, North Dakota, but we went to church only for christenings, marriages, and funerals. Only my maternal grandfather was a practicing Catholic, and he attended mass each week. I had the good fortune to live with my grandparents for a time, while my mother was recuperating from surgery. It was my grandfather who taught me to pray (from the heart, rather than the rote prayers for which the Catholics are known); he also made me promise never to smoke. Later, when he learned that I was studying with LDS missionaries, he sent me my first copy of the Book of Mormon.

Always fascinated by religion and by the Bible, as a child I attended a Bible study class with the Assembly of God for a time. Whenever Jehovah’s Witnesses would come to the door, my mother would say, “I’m not interested, but let me ask my son.” I enjoyed hearing another viewpoint of the Bible. After we moved to Salt Lake City, a man from the Gideon Bible Society came door to door selling Bibles for a dollar. In her usual manner, my mother told him, “I’m not interested, but let me ask my son.” She leaned in from the door and inquired and, of course, I was interested. I spent hours lying on the back seat of the family car reading the Bible and finished it. I was only eight years of age at the time, but my mother, a former school teacher and the first female game warden in North Dakota, had begun teaching me to read and write at age four.

We soon moved to another house in Salt Lake City, where we were visited by both Jehovah’s Witnesses and LDS stake missionaries. My mother again asked if I was interested and I began meeting with local missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I had already begun attending weekday Primary at the invitation of new friends, so I had some idea of what the Church was about. It was at this time that my grandfather sent me the copy of the Book of Mormon that missionaries had left at his home in Mandan (but which he, a non-native speaker of English, never read). Like the Bible, it, too, fascinated me. I could see that this marvelous book, along with the Church that used it, taught the same things I had found in the Bible but were missing in other churches. I was baptized just a month short of my ninth birthday. By the time I was twelve, I had added the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price to the list of scriptures I had read.

It was prayer that brought a spiritual witness of both the Book of Mormon and the restored Church. It also brought me much relief during hard times and opened the door to many miracles that have strengthened my testimony over time. In addition to strong impressions, I have been guided by voices (a rare occurrence), prophetic dreams, and other very spiritual experiences. One of these has been posted at mormonwiki.com/A_Mormon_missionary’s_dream.

When, at age sixteen, the bishop interviewed me to become a priest, he also asked if I would care to serve a stake mission. I was so busy with extracurricular activities in high school and elsewhere that I didn’t feel I would have sufficient time to devote to such a calling, so I asked him if he could at least wait until I graduated from high school. He remembered that and, about a month after graduation, I was interviewed by the bishop and stake president and called as a stake missionary. In those days, there were no full-time missionaries in Utah, so we did all the teaching. Halfway through my two years of service, I was ordained an elder and was endowed in the Salt Lake Temple, where my companion and I attended sessions once a week. We were also putting in about 60-65 hours a month in missionary work and managed to convert and baptize several people. Meanwhile, I received my patriarchal blessing, which said that I would “go to the nations of the world and preach Jesus Christ and him crucified.” I had not yet decided to serve a full-time mission, but the blessing got me to thinking about it. When the Church News announced that the French Mission would be split and that Henry D. Moyle was being called to preside over the new mission, I immediately knew he would be my mission president, and I cut out the article, which is still in my possession. I was called to a 2½-year mission in the French East Mission, covering eastern France and western Switzerland. Later, I served several years as a district missionary in Israel, at the same time serving as a counselor in the Jerusalem Branch presidency. So, in line with my patriarchal blessing, I have officially served as a missionary in four countries (USA, France, Switzerland, and Israel) and have taught people from 50 nations, baptizing people from the four lands as well as Australia, Greece, Algeria, and Italy.

My academic career has been inspired by the Lord’s words in D&C 88:78-80: “Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you, that you may be instructed more perfectly in theory, in principle, in doctrine, in the law of the gospel, in all things that pertain unto the kingdom of God, that are expedient for you to understand; Of things both in heaven and in the earth, and under the earth; things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass; things which are at home, things which are abroad; the wars and the perplexities of the nations, and the judgments which are on the land; and a knowledge also of countries and of kingdoms—That ye may be prepared in all things when I shall send you again to magnify the calling whereunto I have called you, and the mission with which I have commissioned you.”

One of my professors, Aziz Atiya, counseled me to “fly over the entire forest” before deciding in which grove of trees I wanted to have my “picnic.” Consequently, though I concentrated on the Near/Middle East in most of my coursework, I picked up degrees in four different fields and took many classes in other areas such as geography, history, French, and Arabic. I have long believed that new discoveries are most often made by people who can bridge the gap between different disciplines, and that too much specialization can blind one to new ways of looking at things. I explain some of my thinking in a 5-part series posted on the Meridian Magazine web site, 2005: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

While still involved in my undergraduate studies, I told the Lord in prayer that if he would help me learn all that I undertook to learn, I would use whatever knowledge I gained to help build up and strengthen his Church. Consequently, I acknowledge the Lord and his Spirit as key to my academic success and pray that I may continue to be of use in his kingdom.

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John Alexander Tvedtnes was born 26 January 1941 in Mandan, North Dakota. His earliest years were spent in that state and in Wyoming and Washington, living on the farms of both pairs of grandparents and in several small towns. In 1949, his father obtained employment in Salt Lake City and moved the family there. Though born into a Roman Catholic family, John attended Bible classes with the Assembly of God. His mother, a former school teacher and game warden, taught him to read beginning at age four and he read the Bible when he was eight. Soon afterward, he became acquainted with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was converted by stake missionaries a month short of his ninth birthday, being confirmed on New Year’s Day 1950. Consequently, while the rest of the world was celebrating the new millennium on 1 January 2000, John was commemorating half a century as a member of the restored Church.

John’s high school years included many extracurricular activities, such as various clubs, ROTC teams, the Civil Air Patrol, the Ground Observer Corps, and the Civil Defense Corps. He graduated from high school in 1959 and worked for the Salt Lake City Police Department for more than a year before attending the University of Utah. He served a stake mission from June 1959 until June 1961, then filled a 2½-year mission in France and Switzerland (French East Mission) before returning to the University of Utah and various occupations to support a growing family. Over the years, he has served as counselor and president in elders quorums; as group leader, assistant, and secretary in high priests groups; as a Sunday School teacher (mostly Gospel Doctrine classes); and as first counselor in the Jerusalem Branch Presidency. He also served as a branch/district missionary in Israel.

John received his BA in anthropology in 1969, a graduate certificate in Middle East Studies in 1970, an MA in linguistics (specializing in generative-transformational grammars with a minor in Arabic, also in 1970), and an MA in Middle East studies (Hebrew) with minor in anthropology and archaeology in 1971, all at the University of Utah. Meanwhile, he earned enough credits for a BA in French, a BA in geography, and an MA in history, though he did not take those degrees. He did graduate studies at the University of California (Berkeley) and moved with his family to Israel, where he did graduate studies in Egyptian and Semitic languages and lived from 1971 until 1979.

John taught biblical Hebrew at the University of Utah from 1968 to 1971 and, during 1970/71, also taught several courses in linguistics at the same institution and courses in anthropology at the Brigham Young University Salt Lake Center. During 1972-1979, he taught many courses in the BYU Jerusalem semester-abroad program, including biblical Hebrew, anthropology (peoples of the Middle East), archaeology (of Israel and the Near East, as well as archaeological methodology and field work), history (ancient Near East, history of the Jews), historical geography (ancient Near East and Israel), and led most of the student field trips. He also guided tours for BYU and others. Returning to the United States, he worked in the private sector for a number of years, while teaching part-time at the BYU Salt Lake Center and the University of Utah (one course only), and taught CES courses in the Magna-Hunter region for a number of years. Meanwhile, he taught part-time at two high schools in Israel and served as a substitute teacher for about a year in the Salt Lake City School District. He currently teaches an adult institute of religion course in Bentonville, Arkansas.

In addition to formal university courses, John has lectured at the University of Haifa, the Jacob Hyatt Institute of Brandeis University, and for various other groups (Mensa, Sons of the Utah Pioneers, blind groups, Baptist seminarians, tour groups in Israel, etc.). He has also spoken in many Latter-day Saint church meetings, conferences, and firesides, and even spoke in the Sabbath services of a Seventh-Day Adventist congregation. He has delivered papers at symposia sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture, the World Union of Jewish Studies, the Society of Biblical Literature (Society of Biblical Literature or SBL), the Middle East Center of the University of Utah, the Society for Early Historic Archaeology (SEHA), the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS, now the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship), the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (FAIR), the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum (BMAF), and the BYU Religious Studies Center.

To date, John has had ten books and more than 300 articles published. Some of his works have been published by such prestigious institutions as the Magnes Press of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, and others.

John has held memberships in such professional societies as the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Society of Biblical Literature, the World Union of Jewish Studies, the Society for Early Historic Archaeology (where he served on the board of trustees), and others. In 1995, he began to work full-time for FARMS, which became part of BYU and was incorporated into the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, where he was senior resident scholar. He retired from BYU in January 2007 and he and his wife Carol moved to Bella Vista, Arkansas, several months later. Most of his children and grandchildren still live in Utah.

See John Tvedtnes’s web site at bookofmormonresearch.org. For a comprehensive listing of his published writings, with links to those that have been posted on-line, go to bookofmormonresearch.org/john_tvedtnes_publications.

Posted July 2010

Psychology and other social sciences teach us that human beings interact in the world through three modes: affective, cognitive, and conative. These three ways of interaction are highly integrated, each one exerting an influence on the other two. Consistency between a person’s affect, cognitions, and conations creates an individual who is internally focused or disciplined and who may exhibit strength of character and consistency in action.

There is a fourth way or mode in which people interact with the world around them that is gaining recognition and acceptance in the social sciences. That is a person’s spiritual aspect. Spirituality also interacts with the individual’s affective, cognitive, and conative experience of the world, and consistency with those three elements increases personal focus, which in turn increases discipline, strength, and a sense of moral correctness in judgment and action.

It is very difficult to maintain internal consistency across all situations and across time. It is, however, important to recognize our spiritual nature as well as our emotional, intellectual, and intentional aspects. In the more secular literature spirituality becomes synonymous with intuition or insight. In reality it is a perception of or sensitivity to spiritual promptings that, when followed, brings insight, understanding, and intuition.

I have had direct experiences with the spirit as well as many prompting and subtle nudges that have moved me in paths I had not foreseen but have then provided great blessings, insights, and inspirations.

I will share one such experience.

In 1990, I had an opportunity to travel to Russia and teach workshops on entrepreneurship to Russians on a cruise ship on the Volga River. I actually spent six weeks on four different excursions on the good ship Zhukov going from Moscow to Nizhniy Novgorod and back, teaching free market principles to Russian passengers newly freed from Soviet Communism. Because the cruise company was operated by and employed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many of the Russians and other Americans on board were also members of the church.

The cruises lasted about ten days and inevitably went over a Sunday. This provided an opportunity for cruise passengers, both Americans and Russians, to meet together in a religious meeting. With permission from everyone who needed to give permission, each Sunday there was a testimony meeting (with translators) held on the ship.

On my second cruise from Moscow, Sunday fell about half way through the trip. About eighty members met in the ship’s theater on the top deck of the ship. I vividly recall sitting in the back of the salon as a young woman from St. Petersburg got up to bear her testimony of the Church and the Restored Gospel. She started off telling us her name and said that her family was the first, or one of the first, families to be baptized into the church in Russia. They were among the first converts in the entire country.

Immediately I had a flashback experience of a very spiritual nature. I remembered sitting in a Zone Conference in Uruguay in 1978. I don’t remember the exact date or location, but that didn’t matter. What I remember was our mission president, Gene R. Cook, standing up and telling us about his recent trip to general conference. I remembered very clearly the words he spoke.

President Cook said that he had been to general conference and that, as part of the conference, the Prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, met with all the General Authorities in the top room of the Salt Lake City Temple. Then President Cook quoted the Prophet as saying: “Brethren, the Spirit of the Lord is brooding over the continent of Africa and the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and it will not be long before the Gospel is preached in those countries.”

I remember being excited and thinking how wonderful it would be to have the church in Russia (I didn’t even think about Africa and what it would mean in terms of every worthy male member holding the priesthood). I returned from my mission, promptly forgetting the Zone Conference and the words of President Cook amid the activities of getting on with life.

At that time Russia was ruled by Brezhnev, a hard-line communist autocrat with no real prospects for any kind of meaningful reform. And later, I didn’t remember anything I had heard that day as the wall tumbled down, as the Soviet Union collapsed, as the Russian Republic was born on the rubble in front of the Russian White House.

I didn’t remember anything about that day in 1978 until that day in 1990 when a young woman stood before a group of American and Russian Saints and bore strong testimony of the Restored Gospel.

I received such a strong confirmation, not only of the truthfulness of her words but a strong, vivid recollection of the words of a Prophet of God through one of his designated authorities. It was an intellectual recollection accompanied by the joy the spirit brought to that young missionary in a Zone Conference in Uruguay in 1978. More important to me in 1990, it was a witness born by the Spirit of the literal fulfillment of a prophecy given to Spencer W. Kimball all those years before.

That same sweet spirit that touched me that day has occasionally touched me thereafter. When I think back to the salon on the top of the Zhukov I feel the spirit again, I remember what it looked like and how I felt when Our Heavenly Father blessed me with that experience.

Because of that experience in 1990 and many others I know God lives and loves his children. I know he takes an active role in the affairs of man. It was He who moved Russia from Brezhnev to democracy in 12 years with relatively little bloodshed.

Because of that experience I know God has sent Prophets in these latter days and I know Spencer W. Kimball was one. I have no doubt that those who have served in that position since him have also been Prophets. I have often received spiritual witnesses to that effect.

I know the Gospel has been restored and I receive witnesses of that restoration as the spirit confirms the testimonies of saints just like that young woman who testified on the aging ship Zhukov on the Volga.

I have felt the Spirit testify of many things over my life. It has confirmed the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. It has witnessed to me of the prophetic mission of Joseph Smith. I have felt that spirit in countless church meeting and in sacred places such as the Temple or the hills above Adam-ondi-Ahman.

Each time I am left with a desire to remember the other experiences I have had, to feel the joy of those experiences, and to act in accordance with Gods plan for me.

I bear testimony of these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

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Peter Robinson is the Morris Professor of Entrepreneurship at Utah Valley University, where he has taught since 2003. Prior to joining the faculty at UVU, he was director of research for the Center for Entrepreneurship and an assistant professor at Wichita State University (1987-1990), a tenured associate professor and department chair at the University of Calgary ( 1990-2003), and, in 1994 and 1996, a visiting professor of entrepreneurship at the State Academy of Management in Moscow, Russia. He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from Brigham Young University in 1982 and 1987, respectively. He is a Sam Walton Fellow and the recipient of a Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award, and, in 2005, was named Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Reviewer of the Year.

Posted July 2010

Testimony of Alan C. Ashton

I am one of the co-founders of WordPerfect Corporation and am indebted to the gospel of Jesus Christ for the happiness and joy in my life. My parents were both members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and my mother’s father, David O. McKay, was the prophet and president of the Church.

Even with that close connection to the leader of the Church my testimony did not come from him, nor did it come from my parents. They were certainly influential in my attending Church meetings in my youth, but my conviction of the truth came from my individual study and obedience to the gospel principles. In middle school and high school I became interested in the stories and teachings in the scriptures which included the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. In the Church these are called the standard works. I enjoyed my Sunday School classes and Seminary classes. I loved the teaching of my 9th grade seminary teacher so much that during the summer when school was out I rode my bike three miles to his home early in the morning three times a week to hear him teach and explain the New Testament parables of Jesus.

As I was finishing high school I joined the 23rd Army Band in the Utah National Guard where I played the trumpet. I went to Fort Ord near Monterey, California, for my six months of army training. I had decided to serve a mission for the Church so I determined to read all of the standard works during my spare time during this training.

The first two months were basic training and I read the Book of Mormon during the hourly ten-minute smoking breaks. I had a pocket-sized copy of the Book of Mormon that I had with me as we had classes and as we marched from place to place.

I began to appreciate in a new way the writings of the prophets and teachings of the Savior, Jesus Christ, as they were recorded in the Book of Mormon. In the last chapter of the Book of Mormon the prophet Moroni gave this promise: “And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.” (see Moroni 10:3-5)

I had received the words of the Book of Mormon by reading and pondering them, and I desired to obtain this witness by the power of the Holy Ghost that the words in Book of Mormon were true and from God.

One night shortly after I had finished reading the Book of Mormon I climbed down from my top bunk and went alone into a large classroom in an adjacent room and knelt down on the hard, cold tile floor in the far corner of the room and offered a sincere prayer to my Heavenly Father in the Name of Jesus Christ asking if the Book of Mormon was true. I received a wonderful, powerful, warm, tingling sensation which enveloped me from head to foot. I rejoiced at receiving this confirmation of the Holy Ghost.

I have received similar feelings throughout my life in times when I have sought and needed spiritual inspiration, but this first occasion was most pronounced. I have learned to recognize these promptings of the Holy Spirit and found that I could not make them happen at will, but that they come from a source outside of me, bearing witness to truth.

These experiences are sacred to me and I am grateful to a loving Father in Heaven who because of His Son Jesus Christ has sent me guidance in crucial times in my life.

I have felt and received guidance as I served a two and a half year mission for the Church in Germany, as I became a husband and father, as I was deciding what to do for my Ph.D. dissertation, as I was making the decision to start a word processing product which became WordPerfect, and as I have served in a variety of callings in the Church including multiple times an Elders Quorum president, a gospel teacher, a member of a bishopric, a stake president, a mission president, and now currently a bishop.

My testimony and knowledge of the truthfulness of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown stronger as I have experienced growth and joy in my life. I have seen the power of the gospel in the life of my wife whom I love with all my heart and to whom I am eternally married, and in the lives of our eleven children and their families. I see the positive results and goodness in the lives of faithful covenant members of the Church as they serve one another and as they strive to keep the commandments of God.

I have treasured warm associations with people of other faiths and have enjoyed learning from them and sharing with them what I hold dear. I love the scriptures, and I read and learn from them every day.

I have come to know through the manifestations of the Holy Ghost that Jesus is the Christ and that He is the Savior and Redeemer of mankind. I know that I along with all mankind will be lifted up to stand before Him to be judged of our works because He was lifted up by men upon the cross. I know that salvation comes in and through Jesus Christ and that all will be resurrected because of Him. I know that the true gospel of Jesus Christ was restored to the earth in these latter days through the prophet Joseph Smith. I know that we are all children of God and that He invites us to come unto Him with full purpose of heart.

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Alan C. Ashton, a former professor of computer science at Brigham Young University, is the co-founder and the former president and CEO of WordPerfect Corporation. He graduated magna cum laude in mathematics from the University of Utah and later received his Ph.D. in computer science from the same university.

In 1995, after WordPerfect was acquired by Novell, Dr. Ashton and his wife Karen founded Thanksgiving Point—a complex of gardens (approximately fifty-five acres, with fifteen different theme areas and approximately four-and-a-half miles of walking trails), restaurants, etc.—in Lehi, Utah. ““We wanted to create something for the people around us,” says Dr. Ashton. “We’ve been blessed financially and with a large family. We wanted to give something back to the community and the families in our area.” Thanksgiving Point provides a place where adults and children can learn about farming, gardening, and cooking, and includes a championship-caliber golf course (the longest in the state of Utah), a museum of ancient life (featuring the largest collection of mounted dinosaur skeletons in the world), and a multi-screen movie theater. Nearly 1.5 million people visit Thanksgiving Point annually.

Alan and Karen Ashton are the parents of eleven children. His other interests include farming, music (especially the trumpet), and competitive tennis. He has held various responsibilities within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including service as a missionary in central Germany, as a stake president, and, from July 2004 through June 2007, as a mission president in eastern Canada. He currently serves as a bishop.

Posted July 2010

My testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ as restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith centers in large part on its view of the infinite and eternal potential of mankind. To this point, I share and comment on five brief excerpts from sacred writings produced by Mormonism’s founder.

1. In a text attributed to the prophet Abraham, God describes himself thus: “These two facts do exist, that there are two spirits, one being more intelligent than the other; there shall be another more intelligent than they; I am the Lord thy God, I am more intelligent than they all” (Pearl of Great Price, Abraham 3:19).
2. In response to an invitation to summarize the essence of Mormonism for an American audience of newspaper readers, Joseph Smith appended to a brief narrative of the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a series of basic tenets. These have become canonized in Mormonism as “The Articles of Faith.” The ninth Article of Faith reads, “We believe all that God has revealed, all that he does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” (Pearl of Great Price, Articles of Faith #9).
3. In a letter to his followers during arguably the most difficult months of Joseph Smith’s prophetic ministry, he declared somewhat defiantly, “How long can rolling waters remain impure? What power shall stay the heavens? As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:33).
4. On another challenging occasion, Joseph Smith received “knowledge from heaven” that identified four essential qualities that God and mankind have in common. The qualities of eternal existence, intelligence, spirituality, and innocence establish a presumptive basis for an eternal relationship between our Heavenly Father and His spirit children (Doctrine and Covenants 93:23-39).
5. In a text attributed to Moses, the ancient prophet related successive encounters with God and Satan who invite him in turn to worship them. Moses concluded God’s offer to be the more compelling after having applied a rigorous and systematic comparative method that convinced him that God possesses more glory, power, and intelligence and provides a more exalted message to mankind than does Satan. Then, in declaring his own allegiance to God, Moses tells Satan, “I will not cease to call upon God, I have other things to inquire of him” (Pearl of Great Price, Moses 1:18).

These passages from Mormonism’s foundational scriptures describe a God who is more intelligent than all other beings and who willingly shares His abundant intelligence with all who receive and act on it. They also describe the human race as possessing essential qualities of godliness, implying that men and women can become like God to the extent that they nurture the divine essence within them. In these and other scriptural passages, mankind is richly rewarded for inquiring after the qualities of godliness.

Advocating a message that links mankind and God, heaven and earth, and time and eternity is very ambitious, even “audacious” (Harold Bloom’s term) for a religion that was founded by a frontier farm boy from New York’s “burned over district” and that is more often understood in the context of America’s religious past than the planet’s meaningful future. Whether Mormonism ever fully realizes these noble objectives is for the witnesses of another day. Those of our day must assess whether the ideology that Joseph Smith and his successors have advanced describes a God that we can faithfully worship and defines a gospel that can effectively guide our lives.

I find the Mormon worldview to be compelling, in spite of its essential ‘incompleteness’ (as required by Article of Faith #9) and the persistent imperfections of those, like me, who have attempted to live it through the years. Mormon history teaches me that its gospel obligates both leaders and followers to serve mankind and to work for the betterment of the earth and of all humanity, while developing personal virtues of godliness and overcoming their own and others’ imperfections. No exceptions, no excuses. Mormonism’s abiding emphasis on spirituality, service, work, and worship derives from the following basic tenets:

• The extent to which our life is one of service to others determines in large measure the “kingdom of glory” we inherit in the multi-tiered Mormon afterlife
• The “Celestial,” or highest, kingdom of glory consists of those who have covenanted with one another and with God to assist Him throughout eternity to bring salvation to all of His children
• Salvation is a never-ending process of realizing our innate potential of becoming like God.

Latter-day Saint scriptures consist of the records of holy prophets that:

• Reveal a vision of this plan of salvation
• Document the (largely unsuccessful) efforts of past and present societies to realize its possibilities in mortality
• Witness to the eventual fulfillment of this plan through the blessings of God and the persistent faithfulness of His children.

The central key to the success of this plan is the “infinite and eternal” atonement of Jesus Christ. Allowing mercy to play a major role in nurturing our divine potential, the atonement shows all mankind that charity is the essential quality of godliness and thus the most desirable of human virtues.

My witness is based on more than inspired writings and elegant systems of religious thought. Most importantly, it comes from personal spiritual experience. My knowledge of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and its restoration through Joseph Smith in our day results from

• An abiding desire to understand my identity and place in the universe
• A concerted search for these “solemnities of eternity”
• A willingness to conform my life to the moral and ethical implications of the resulting witness from God.

As partial and imperfect as these personal efforts have been, they have borne the sweetest and most sublime fruit of all others in my life.

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Steven L. Olsen received AM and Ph.D. degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1978 and 1985, respectively. For the past three decades he has filled various professional and administrative positions with the LDS Church History Department, Salt Lake City, including Senior Curator and Managing Director. Major projects completed under his leadership include the permanent exhibits, “A Covenant Restored: Historical Foundations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and “Presidents of the Church” at the Church History Museum; the historic site restorations, “Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith Farm and Sacred Grove” and “Book of Mormon Historic Publication Site” (western New York), “Historic Kirtland” and “John and Else Johnson Home” (northeast Ohio),” Cove Fort” and “Brigham Young Winter Home” (Utah); and the Church History Library in Salt Lake City.

He has presented and published widely in the fields of museum studies and Mormon studies. Major continuing research interests include the symbolism of community design, literary conventions of sacred texts, ceremony and ritual, and visual iconography. Steve has served on the boards or in the leadership of the following professional organizations: American Society of Church History, Western Museums Association, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Utah Museums Association, Utah Office of Museum Services, and Utah Humanities Council.

Steve and his wife Kathi have five children and two grandchildren and live with assorted pets in Heber City, Utah.

Posted July 2010

While working for a Democratic member of Congress, I met a co-worker who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We became close friends. I was about to start graduate school at the University of Virginia, and he offered to give me a ride to Charlottesville to help with my arrangements. During that trip, we talked about religion, and I agreed to attend church with him on the following Sunday. I cannot remember when I did not believe that Jesus is the Christ, and I wanted to better understand Mormonism. I had known a number of Latter-day Saints, and I found them to be strange in a pleasant sort of way. My willingness to attend services that Sunday and learn more was a sociological exploration, at first, for me. As I prayerfully read the Book of Mormon, however, a great feeling of assurance and peace swept over me, and I knew it was true. In that very instant, I said to myself, “Oh no, bring on the sackcloth and ashes, now I am a Mormon.” For me, in that instant, I knew that the Book of Mormon and the Church were true. From that simple act of religious conscience, when I agreed to follow that special prompting from on high and become a Latter-day Saint, I have had much joy in the gospel and have come to know very powerfully that Jesus is in fact the Christ, the anointed one, my Savior and friend. I have also dedicated much of my professional life as a professor of constitutional law to ensuring that the right of religious conscience, as found in our First Amendment, remains vibrant in this country and spreads throughout the world. It is my humble prayer that every child of God will have the opportunity that I have had to be free to follow the promptings of his or her religious conscience and do that which God would have them do with their lives.

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Rodney K. Smith received his B.A. from Western Colorado State College, his J.D. with honors from Brigham Young University, a master’s and a doctorate in law from the University of Pennsylvania, and an honorary doctorate from Capital University. He currently serves as President of Southern Virginia University, is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Academy of Liberal Education, has served on the International Board of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society, and is a Visiting Professor at the Washington and Lee College of Law. President Smith previously served as dean of the schools of law at Capital University, the University of Montana, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He also taught at the University of North Dakota, Widener University, Brigham Young University, and the University of San Diego. Dr. Smith held the Herff Chair of Excellence in Law and was serving as interim dean at the University of Memphis immediately prior to his coming to Southern Virginia University. President Smith has authored or co-authored four books and over twenty-five scholarly articles and is recognized for his scholarship in the freedom of religion and sports law areas.

President Smith is quick to note, however, that his greatest accomplishment is that he married well and that he and his wife, Danielle, are the parents of eight children and the grandparents of eighteen grandchildren.

Posted July 2010

My testimony of Christ’s divinity came in my childhood. My testimony of the restored Gospel and the authority of the priesthood came when I was a young mother. I was raised in a strict Southern Baptist home, and two of my great-uncles were ordained Baptist ministers. Because of that, much of the conversation and activity in our family was Christ-centered. I requested baptism into the Baptist church when I was seven. The pastor at first told my mother that I was too young to have much understanding, but she insisted that he interview me. I was baptized by immersion soon after the interview, and throughout my growing-up years, I thought I might become a missionary when I became an adult.

As a young child, I knew that Jesus Christ was my older brother and that he had come to earth to teach people what his father wanted us to know. I also knew about his death and resurrection and the promise of human resurrection. These were topics that I had heard in sermons on Sunday and had heard discussed by family members at home. Then and now I have loved the stories in the New Testament about his appearance to the Apostles (and others) after his resurrection. I knew then and I know now that he is the Christ, our teacher, and the divine son of God. As a child, I often thought Christ was present in my life whispering and coaching me along my way. As an adult the coaching has continued, always positively, and I now know that gentle voice in my mind is the Holy Ghost.

My literal conversion to the truthfulness of the restored Gospel came suddenly. Late on a February morning in 1966, in Glendale, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, my two toddlers and I were picking up sticks in our new back yard after a wind storm. A neighbor to the rear of our home was doing the same thing with two of her tykes. We introduced ourselves to one another and then began to visit. She asked me what church we attended, and I said that I had been raised Baptist and my husband had been raised Methodist, and though we attended church regularly, we were looking around because neither seemed to be quite what we wanted for our children. She asked what I knew about the “Mormons” or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I said that I knew about some golden tablets, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, Brigham Young, and the trek to the West from Illinois.

She said that I knew more than most people, and would I like to read some materials about her church? I was interested in part because one of my Southern Baptist aunts had lived in Ogden, Utah, and she had expressed respect for the Latter-day Saint people there. I gave the children their lunch, put them down for their nap, and began to read the tracts and Book of Mormon she had given me. The children slept all afternoon, and I read. I read the tracts and skimmed the scriptures. There was one longer tract, “The Philosophy of Mormonism” by James E. Talmage, that particularly interested me. Though I had read Moroni’s promise from Moroni 10: 3-4 in the materials, I didn’t want to pray and put it to the test until I had read the Talmage tract. I remember worrying that the children would awaken before I could get through that last pamphlet, but they slept and slept.

I first learned of the Latter-day church’s teaching of the pre-existence from that tract. I had always thought that must be, but no pastor I had talked with would (or could) confirm that for me. I had been nicknamed “Plato” in high school because I excitedly embraced the concept of ideal forms; that is, that earthly creations were only imitations of perfect forms in another dimension. I had also read Kant and other philosophers because for several years I had searched continually for evidence of the preexistence.

I finally went to my bedroom and prayed. Remarkably, the children were still asleep. I thanked Heavenly Father and asked, as the tracts instructed, if the restoration were true, could I please be given unmistakable confirmation? The manifestation came in the form of a burning in my chest. It was literal, and it was so powerful that there was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the Holy Ghost had witnessed truth to me.

Over the next few weeks the missionaries came to our home, gave us the lessons, and challenged my husband and me to be baptized. On March 26, 1966, my husband and I were both baptized and confirmed as members of the Church, and we received the gift of the Holy Ghost. The following year we took our children to the Salt Lake Temple, and on June 13, 1967, we were sealed as a family for time and eternity.

Over time I raised our children in the Church, and three of our four have testimonies of the truthfulness of the Gospel. The fourth is a Christian Lutheran which is also his wife’s religion. Two of our children were married in the temple, and our oldest son served a worthy mission. After the children were grown, I completed my university studies and was invited to become a full-time faculty member in the English department at Brigham Young University. My mother was negative about my conversion to the Latter-day Saint faith, and my husband became less-active soon after we went to the temple. Even so, I knew what I had experienced that February afternoon, and I have remained fully committed to Jesus Christ and his work of building the kingdom.

I have been blessed, I know it, and I know my work now is to do my best to bless the lives of others through my family, temple work, teaching, writing, and constantly learning to be the person our Heavenly Father sent me to earth to be.

I testify these truths and events In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

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I was born and raised in St. Louis County, Missouri, and our family moved to the West in 1979. I married at nineteen, and my husband and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary in December 2009. We have four married children and twelve lively grandchildren. I am a folklorist and professor and joined the English Department at Brigham Young University in 1996. I am also director of the Secondary English Teaching Program and past president of the Utah Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts. I have written several books, chapters, and essays. Probably the most important writing I have produced to date is a book called Begin Where You Are: Nurturing Relationships with Less-Active Family and Friends (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book: 2004).

Posted July 2010

“Without His Spirit We Are Left in The Dark”: The Spiritual Assistance of Literature

I have come to personal witness of the reality of the spiritual dimensions of existence. I have received, through the Holy Spirit, a witness, a testimony, of the reality of God the Father and the divinity of His Son Jesus Christ, of the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith, and of the divine re-establishment of the Kingdom of God in “the outward church below,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This belief was founded and fostered in my young years by believing parents and cultivated by many men and women who taught and exemplified for me the way and benefits of the happy, righteous, spiritual life.

As I grew in awareness, I learned, gradually, that the natural man/woman grows to spiritual man/womanhood to the extent that he or she becomes comfortable and familiar, while still in mortality, in the presence of spiritual realities. I learned that the ultimate goal of every person should be to become worthy, through personal endeavor and the grace of God, to overcome mortality and live in the presence of Deity.

I have learned, oh so gradually, that the key to belief and faith and spiritual oneness with the supernal is learning how to foster and use the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Learning to walk with the Holy Ghost is, of course, the study of a lifetime and a principal spiritual challenge for human beings. The wise prophet Brigham Young said, “The greatest mystery a man ever learned is to know how to control the human mind and bring every faculty and power . . . in subjection to Jesus Christ; this is the greatest mystery we have to learn while in these tabernacles of clay” (Journal of Discourses 1:46). And the key to achieving this subjection to Christ is, again, the Holy Ghost, who is also the key to finding the delicate in-the-world-yet-not-of-the-world balance between the world (always “too much with us”–Wordsworth) and the eternal realms of God.

I am a “man of letters,” a voracious reader who can state that, for me, as John writes, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). In addition to being my introduction to God and the Plan of Salvation of Jesus Christ, literature, sacred and profane, has been, lifelong, my education, my profession, my scholarly engagement, and my daily avocation. For me, good and great literature, when selected and read by the power of the Holy Ghost, aids holy writ in clarifying our mortal purposes, enabling a vision of our mortal and eternal course, and reinforcing our divinely focused humanity. Literature is thus one of the great gifts of God.

To a great extent, I read my way to a testimony and then found that the eternal principles I was learning really worked in daily life, in losing ourselves in service to others. (I don’t claim to have accomplished that worthy goal, but there has been joy in trying.)

I was fortunate to have been strongly influenced by precept and example. Very early in my life, my parents and brothers and sister encouraged my reading by taking me to the public library and by giving me books for every occasion. There was always the expectation that I would be a reader. By the age of ten I was a devoted reader of boys’ (and girls’) books. I read all of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and then discovered and devoured my father’s ancient volumes of Horatio Alger, the Motor Boys, and Dick Prescott at West Point. I learned contemporary history through reading Red Randall at Pearl Harbor and Agent 9 Solves His First Case, and Eddie Rickenbacker’s thrilling account of his raid over Tokyo in Seven Came Through; I learned to love football less by watching and more through reading John R. Tunis’s All-American, and Charles Lawton’s Ros Hackney, Halfback, and One Minute to Play, Goal to Go, and Touchdown to Victory, by cherished if forgotten authors. As I laid down the books after a reading session, I would rush out to join Sammy Park and other neighbors in a rousing game of sandlot football; I would hear triumphant music pounding in my head as I dashed for a touchdown or plunged into the line, a boyhood incarnation of whatever fictional player I was reading about, motivated by the prose of these thrilling stories.

It was clear, early on, that as a lover of words and stories, I was destined to be an English major, and I became such, earning the B.A. and M.A. (University of Utah) and Ph.D. (Wisconsin) in English, and enjoying (over nearly forty years) a productive career of teaching and scholarship at Brigham Young University, where I also served as department chair and as dean of the College of Humanities. But my great love was teaching eager students about literature, and writing many articles and books about American, Western, and Mormon literature.

During my first fourteen years, the only sacred writ I read and committed to heart was a thick comic book rendering of the stories of the Old Testament. I discovered this little book when I was about eight years old and read it so often that I distressed my Junior Sunday School teachers with my eagerness to spill the beans to the other kids about the stories’ conclusions and then turn back to disrupting the class, playing my various roles as FBI agent (wooden pistol in right breast jacket pocket), Superman (cape, towel concealed under jacket), or a P-38 pilot (fur-lined, goggled, pilot’s cap, parachute [pillow] tied on back)—at least so I’ve since been told by hand-wringing parents and teachers. Even today, in my mid-seventies, before undertaking any challenging task, I shout, internally, as I charge into the fray, a lá that long-ago Bible comic book, “The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon” (Judges 7:20).

Regardless of my youthful ignorance of scripture, I must have been paying partial attention to bits and pieces of the gospel as taught by the Latter-day Saints, for rudiments of my faith were congealing and rising to my soul’s surface. The Plan of Salvation all came together for me when I stumbled onto it one wintry Sunday afternoon in 1950, when I was fourteen. Passing the long, boring time between roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and Sunday evening Sacrament Meeting, I took up my father’s LDS triple combination, counted the relatively few pages (sixty) comprising The Pearl of Great Price, and decided I would try to read in one afternoon an entire Standard Work (the LDS faith recognizes four books of scripture as “the Standard Works”—The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price). So I sat down and read The Pearl of Great Price, which comprises the visions of Abraham, Enoch, Noah, Moses, and Joseph Smith. It was an illuminating Sunday afternoon. Clearly enlightened by the Holy Spirit (I say this from hindsight), I stumbled suddenly and without warning, like Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” onto a new world. That afternoon’s reading—attentive, authentic, and inadvertent—settled the philosophical foundation of my being and testimony, and forever changed my life.

From the moment I read “Behold, I am the Lord God Almighty, and Endless is my name” (Book of Moses 1:3), the Holy Spirit excited my imagination, which was primed by my voracious reading habits, and I was suddenly and surprisingly reading the adventures of Moses and Abraham, Adam and Eve, Noah, and Enoch with the same attention, absorption, and excitement I brought to the adventures of Robin Hood, The White Company, The Three Musketeers, Ben Hur—or Ros Hackney. The Salt Lake City living room (1067 East 4th South) dropped away and I was there, with Moses, viewing worlds without number; I was one of the Grand Council in Heaven watching the great immortal drama unfold before my mind’s eye; I thrilled to hear Elohim say to us assembled spirits, “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). I thrilled at hearing the Only Begotten say, “Here am I, send me”; I shouted with the two-thirds of God’s children who thrilled at the choice of God the Father: “I will send the first” (Abraham 3:27). I stood with Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Noah, and Enoch and chilled at the dramatic “Enter, Satan, Stage Center,” as Lucifer comes a-tempting each prophet. I read, as if for the first time, Joseph Smith’s account of his First Vision, and I stood by his side, about the same age, fourteen, in the Sacred Grove, and felt very nearly overcome by Satan’s attempt to re-enter the drama; and I viewed again, this time with Joseph Smith, the same Alpha and Omega vision I had seen through the eyes of Moses and Abraham and Enoch, and imagined that I could see, reading words from The Pearl of Great Price and illuminated by the Holy Ghost, something like the glory of the Father and the Son, and hear, with all of them, the awesome witness, “This is my Beloved Son, hear Him,” and hear the call to “awake and arise,” and be about teaching “all men, everywhere his [Christ’s] Plan of Salvation” (Moses 6:62).

Reading this inspired literature seemed to make everything clear, dramatic, true—and vastly important, for I seemed to glimpse the repeated patterns of God in speaking to His mortal children. I felt marvelous, uplifted, good. And as I closed that book, now become more than a mere book, and returned to that Salt Lake City living room, everything looked the same, but everything was different, for I had read, partially comprehended, envisioned, and experienced for myself the Plan of God, as recorded in The Pearl of Great Price and which I first encountered in the sixty pages of The Pearl of Great Price and illuminated by the Holy Ghost.

The Plan was indelibly imprinted on my heart and mind and soul; and, when my earthiness and waywardness would permit, it would come to the fore. Even when my humanity too often pushed The Plan to the back of my consciousness, it had become so riveted to my soul that it dogged me, haunted me, and colored everything. Getting myself together at age nineteen, I answered the call to serve an LDS mission (Swiss-Austrian Mission) for two and one-half years. That experience was my spiritual coming-of-age. After teaching the Austrian and Swiss people the Plan, I would spend the rest of my life trying to teach others the reality of the visions of those prophets, and the way, the truth and the light. My ministry in teaching the gospel has been done as a missionary, a teacher of youth and adults, a father, twice as a bishop, as a stake president, and mission president (Zürich Switzerland). In my various teaching roles I have often been sustained by glimpses of that vision and been quickened by the intervention of the Holy Ghost in promptings, whisperings of the Spirit, counseling, healings, prophesying, and by direct revelation. I have been guided and strengthened by what I have come to call “Surprises of the Spirit,” which have recurred throughout my life.

Through it all, I have been, strengthened, in a lesser but reaffirming way, by my immersion in literature—which I read through spectacles tinted by The Plan. For example:

One summer evening in 1952, when I was sixteen, I bought a paperback book (35¢), Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by the poet Oscar Williams. I devoured the book, cherished it, and ran, without warning, into William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” a poem which I found my parents knew and also responded to, a poem which thrilled me with what I recognized as a poetic rendering and reaffirmation of my experience with Abraham, Moses, Joseph Smith and the Plan of God. Wordsworth, feeling the mortal “prison house” growing around him and gradually shutting him off from his earlier intimations of immortality and bringing him face-to-face with the ironic fallen world, ponders, “Whence our lives come and where they go,” and asks, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” and sighs, “But yet I know, where’er I go,/ That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” Then he declares, in words as familiar to Latter-day Saints as “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” (I Nephi 1:1):

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

He continues:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Still, we have, throughout our lives, fleeting and haunting glimpses of our Eternal Home: Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither. . . . (in Williams 260-62,265 passim)

I thrilled—and still do sixty years later—sensing in William Wordsworth a kinship with a fellow “stranger and pilgrim in the earth” who has glimpsed the eternal and is haunted by the Cosmic Irony which besets us here below. I found these heavenly intimations echoing in other poets and thrilled, for example, at discovering Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught me that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and that the world and its stranger/pilgrim inhabitants are daily renewed, “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (in Williams 458).

The Cosmic Irony I refer to describes the macro-micro jokes with which human life is fraught—the funny and sad differences between great expectations and mundane realities; the painful incongruity between is and ought to be; the wisdom in the comment by William Hazlitt, the great English essayist, that “man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.” Cosmic Irony, then, describes the macro-micro joke, the gap between man as he is and man as he ought to be and will be, or, as Robert Frost puts it, cosmic ironically,

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me. (Frost 428)

Believing readers who have once become aware of Otherworldly Reality in the midst of Present Worldly Reality and partaken of the Cosmic Irony in which we exist will find that their sense of being strangers and pilgrims in the earth” (Heb. 11:13; D&C 45:13) infuses and informs all of their lives, their philosophy, their enjoyment of music, their reading, and certainly in my case, their literary criticism, aware as they always are of the spiritual reality which overlays the temporal reality. This dimensional gap is affirmed in Mormon poet Eliza R. Snow’s profoundly true lines in the LDS hymn, “O My Father,” as she envisions our veiled lives with heavenly parents in a pre-mortal existence and sighs, “Yet ofttimes a secret something whispered ‘You’re a stranger here,’/And I felt that I had wandered from a more exalted sphere” (Hymns).

The Holy Ghost is in all of this. He enables us to read authentically, to balance and harmonize the two realms which we occupy: Mortal and Immortal, Flesh and Spirit. To balance literature of the fallen world, which must by nature describe the lives of fallen mankind, against the literature of the spiritual world, which attempts to describe the spiritual and ideal world. So the Holy Spirit makes us aware of Cosmic Irony, or Cosmic Incongruity, which haunts most of us believers on our mortal journey. In fact, a Latter-day Saint who has emerged from her own Sacred Grove must learn to walk the mortal walk cockeyed—if you’ll allow it—with one eye cocked to the pressing daily realities of this life—to the here-and-now, the temporal, while the other eye is cocked to the reality of infinity, the eternal now, the out-there. The spiritual mortal learns to read mortality like the youth in 2 Kings who is allowed to see beyond the threatening great host the “mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17).

In reading, as well as in daily life, the Holy Ghost can refine our tastes and sensibilities as we learn how to cultivate, discern, and respond to the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Even in reading. Brigham Young counseled us to, “Read good books, and extract from them wisdom and understanding as much as you possibly can, aided by the Spirit of God, for without His Spirit we are left in the dark” (Journal of Discourses 12:124; 29 Dec. 1867; my italics). He said at another LDS conference, “It is your duty to study to know everything upon the face of the earth, in addition to reading [the scriptures]. We should not only study good, and its effects upon our race, but also evil, and its consequences” (Journal of Discourses 2:93-4; 6 Feb. 1853).

For me, reading has helped me to harmonize heaven and earth. My baptism by immersion in the realm of spiritual literature (especially the Holy Scriptures) has increasingly enriched my faith and further established my testimony of the reality of the spiritual dimension, of Jesus Christ, of His Plan of Salvation for every soul, and it has schooled me in seeking the direction of the Holy Ghost; and my immersion in world literature has enriched my life and humanity and given me a better understanding of the forces at work in the world of man of God. I am still engaged in the struggle of finding that delicate balance between the flesh and the spirit (see Romans 8), and I still have setbacks, but I cautiously believe my course is set for Eternal Life, and I hope the current I have been following, in fair and foul weather, will lead my family and me—and each of you in your discovered way—safely Home.

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Richard H. Cracroft (1936- ) grew up in Salt Lake City. As he explains above, he has been a consummate reader since his early boyhood; by high school, he was thrilling to Julius Caesar and Macbeth and Cyrano de Bergerac and was already planning on majoring in English at college–and he was named as an All-State center on his state championship high school football team. Majoring in English with a minor in German literature, he earned the B..A. and M.A. at the University of Utah, and the Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1969). He joined the Brigham Young University English Department faculty in 1963, retiring in 2001. At BYU he was chair of the English Department, dean of the College of Humanities, coordinator of American Studies, and director of the Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature. He received BYU’s Abraham O. Smoot award and was the first holder of the Nan Osmond Grass Professorship in English. He established the courses in Western Literature and Mormon Literature at BYU and taught them for many years. With Neal E. Lambert, he published A Believing People: The Literature of the Latter-day Saints (1974), the first anthology of Mormon letters, and has published numerous articles and reviews on Mormon literature; for over twenty years he has written a book review column, “Alumni Book Nook,” in Brigham Young Magazine. He was president of the Association for Mormon Letters and was named a Lifetime Member of AML. He has published extensively in American literature and historical and LDS-centered journals and has authored and edited thirteen books on American literature and biography, Western literature (particularly on Mark Twain and Wallace Stegner), and Mormon literature. His article,”‘Cows to Milk Instead of Novels to Read’: Brigham Young, Novel Reading, and Kingdom Building,” BYU Studies, 40.2 (2001):102-131, was winner of the 2001 T. Edgar Lyon Award for the Best Article of the Year on Mormon History, sponsored by the Mormon History Association. Since retiring, he has taught for ten years a course in literature for the Elder Quest senior citizens group. He has been a lifelong local leader in the LDS Church, serving as a missionary in the Swiss-Austrian Mission, in bishoprics, on high councils, and as a youth leader, bishop (twice), stake president (of the Provo Utah East Stake), president of the Switzerland Zürich Mission, Branch President at the Missionary Training Center (MTC ), and high priest group leader (three times)–which adds up to about forty-five years in his ministry. He has been joyfully married for over a half-century to Janice Alger Cracroft; they have two sons and a daughter and seven grandchildren.

Posted June 2010