Testimonies

While I was a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, one of my professors was surprised to hear that I was a practicing Mormon. He was puzzled by the fact that I was both a serious graduate student and a serious believer. He could not understand how someone interested in philosophy could believe in angels, gold plates, and the other elements of LDS faith. So he asked me about it, wondering how I reconciled my religious beliefs with my interest in philosophy. He saw the two as incompatible. I must confess that I was surprised by his questions. Even though I had always known that someone would ask me about my faith and I often thought about what to say, I was never able to think of anything that I thought would satisfy a philosopher. At that moment, I simply said that I had had certain experiences that I could not deny. While I did understand that what I studied and my faith were often in conflict with each other, I could not deny the experiences that I had when I first investigated the LDS Church. My professor was impressed by the honesty of what I said and in response said that, if it was important to me, he would respect that and treat it seriously too.

I have thought about that moment ever since. I first heard about the LDS Church and Mormons when I was in high school. At the time I was not particularly religious and I was not looking for a religion. But I did have questions about life and its meaning, about morality, and about those aspects of life that make it meaningful for us. As I read Joseph Smith’s account of what happened to him, the revelations and visits that he received, I was impressed with his honesty. I recognized that I shared with him a yearning for something higher and better. As I read the Book of Mormon I found myself touched by its message, finding in it answers to questions that I had been thinking about. During this time, I also found out that interest in Mormonism raised a great deal of opposition. As I read about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, people suddenly confronted me with phone calls, pamphlets, and books trying to dissuade me from pursuing it any farther. All of these experiences affected me deeply and I found myself often in prayer asking for direction. The one constant in these moments was how impressed I had been with Joseph Smith’s story and in actually reading the Book of Mormon. It was not long before I had those spiritual experiences that whispered to my soul of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, of Joseph Smith and his experiences, and most important, that God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ live today and are speaking to us through prophets.

People are still surprised to find out that I am a Mormon who takes his religion seriously. They are surprised that someone with a doctorate in philosophy would also be a serious believer. Most of all they struggle to understand how anyone could believe the basic story of the Mormons. While I do understand the surprise, I also know that their surprise is often occasioned by the fact that they know little about Mormons or our faith. My faith has been a constant source of encouragement and it has sustained me in my pursuit of knowledge.

Many academics today are suspicious of religious belief, seeing in it an attempt to hobble the mind and prevent it from learning. They see it as undermining the search for truth and limiting human potential. But my experience as a Latter-day Saint has never been like that. From my earliest association with members of the Church, no question was ever out of bounds. No religion has confronted questions and criticisms like the LDS Church. One of the aspects of my faith is its willingness and patience in answering any and all questions and criticisms about our faith. In addition, the Church has encouraged members to develop their scholarly talents in order to serve the members of the Church, as well as the community at large. In addition to that, my faith has encouraged me to learn all that I can. From the sciences to the humanities and fine arts, my faith has opened me up to the rich diversity of experiences that one discovers as one takes on the great questions about life, death, morality, and beauty.

It has become common today to hear people claim that history and religion conflict with each other. The same is said of science and religion, as well as philosophy and religion. I would add that history, science, and philosophy conflict with each other as well. On this I wholeheartedly agree. They are all in conflict. It is this conflict that makes the questions raised in these disciplines worth pursuing. Now, those who make this claim usually mean by this that religion is in conflict with the truth and that it requires one to sacrifice the intellect in order to meet the demands of some blind faith. It is one of the noblest aspects of my faith and my church that it has never demanded that I sacrifice my intellect for any reason, especially to keep my faith intact. There is no religious institution that is more committed to the education of its members than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

As a student at Brigham Young University I was introduced to the great books and the great ideas of the Western intellectual tradition. I read the great books from Plato to NATO and in my classes I learned about Darwin and evolution, Marx and historical materialism, Freud’s psychotherapy, and many other of the great ideas that define the Western tradition. I should add here that I also had classes that discussed the religious and philosophical thought of Asia. No idea was too radical to be studied and discussed. No book was censored. No limits were placed on the questions we could ask. What I learned from this was just how deep and broad the conflict was in terms of the intellect. I learned to engage it openly and honestly. I saw clearly the limits of the mind and the claims that it could make in terms of knowledge. Because of this I embraced the conflict and saw that my faith was up to the task of intellectual inquiry. I was not afraid of knowing the truth and I was able to see where my faith fit into the scheme of things. Most of all, I learned that faith is reasonable and contributes significantly to the life of the intellect. It was both humbling and liberating at the same time. Most of all, I appreciated the confidence that my church placed in me to go out and experience these things. I appreciated its confidence in its own foundations. In this respect, I think the LDS Church is to be admired for its commitment to education and extending the knowledge of its members. Latter-day Saints have made significant contributions to the liberal arts and sciences.

Before concluding I must touch on one last aspect of my faith that is most dear and precious to me. It is the Book of Mormon. The story of its coming forth and the contents of the book are understandably strange to people in this day and age. But no book is more in tune with the times and the human spirit than the Book of Mormon. It takes up all of the great questions, those of life and death, right and wrong, good and bad, freedom, truth, and most of all, whether there is a God. It is the equal to any of the great books that I have read and should be read even by those not disposed to believe it. It is a complex and surprising book, one that is capable of leading the reader to reflect more deeply on the questions of life and to consider how to live it well. Much of what I have learned has been because I have used the Book of Mormon as a standard against which I measure what I read and learn. It has made study and reflection a more engaged experience and it provides a reliable way to measure the words and arguments found in the great books of the Western tradition.

The Book of Mormon is central to my faith because it calls on us to consider the possibility that God once again speaks to human beings through living prophets. This is more than a mere sectarian claim. It is a return to the high intellectual debates that earlier centuries were invigorated by. That is something no other book can accomplish. It calls out for readers who are willing to take this challenge and to see whether it speaks the truth. It is a book that calls for brave readers, readers with an open mind who are willing to risk what they know. It is also a book that rewards those who do so, even if they do not accept its claims. In a world where there so much upheaval, the Book of Mormon speaks to us, helping us to see how we can cope with the demands that the world we live in places on us.

While my faith cannot reconcile the conflict between it and philosophy, it certainly has much to say to someone who is looking for answers to the great questions. In it, will find it honest and open to any inquiry that is sincere. To my friends and colleagues, I invite you to take a serious look at the things that Latter-day Saints believe and do. My faith has been a great blessing and a comfort to me in my life. In a dynamic world that experiences such rapid changes it offers an important perspective for people trying to find a point from which to navigate through life’s troubled seas.

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Ted Vaggalis is an associate professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary studies at Drury University, in Springfield, Missouri. He received a B.A. in political science from Brigham Young University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Kansas. His interests focus on contemporary continental philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.

Professor Vaggalis was the inaugural director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Center, the home of Drury’s signature Global Perspectives 21 curriculum, and he teaches all of the core courses within the Global Perspectives 21 curriculum. In 2005, he received the university’s Faculty Award for Liberal Learning, which recognizes a Drury faculty member who is committed to fostering the critical thinking and imaginative capacities that characterize liberal learning.

The future Dr. Vaggalis served in the Canada Toronto Mission under President M. Russell Ballard, and his son has recently been called to serve in the Peru Lima South Mission. He has set out some of his thinking on Mormonism and theology in “The Gospel and the Captive Woman,” in FARMS Review 18/1 (2006): 265-290.

Posted March 2010

It was never my intention, dream, desire, or plan to become a scholar, much less a Mormon scholar. Or even a Mormon, for that matter. During my seventh and last year of ministerial studies for the Lutheran Church, I found myself floundering in both a Biblical Theology class and a Philosophy class, where I was embarrassed to confess to the professors of both that I couldn’t grasp either subject: that I felt like a farm boy who was just learning to read. I simply wanted to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and serve Him and my fellow man, leaving the intellectual ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ discussions to those so inclined. I managed to complete my BA in Ministerial Studies, Classics, and Choral Music, and then felt impressed to cease my studies. I went so far as to sign up for the Army, not even fearing that I could be sent to Vietnam. It wasn’t to be, however, but within one hour after being given the word that I had flunked the physical, I was on my way to becoming an Academic Librarian for my life’s career: a lifetime of diversity and variety in work, play, music, and family.

As I blossomed in librarianship, my research interests became polymathic and broad-ranging. My insatiable spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical curiosity embraced anything and everything in and out of time and space. I was eventually called a ‘quintessential scholar-librarian’, truth-seeker, missionary of the mind, wisdomologist, and knowledge navigator, who looked for truth wherever I could find it, and I often felt spiritual serendipity operating in my life, which only the promptings of the Spirit could provide. The greatest adventure in the Gospel is following the surprises the Spirit often gives us—not those invented from our own faulty wills and worldly dreams.

All knowledge became an open canon for me. There are no boundaries. Our latter-day prophets, from Joseph Smith to Russell M. Nelson, have encouraged the Saints to seek and embrace truth wherever they can find it. I have always been an arch-proponent of this principle. I like to think that I embrace a ‘big picture’ or ‘high altitude’ perspective and am not beholden to any one narrow, scholarly methodology. Just as a closed canon of scripture is faulty, so also are closed canons in academic systems. Add to this the more common limitations of superstition, pride, prejudice, ignorance, traditions, academic gamesmanship, and ego and one wonders if anything can be known for certain. But the following statements of testimony come close.

Despite the judgments of others who would prefer me not to believe in Christ if I am other than ‘Christian,’ I do affirm my belief in Jesus Christ as my Redeemer and Savior, who sacrificed His life to atone for my sins, and who, as the living Son of God, made it possible for all who believe in Him to be resurrected and live forever.

I did not leave my previous Church—it left me. Its mythological interpretations of the flood, Jonah, and other Biblical stories, plus excessive ecclesiocentrism (rather than Christocentrism), and theologolatry (or Churchianity), left me out in the cold. I sought a vibrant, warm, living, and forward-moving vehicle for my faith in God, not a still, cool, dead, idling vehicle.

I affirm that “Christianity’s” doctrine of the depravity of man (thanks to St. Augustine) has gone so far afield from truth that it is an abominable, blasphemous teaching in the eyes of the Lord, for it effectively shuts out the fact that we are all created in God’s image. I quickly learned that we should behave as children of God instead of muttering and complaining our whole life through that we are worms and sinners and cannot do anything without the Lord. But neither can the Lord do anything about us without our freedom of choice. Living in the spirit, full of faith, hope, and charity is a cooperative effort between God and man. God is too small if He only created a situation where all men would become good-for-nothing “worms.” Indeed, Jesus could never have said to his disciples, “Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

I affirm that my mission on this earth now and in the future is to cry repentance to the people of this earth—not just to those who think they are sinful and those who are truly sinful, but to every man and woman. Repentance, like perfection, is on-going and dynamic. Repentance literally means ‘change of mind,’ and as we grow upward in faith our outlook and perspective on everything should change our life’s patterns to emulate God’s. We clean our closets, so to speak, and replace old habits with new and receive personal revelation for directing our personal lives.

I believe in a first-hand, personal communication with Heavenly Father, not by way of a second-hand witness of such from a pastor, priest, rabbi, or shaman or as a result of long traditions. A believer must pray with sincerity and real intent in his heart. That act of sincere prayer can change the entire course of his life, as it did mine. No one can complain about my religion or pretend to know it thoroughly until he has received an answer from God through the Holy Spirit.

The truth found in the Church is not to be finally judged through its members as a body, for the organization is administered by imperfect people. Rather, the Church is and will be judged by its pure doctrine and dynamic theology, whose Prophets, Seers, and Revelators seek to be in harmony with the word of God and true personal revelation.

I affirm that I now know the difference between the beauties, choirs, music, organs, art, cathedrals, and liturgy constituting religious aesthetics and the truth, warmth, joy, comfort, inner light, and radiance of true spirituality. While aesthetics can lead to the spiritual, they can never substitute for spirituality.

I affirm, as did my close friend Ron Eddington, who died July 2, 1978, that “death is the most glorious part of life.” Just as we “died” when we left the pre-existence, so we were born into this life. Contemplation of death can bring us closer to a proper perspective of the vast eternal plan and of everlasting life with Our Father. I believe, further, however, that following the resurrection we will be assigned (we will actually have assigned ourselves by the lives we have led) to our future mansion or level of existence, depending upon our faithfulness to Christ’s teachings and the degree to which we overcome weaknesses and trials.

I affirm that trials, tribulations, sorrow, suffering, and temptations are not punishments from God because of our sin, but experiences to be learned from and tested with so that we may grow closer in trust and faith to God and be able to live with Him eternally. In other words, lack of trials in my own life could point to a lessening or stalemate of my faith and spirituality. But there has been no lack in my own life. Losing two wives from cancer and eventually becoming a father of seventeen children and grandfather of 69-plus grandchildren has resulted in my becoming a true scholar of family, borne of experience, not book-learning.

Being of sound and open mind and spirit, fully enjoying the life my Creator has blessed me with, gratefully accepting the free grace a loving Savior Jesus Christ has proffered me and blissfully receiving the sanctifying power, revelation, comfort, and counsel the Holy Ghost has brought to me, I hereby solemnly and reverently pray for and pity anyone who believes that I have been brainwashed or deluded. I have embraced a faith which has been offered me by a living God through his Holy Spirit, through the living prophets since the world began, and through the written (Old Testament, New Testament, Doctrine and Covenants, Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price and any other new, true records given in the future by the Lord) and living, revealed words of God, regardless of the dispensation or time of their origin or their means of coming to the Lord’s people.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and the Gospel of Jesus Christ which it teaches)—more than any other spiritual or secular organization I have ever studied—makes it possible for me personally to achieve my highest spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional eternal potential, thanks to the abundant grace of my Father in Heaven, the atonement and teachings of my redeemer Jesus Christ, the guidance and comfort of the Holy Ghost, and the love and service of my fellow Latter-day Saints. I will continue to seek His will (though not always obeying it because of my imperfect nature) and to strengthen my witness of His reality, His blessings to me, and the fulness of the truth, however it may come. This is my testimony, as clearly as I can share it.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:
Academic librarian at Brigham Young University for 38 years, with over 15 subject specialties assigned to me at various times.

Phi Kappa Phi member; Professional Librarian Award for 2006; member of Society of Biblical Literature, American Theological Library Association, Mormon History Association, Mountain Plains Library Association.

Editor, indexer and bibliographer for over 100 works.

Scholarly reviewer of over 60 books for Library Journal, BYU Studies and other journals.

Library assistant to Hugh Nibley for over 30 years; teacher of Honors Nibley classes for 5 years; indexer and editor of several of Nibley’s collected works; bibliographer and archivist of his papers following his death in 2005.

Member of review board for the Oxford Biblical Studies online (2009).

California Anaheim Mission (2009-2010) Vehicle Coordinator over sixty-five cars and Supplies officer for materials in fifty-four languages.

Bass singer for eighteen years in the Utah Baroque Ensemble; business manager for the Utah Valley Symphony; baritone in the Orange County Mormon Choral Organization.

Father of 17 children from a blended family, with a resulting 79 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren.

Posted March 2010

Updated November 2019

It takes the whole Earth to raise a geologist

My mother made a deal with me: If I would attend BYU for at least one quarter after graduating from high school, I could complete college at the University of Texas, which, at age seventeen, was my first choice. I had grown up in Houston as a Church-going member, but the real genesis of a testimony began with that mother-son deal. And in spite of the fact that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, BYU was just beginning to develop into a first class university, what I learned from a number of physical and biological science classes demonstrated to me that this mix also would be a good profession. However, there was a problem. A knowledge of Earth structures and processes could support either atheism or a belief in God, the former being the easier to manage. But if the gospel was true, the evolution of Earth’s structures and organisms should be consistent with theological matters dealing with Earth. Having developed a testimony of one requires testing that testimony against the other. Developing a real testimony not only requires maintaining a gospel-oriented course, but it also requires repeated examination of the apparent and real conflicts between understanding Earth’s processes and Christian/LDS theology.

Early in my career, I became convinced that the principal conflict between a belief in God and a naturalist interpretation of life centered on time and change. If Earth and its galaxy are billions of years old, as demonstrated repeatedly during the past 75 years, then those who ignore the facts and proclaim that Earth is a few thousand years old are badly misinformed. If Earth’s structures and inhabitants evolved during billions of years, something firmly established as factual, then those who believe that the only major modification of Earth and its organisms can be attributed to Noah’s Flood are wrong. This became obvious, and the challenge of reconciling the facts of time and change with what some believe (in partial ignorance) are theological truths would be important in shaping my view of life. While the role of the Holy Ghost in testimony is unquestioned, reconciliation is an equally important part of the big picture for me.

My life has been divided into distinct activities, with family, church, and science playing the important roles. Through years of service within the Church and in my secular life, it is now apparent that my testimony rests on belief in a real God and the fact that the Book of Mormon has no rational explanation except that of prophetic involvement, but also on the knowledge that I live on an old Earth whose inhabitants have experienced several billion years of evolution. This testimony is made even stronger by understanding and accepting the testimonies of those, especially my wife, whom I honor and respect and whose avenues to Deity, apparently, are clearer than my own. Added to this is the observation that the gospel works well, almost exactly as advertised.

Enrolling at BYU was a good idea, thanks to my mother!

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David L. Clark is the W. H. Twenhofel Professor Emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He taught at Southern Methodist University (1957-1959), Brigham Young University (1959-1963), and the University of Wisconsin (1963-1999) where he was Chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics and Associate Dean responsible for the Natural Sciences. He served as Chairman of the Polar Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences (1995-1999) as well as a member/chairman of a number of national and international committees for paleontology and Arctic marine geology, areas in which he has published extensively. He is married to Louise Boley and they are the parents of four children and grandparents of sixteen.

Posted March 2010

Only a few of my colleagues have asked me how I can be a believing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an Egyptologist at the same time. I suppose that more have simply not dared to ask me. I write this for them, and for any others who might benefit from it.

Egyptology likes to think of itself as an empirical discipline, restricting itself only to things that can be seen and measured. Some Egyptologists even imagine that they are engaged in science, even though in theory and substance what we do is not remotely like what science does. We do not think like scientists. We do not and cannot do experiments and there is often no way to test between alternate hypotheses. Because we cannot decide between various hypotheses based on the available evidence, we must take some things on faith. Even in the texts that we read, we are at the mercy of others who have looked at the texts and decided what is written. Some of my colleagues insist that they take nothing on faith and will not believe what someone else’s printed edition of the text says; they then ironically and presumptuously turn around and ask everyone else to take their word for the readings they provide. Though I have the training to collate the texts, I am usually satisfied to take other’s word for their readings since I may never have the opportunity to examine the text for myself in this life. I went through almost my entire graduate studies in Egyptology without ever having been to Egypt. I still have never been able to visit some of the sites I am most interested in. I have been willing to take a great deal on faith, and that is just in Egyptology. In that regard, I do not consider studying Egyptology all that much different than studying my own religion, which has its own means of verification.

Such experiences provide me with a background to have faith—that is, trust—in God, but Latter-day Saints believe that God has told us to “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning” because “all have not faith” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:118). Learning thus becomes an adjunct to our faith or trust in God. Because learning does not necessarily presume a background of faith, Latter-day Saints sometimes attempt to express in the language of learning (as ill-suited as that usually is) the reasons for the hope that is in us. Egypt, I am convinced, can play a role in this endeavor.

Egypt is one of two places on the earth with continuous contemporary historical documentation dating back five thousand years. It has some of the oldest books on earth, and we Egyptologists are the ones who study them. The Christian writer C. S. Lewis voiced the thought through his devil Screwtape: “Only the learned read old books, and we [the devils] have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.” This thought, written over half a century ago, is still as true today. As eminent an Egyptologist as Jan Assmann astutely ends his survey of Egyptian history remarking, “Today we know infinitely more about Egypt than did the experts of the eighteenth century. But we are also infinitely less sure of what to do with that knowledge.” Egyptology itself provides no framework for making use of the knowledge of ancient Egypt that our discipline provides. Grounding in the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, however, provides precisely such a framework. That framework led me to the field of study and without it there seems little point in looking back thousands of years if they have nothing to offer. I am an Egyptologist because I am a Latter-day Saint, not despite being one.

Being a Latter-day Saint changes the way I look at the Egyptological record both consciously and unconsciously. Consciously, I have looked at the invariably inaccurate way in which almost all non-Mormons depict Latter-day Saints and have asked what in their approach made them get even basic things incorrect and what could they have done to rectify their work. Their methods have obviously failed them. If a method does not work examining something I know well, should I have faith in it when examining a subject I do not know as well? The answers to those sorts of questions then become the basis for looking at Egyptian religion. I thus attempt to look at practices that were done all the time and texts that are frequently found and often repeated. I also look for assumptions made about ancient Egyptian religion and society that may not necessarily be so. For example, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has no theology—that is, no systematic setting forth of propositions about God based on human reasoning alone; in that sense it may even be said to be anti-theological. Because I come from a religious background that is atheological, I see no reason to assume that the ancient Egyptians had a theology either, and they also seem to have no systematic setting forth of propositions about God or anything else in their religion.

Two scriptural texts inform my view of ancient Egypt and its religion and provide a means of fitting it into a larger picture. The first is in the Book of Mormon: “the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have” (Alma 29:8). So from a Latter-day Saint perspective, God allows truth to be taught by all nations, including the ancient Egyptians. Not only am I not surprised to find truth among the Egyptians, I expect it. The second scriptural text is from the Book of Abraham. Speaking specifically of the Egyptians, it says that “Pharaoh, being a righteous man, . . . judged his people wisely and justly all his days, seeking earnestly to imitate that order established by the fathers in the first generation” (Abraham 1:26). This tells me that I should expect to see an imitation of the truth among the Egyptians. Like the Ptolemaic restorations of Thutmoside reliefs in the Karnak temple, the imitations are not real and will contain a mixture of the true and false, but they will contain some truth. There is thus the opportunity to gain both truth and wisdom by studying the ancient Egyptians.

One of the persistent phenomena found among the Egyptians is their insistence that the gods talked to men. We Egyptologists term examples of this phenomenon oracles: A group of priests carried around a boat on poles that contained a shrouded image of the deity. Individuals approached the deity and asked it questions and received answers. We have recorded instances of individuals asking who stole items from them and receiving the correct answer (even telling the exact location of the stolen item). The Egyptians said that the god gave the answer. Our explanations of the events invariably contradicts the account of the ancient texts. The “texts specifically say the gods speaks, but modern scholars have with reason preferred not to take them at their word.” This statement by a colleague is extremely telling. This is an example of where our empiricism can blind us to the evidence from ancient Egypt. Not believing the historical record left by the Egyptians is the preference of modern Egyptologists. The unstated “reason” for this preference is that we prefer to believe myths of our own construction.

When we Egyptologists try to reconstruct Egyptian history, we reconstruct not what really happened, which we may never know, but what we think may have happened in conformity to our own biases, theories, and prejudices. If our assumption is that there is no God and, thus, that no god could have talked to the Egyptians, then it simply does not matter what evidence like an ancient text tells us, we will ignore it. If our assumption is that there is a God, but the Egyptians only had false ones, then for all practical purposes, our theories of the past will look like the atheist ones. That God might have talked to the Egyptians or that he might talk to us today does not seem strange to me. I know it can be real. I have experienced it and I am willing to allow that the Egyptians could have experienced it as well.

Some of my colleagues may think that my faith contains what they see as contradictions. Some of those contradictions they see because they assume me to think things that I do not think; they would do well to inform themselves on what Latter-day Saints actually believe. For example, I—along with many, if not most, Latter-day Saints—do not think that the Book of Abraham was derived from the currently remaining fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri. After a quarter of a century of looking at the issue very carefully, I am unimpressed by colleagues who clearly have not carefully studied the Joseph Smith Papyri trying to tell me what they do or do not say. Many of the other contradictions and dilemmas my colleagues might see in the Church of Jesus Christ find close parallels in the discipline of Egyptology. For example, we currently possess direct archaeological confirmation for the location neither of Zarahemla nor of Punt. That does not seem to me to be a reason to deny the ancient authenticity of either one. We do, however, have records from both places. If I am asked to give up my faith because of some perceived contradiction then I am asked to give up my profession as well, since it has the same sorts of contradictions. A discipline with so many unresolved issues has no business pointing fingers at others for having some. Usually, in Egyptology, we think of an unresolved issue as an opportunity for further inquiry.

From my perspective as a Latter-day Saint, I do not worry about whether my studies will provide evidence to refute my faith. So far, any time that (1) there has been sufficient evidence, (2) I have looked through the relevant available evidence, and (3) done the Egyptology correctly, it has always supported my faith. In many cases, the evidence that would decide the issue one way or another simply does not exist. In other cases, our theories may be flawed and need to be reexamined. I do not mean to say that all my questions have been completely answered, but I can put my trust in God for the present because I have proved him in days that are past. I have enough experience for myself to know that God is real, even if I cannot prove him to others.

What if the Church of Jesus Christ is not true? If “life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more, . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” then Egyptology is a waste of time. Since Egyptology every year produces far more written material than anyone can keep up with, most of what we write now is hardly read. Who will care about our research in twenty, or two hundred, or two thousand years? If, on the other hand, the gospel is true, then death is not the end and the research I do can have an eternal aspect to it. These people whom I study now I may meet one day. What will they think about what I have written about them? I will need to be not just fair to them, but I need to strive to actually get it right.

I know my colleagues well enough to know that many if not most of them will not follow me in my belief that God exists. If you do not believe the Egyptians, why should I think you will believe me? (We are back to what C. S. Lewis said, again.) The way is open to you to find out for yourselves; God is perfectly willing to answer you as he has me. But the veracity of a proposition is not dependent on its popularity, and what I know for myself is not dependent on whether or not anyone else accepts it. It is still true.

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John Gee (Ph.D., Yale University) is currently the William (Bill) Gay Research Professor of Egyptology and a Senior Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. He formerly taught at Yale University, and worked in the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He is currently the only Egyptologist from North America affiliated with the Totenbuch-Projekt of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

Professor Gee has given papers at Egyotological conferences in Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Budapest, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Copenhagen, Giza, Grenoble, Jersey City, Laie, Leuven, London, New Haven, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, Providence, Reading, Rhodes, San Diego, Seattle, Stevenage, Toledo, Toronto, Tucson, Vancouver, Warsaw, and Washington D.C.

He has published Egyptological work with E. J. Brill, Peeters, Praeger, Harrassowitz Verlag, Archaeopress, Styx, Sheffield Press, the Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Near Eastern Studies, the American University of Cairo Press, the Association Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth, the Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts, the MEBT-ÓEB Comité de l’Égypte Ancienne de l’Association Amicale Hongroise-Égyptienne, the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, the Bulletin for the Egyptological Seminar, Göttinger Miszellen, the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, and the Journal of Egyptian History.

The Aigyptos Datenbank lists him as having published on Amasis, archives, art, British Museum EA 10416, Book of the Dead, Book of the Dead 31, Book of the Dead 69, Coffin Texts, Coptic language, Coptic studies, daily ritual, Demotic papyri, Demotic studies, Greek papyri, Greeks in Egypt, hypocephali, initiation, lamps, language, Late Period documents, Late Period hieratic papyri, Late Period iconography, Late Period tomb equipment, law, Louvre E 7846, love, marriage, marriage contracts, Mesopotamia, Middle Kingdom literature, Middle Kingdom titles, Near East, New Kingdom documents, New Kingdom hieratic papyri, oaths, oracles, philology, phraseology, priest, prosopography, Ptolemaic Period iconography, Ptolemaic period tomb equipment, religion, ritual, Roman period tomb equipment, Romans in Egypt, seals, Shipwrecked Sailor, social structure, society, society and culture, text, Thebes, title, verbal system, and wab-priest.

Professor Gee serves on the Board of Trustees of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities and as editor of the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. He also serves on the program committee for the Egyptology and Ancient Israel Section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Posted March 2010

I worship Jesus Christ as my Savior and best example. I want to be as much like him as I can. The Book of Mormon says, “. . . charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him. Wherefore . . . pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ.” My parents, their parents, their parents, and so on for generations gave their time, their talents, their resources—left family, homes, endured hardship, built homes in a harsh land—in their best hope to follow Christ. I would love their approval. When I read the scriptures, much of the Bible, and especially the Book of Mormon, my heart sings with the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi, who, when guided in vision by the angel to view the tree of life, symbol of Christ’s love, said, “ . . . it is the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore, it is the most desirable above all things.” And the angel replied, “Yea, and the most joyous to the soul.”

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James W. Cannon (Ph.D., University of Utah) taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 1977 to 1985, and is now Orson Pratt Professor of Mathematics at Brigham Young University, where his interests focus on geometric topology, geometric group theory, hyperbolic manifolds and rational maps, complex variables, and planar subdivision rules. He married Ardyth Gunnell in 1966. They are the parents of six children and the grandparents of twenty grandchildren.

For additional information, see Dr. Cannon’s Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Cannon

See, additionally, Dr. Cannon’s chapter in Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-day Saint Scholars.

Posted February 2010

I’m an oceanographer and a volcanologist. I am also a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). As such, I have spent a lot of time in discussion of science and religion. I have many friends and colleagues that are atheists with low opinions of religion in general. Most of them have freely expressed to me their belief that, to sum it up with a direct quote by one of them, “Anyone who is religious believes in foolish superstitions.” Despite that, I am thankful to say, none of them have ever questioned my scientific ability based on my religious beliefs. They understand, as I do, that science and religion are looking for different answers in different places. All that matters is whether I do good science or not. At the same time, I do not think that the two areas have to be mutually exclusive.

My religious belief has been a tremendous asset to me as a scientist. It gives me a purpose greater than simply figuring out how the Earth or the universe works. One of my atheist friends once asked me what my religion did for me. At the time I was living overseas, and being a dedicated college football fan I would watch the highlights from games in the U.S. over the internet. I told him that life without my faith was like watching those video highlights—little 10×6 cm highlight clips. I could still see the great passes or touchdowns and I enjoyed the clips. But my belief in a loving Heavenly Father and that life has a real purpose is the equivalent of seeing the same clips on a large-screen in high definition. I see the same thing, but with much more clarity and sharpness.

There have been times in my studies and research in which the wonder of the natural world, the depth in both time and space of its living and nonliving parts, has affected me in a profoundly spiritual way. Why should it not? I have a hard time rationalizing that the human capacity to appreciate something as beautiful as a South Pacific sunset, as powerful as a volcanic eruption, or as simple as a raindrop, is not rooted in a spiritual sense.

Because of my belief in and acceptance of both religion and science, I recognize that I am a son of God and I have the potential to figure out how the universe works. I really enjoy teaching a class for LDS students in which I discuss the three great controversial subjects of science and religion: the Big Bang, the Age of the Earth, and Biological Evolution. For each section I lay out not just what science has discovered, but reasons those discoveries are interpreted the way that they are. Then, at the end of each section, I ask the students the same simple question: “Does anything that you have just learned change the fact that God exists or that Jesus Christ was the savior of the world?” The students come to understand that, for members of the LDS Church, the answer is always “no.”

I do not believe in a “small” God whose characteristics and abilities are limited to what my current religious or scientific understanding is, but rather in One who can be both the Author of the vastness of the universe as well as a personal Father who loves me. He is the source of all truth, scientific and religious. He gave me the intellectual and spiritual capabilities to use both. It would be a waste of my ability and talent not to do so. If there is an apparent conflict between science and religion I see no reason for concern. Since, as a fundamental rule of science, we can never be absolute about our interpretations of the universe and since all believers accept that there are “mysteries of God,” why should anyone expect the two areas to always be in harmony?

I believe there are those in both science and religion who are actively promoting the contention that exists between the two realms today—individuals who feel threatened by the other side. But in both cases they are practicing neither true science nor religion. They have motivations beyond the explanation of physical processes or the worship of God. If God does not exist, then for the most part it should not matter whether people believe in religion or not. If God does exist, then we will be judged for our behavior toward our fellow man rather than our scientific views of the universe. In the end, rather than waste time contending over another person’s belief, I would rather spend my time and energies in seeking truth in the realms of both science and religion.

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My academic background includes a B.S. in geology, with university honors, and a minor in physics from Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (Narragansett, Rhode Island). While an undergraduate I was awarded a Link Foundation internship to Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution and served as president of the BYU Astronomical Society. I am a member of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, and the Tsunami Society.

I am first or contributing author of several peer-reviewed articles and the author of two books. I have served as a reviewer for multiple academic journals and as a fieldtrip co-leader for field excursions to Oman and Hawaii. My research interests include (but are not limited to): general volcanic processes, correlation of volcanic deposits, lava-water interactions, underwater exploration, and maritime history. I have field and research experience in thirteen countries and seventeen states, including work in the South Pacific mapping and sampling underwater volcanoes and collecting and analyzing field and volcanic rock data in Nicaragua and Honduras.

I am an avid scuba diver with 100+ dives and 40+ hours of bottom time. I also enjoy the outdoors, classical music, classic and alternative rock music, history, archaeology, art and architecture, new cultural experiences, and books of all kinds.

Posted February 2010

As a member born-and-raised of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I learned from the time I was a very small child to view human experience as richly meaningful and therefore sacred. I listened to the testimonies of everyday men and women at church on Sundays, to sacred stories passed down from my ancestors, and to my own parents’ careful teaching. When I was seven years old and preparing for baptism, my father and I read the Book of Mormon together every night until we finished the book. Through these experiences, I learned to value reflection and discerning interpretation. I learned to place great faith in the revelatory power of words—both the words of scripture and words carefully rendered from human experience.

I know these early experiences contributed to my formation as a scholar, teacher, and writer. By teaching that “the glory of God is intelligence” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:36), Mormonism taught me that it was good to cultivate my mind in the service of others. Consequently, I have made my living as a professional scholar of American literature, culture, and religion.

Although I have sometimes encountered curiosity or misunderstanding about Mormonism in particular, I have never experienced outright hostility towards belief in a university setting. I credit this in part to the opening up of the academy to women and people of color in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. For many communities of color, faith is understood as a central component of community life with unique powers that surpass those of what modern philosophers have called “reason.” In this way, as a Mormon, and especially as a Mormon who studies race and religion in American life, I believe I have benefited tremendously from the exemplary work of writers and scholars of color in the social sciences and humanities.

I am not afraid to say that I believe in a merciful, powerful, compassionate God who is available to all who search. I believe as is taught in 2 Nephi 26: 33: God “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female . . . all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.” As a Mormon born before the 1978 lifting of the ban on priesthood for males of African descent, it has been my privilege to witness how Mormonism has opened itself to inspired changes that have led us closer to realizing the dream of Zion as a gathering of the “pure in heart” (Doctrine and Covenants 97:21). I believe this gathering process is still unfolding. I am grateful to belong to a community that has always emphasized hard work and service to others. Struggles for justice and dignity have always spoken powerfully to me as a Mormon and a person of faith.

I believe in prayer, and Mormonism is the language I pray in. Through many life phases and challenges, I have always found comfort—sometimes astonishingly immediate comfort—from prayer. I have never been too proud to kneel and ask for help. Through the practice of prayer I have learned how to listen, how to wait for words, and how to discipline my needs, wants, and words into a shape harmonious with powers that are greater than I. Prayer as a spiritual discipline has harmonized in many ways with the forms of discipline I’ve learned as a writer, teacher, and scholar.

I believe that we are profoundly connected to our ancestors. Mormonism teaches us that our souls do not enter the eternities alone but within a great matrix of belonging that embraces our kindred dead. This is to me among the most beautiful and distinctive doctrines of our tradition. Stories passed down through my maternal grandmother’s ancestral line bear special witness to our ancestors’ immediate presence in our lives. I am grateful to my mother, an expert genealogist, who in the great tradition of Mormonism has searched out the names and stories of our kindred dead. She has been, in her own way, a model of historical inquiry for me. Cultivating a closer, more responsible relationship to the past can bear redemptive effects on the present: this I believe as a Mormon and as a scholar.

I believe in a merciful and powerful God, a Mother and Father in Heaven. It was within Mormonism that I learned to conceive of God as both male and female, Mother and Father. In 1845, Eliza R. Snow, one of our great poets and leaders, once wrote: “In the heavens, are parents single? / No, the thought makes reason stare. / Truth is reason, truth eternal / tells me I’ve a mother there.” This is another distinctively Mormon doctrine that I treasure.

Over the years my need for certainty on doctrinal particulars has melted away, replaced instead by a hopeful, compassionate, future-oriented faith and sense of trust. I believe in a life of courageous and rigorous searching. This searching for me is exemplified within Mormon tradition by the story of Joseph Smith, who took his difficult questions to God in prayer in a grove of trees in upstate New York, and by the stories of our Mormon pioneers whose search for a community of faith led them away from their familiar homes across the American plains towards an uncertain future in a new place. I believe that God neither provides us with nor expects us to have all the answers, but that to live great questions with an open and humble heart is to experience the grace and the presence of God. I consider it a privilege to have learned these lessons within the Mormon tradition.

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Joanna Brooks is an associate professor and interim chair of the department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Born and raised in Orange County, California, she attended Brigham Young University as an Ezra Taft Benson Scholar. She received her Ph.D. in American literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Brooks is a scholar of American literature, religion, and culture. Her first book, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford University Press, 2003) was awarded the Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Her edition of The Collected Writings of Samson Occom: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America has been hailed as a “landmark” of early American scholarship. Brooks has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society, and has served in national leadership positions in the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association. She lives in San Diego, California, with her two children and her husband, David, a professor of American Indian studies.

Posted February 2010

Growing up close to the center of the Church in Utah with pioneer background on every line was a marvelous experience. Those were the days that General Authorities commonly came to stake conferences and General Conference was a two-hour drive (now a 45-minute drive). I participated in the Church-wide June Conference in drama and dance, even shaking the hand of the president of the Church when he came to thank the cast. So testimony should have come easily. But testimony never comes easily.

At the center of the Church are different challenges to faith. Mormons of every type live next door, across the street, down the block. Mormons are our grocers, our physicians, our teachers, our politicians, our lawyers, our housewives, our merchants, our librarians, our alcoholics, and our criminals. Mormons are in our state house and they are in our prisons. There are faithful, strong saints and there are inactive members, hostile members, and excommunicated members all living here together.

We see the fantastic love and service of the saints and we see dirty laundry of the saints here. Working with faithful saints can lead to testimony-building experiences, but exposure to unexpected member flaws can lead to discouragement in testimony building—or a loss of testimony. In the small town where I grew up, when a person was called to a position of responsibility, we all knew if he/she was honest in business dealings (or not), kept the Word of Wisdom (or not), was a good father or mother (or not). We saints at the center, perhaps more than those wards and stakes whose members are scattered and not quite so visible, sometimes have a harder time to look past imperfections because they’re in our face. We have to constantly remind ourselves that we all have imperfections. Being nonjudgmental and forgiving of human frailties is an on-going challenge. Testimony has to be built on principles and the whisperings of the Spirit, not on human charisma or charming personality; it is not to be lost because someone seems to be a hypocrite. We can never judge because we do not know the entire truth. Only God knows that, and he is the final judge.

It is not by accident that many of the General Authorities come from the center of the Church. There is great strength here. For many years, it has sent out more missionaries than any other region. Temple attendance is overwhelming, despite the numerous temples in the upper half of Utah. Great love and commitment come from the multitude of wards and stakes with thousands of people serving in responsible positions. Our humanitarian service sends many bales of clothing and tons of food to needy areas just from this area alone. So once again, I reiterate that it is a marvelous place to live. Here is where my testimony began as a seed and has grown strong.

For the most part, my testimony came not as a convert-type instant sureness of knowledge, but in bits and pieces: testimonies of individual principles before the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

My first piece of the puzzle was a testimony of faith. I was one of those fortunate people who are born with a believing heart. It got me in trouble sometimes, such as when my older siblings told me that there was a witch living in our cellar who fried eyeballs—and, of course, I believed them—but for the most part, it was a source of deep comfort and joy. I was taught basic beliefs in Sunday School as a child: how to pray, how to give to others, how to love God. Along with faith came my testimony of prayer.

My first recollection of testing such beliefs was when I was a child—perhaps about five or six years old. We didn’t have the money for each of the five children to have bicycles and since I was the youngest, I was left out. I desperately wanted to ride a bicycle but my older sisters’ bicycles were much too large for me. Nonetheless, I took a bicycle out to the front sidewalk and climbed on. I remember it being a long way up. I tried to hold it steady and peddle, but as you can guess, I crashed. Repeatedly. My legs and arms were skinned and bleeding, but I was determined. I don’t know what made me think of it, but a lesson from Sunday School on prayer came to my mind. I closed my eyes and folded my arms on the handlebars and said a quick child’s prayer. I asked God to help me ride the bicycle. I opened my eyes, gripped the handlebars and rode the bike. It was so amazing to me that I’ve never forgotten it.

Many other experiences throughout my life developed my faith. Not that I didn’t have doubts or didn’t question many things, too. My faith was never blind. Sometimes I had to work through questions myself. I thought that original sin was a slick answer to the whole Garden of Eden punishment. I couldn’t imagine God punishing Adam and Eve just for eating an apple. I believed my own version for years until, one day in a Sunday School class, the whole idea became clear. They weren’t punished for eating an apple. They were punished for disobedience. After all, they had only a few commandments: multiply and replenish the earth (which they couldn’t do at that time) and don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So the one thing they were asked not to do, they did. Big time disobedience. I realized at that time that if I had so few commandments, life would be so much simpler. God asked them simply for obedience and they disobeyed.

I have always been blessed because of my innate faith. Prayer has been a vital part of that faith. Through sincere prayer, I was able to be guided to my husband and know that he was the one I should marry. Through prayer, I was told, sometimes very directly, when I should or shouldn’t do something in my life. Answers came, sometimes in exact words, sometimes in strong impressions, sometimes in dreams. Prayer and faith helped me raise my family, finish my education, work in my profession, serve in Church callings, and make changes in my life.

A second piece of the puzzle was a testimony of tithing. I was a giving child, another trait that got me into trouble when I gave away my sister’s doll. Giving to God seemed like the absolutely right thing to do. From the time I earned my first quarter babysitting for a neighbor, I paid the 2.5 cents (rounded to 3 cents) of tithing. I kept an exact record, which I have until this day. Paying tithing is difficult for some people but for me it was very easy. Marrying in the temple to a faithful man made it easy to continue paying a full tithing. Although sometimes, when times were hard, it was difficult to pay other bills, when you pay tithing first, it’s never as hard. When my husband and I served a couples mission to a third-world country, my husband served as the financial clerk of the branch. He was amazed at the sincere faith of some of the members who paid tithing even when they had so little to give. As a family, we have been deeply blessed by obedience to this principle.

Another piece of the puzzle was a testimony of the scriptures. I attended church and seminary faithfully and read my assignments, but I had never read the Book of Mormon or any of the other scriptures completely through until after I was married. I was never asked to. One day I knew in my heart that I needed to read the Book of Mormon and put it to the test. I can’t say that the first reading was easy, but I did it. Then I knelt in prayer to ask if it was true, as suggested in Moroni 10:4-5. I got an answer but it certainly wasn’t the one I expected. The Spirit whispered very clearly the words, “you already know.” And I did. Since that first reading, I have read all the standard works many times. I find new and exciting things every time I read. For example, this past week I have been finishing up Leviticus. There in the 26th chapter is a wonderful promise to those saints who keep the commandments—their fields and flocks flourish, they will live in safety, and they will be fruitful. In verse 12 it tells us that “I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people.” What great promises lie in the scriptures for us to discover every time we read.

When I was a teenager, I received my patriarchal blessing. In it, I was told that I would serve a mission and work in the temple. At that time, I thought it would never happen. I wasn’t even interested. I married at age twenty, so I was unable to serve a mission then. In addition, I was too busy raising a family and getting my education, then teaching school, to serve in the temple. After our children were raised, my husband and I talked more and more about serving a couples mission. When I was in my 50s, I knew the time had come for a mission, so I took a leave of absence from my job and we went to serve in the French West Indies. After more than fifteen years we are still in contact with some of the wonderful saints we met there.

When we returned from our mission, the Mount Timpanogos Temple was being built. After the dedication, I met our bishop in the foyer of the chapel and out of my mouth came the words, “I want to be a temple worker.” I was as surprised as my husband. I had never before thought of or discussed being a temple worker with him. I was called and started serving the month after it opened and have been serving since. I have a strong testimony of temple work. I have had many amazing and humbling experiences through my service there. In this past year I have also been called as the family history consultant for the ward. Again, unexpectedly, I have received a testimony of the work. I have a testimony of missionary work, both for the living and for the dead.

Another piece of the puzzle is my testimony of the Plan of Salvation. We came to this earth to receive a body and to learn from our experiences. As women, we are asked to multiply and replenish the earth. Having a family has been the greatest blessing in my life—not because it has been easy. However, there has been great joy. As I look at my children now, each with his or her own family, I can see many of our teachings coming through. They are wonderful people and I love them very much.

Part of the Plan is also to learn from our mistakes and to experience pain and sorrow. It’s not good to stumble, but it’s good to repent and gain wisdom from the mistake. I’ve experienced many health problems throughout my life and it’s taught me humility. Jesus Christ suffered so infinitely more than anything I’ve ever suffered that I realize increasingly what an incredible gift the Atonement is.

I have always known that education was very important, probably because my mother was a widow and always had to work. Her education made it possible for her to receive honorable employment sufficient to support our family. After receiving my Ph.D. at the University of Utah, I had the privilege of working at Brigham Young University. My years of teaching at BYU brought me into contact with many of the fine young people of the Church. I was able to teach classes in the Book of Mormon as well as in composition and literature. I know that the ability to read and write is a great gift that will provide us with valuable skills throughout our life, and that great literature can put life into perspective and teach us life-changing lessons. Some of the lessons I learned and taught from Shakespeare will forever be with me. Perhaps the greatest moment of literature for me is in Shakespeare’s King Lear, when Cordelia asks for a blessing from Lear at the end of his life. A repentant King Lear asks for her forgiveness. Repentance and forgiveness are so movingly shown, often I am brought to tears with its beauty.

However, I am humbled to know that no matter how much knowledge I gain in this life, I will never know even a fraction of all that is out there. Knowledge is infinite. The same goes for knowledge of spiritual things. Some people struggle over spiritual truths they don’t know. I willingly admit that there are many things I don’t know, but I don’t let them get in the way of the things I do know. I don’t need to know everything. I have all of eternity to learn. I am grateful for modern revelation that lets us know that any knowledge we attain in this life will be of value to us here and in the next life, and that we can continue to learn throughout eternity.

Many other pieces of the puzzle came at different times and in different ways: testimonies of the Word of Wisdom, of family preparedness, of a living prophet, of humanitarian service, of love. I could give multiple examples and experiences of these and many other principles for which I have developed a strong testimony.

Most important is my testimony of the truthfulness of the calling and mission of the Prophet Joseph Smith. As my husband and I walked through the Sacred Grove, I felt strongly of its sacred peace. I know that he prayed there in sincere faith to know what church to join and was given the glorious vision of the Father and Jesus Christ. I know that Joseph Smith was truly called of God for a glorious but difficult mission. He gave his all, even his life to fulfill and affirm his calling. Through the past two years, as we have studied some of his teachings, I have been amazed at his compassion and knowledge. I know that he was instructed throughout his life, line upon line, precept upon precept, and that he saw and knew more that he could even reveal. But what he did give us has shaped the lives of my ancestors and my own life for the better.

In addition, I have a deep knowledge of the reality of Jesus Christ and his ministry. I have had a witness of the Spirit that Jesus Christ lives. He suffered infinitely in Gethsemane and then on the cross to atone for my sins, which are many, so I can repent and one day live again in His presence. I know that He loves me and wants me to prepare the best I can in this life for the life to come.

I know that I have a divine Father in Heaven. When I was a small child, my earthly father was murdered, so my prayers to Father in Heaven went for two fathers. I know my divine Father is just as concerned about me as my earthly father—perhaps they both watch over me. In my childhood, when we sang the Christmas carol “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” I thought it was a song for my earthly father, whose name was Harold. Through the years, I have grown to know more and more that God, the Father, to whom we pray, is cognizant of our prayers. He answers them at a time and in a way most beneficial to us but not as we always want them answered. He knows us better than we know ourselves, so I have learned to trust his judgment and accept his answers, even when they surprise me.

The older I get, the deeper and richer my testimony becomes. Constant affirmations of each of the parts of the testimony have made it grow together into an amazing whole. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the restored church established by Jesus Christ among his apostles. It has the teachings, gifts, structure and authority of Christ’s original church. It has grown strong and great, not entirely because of its fruits (which are great and many) but because each person receives a personal testimony of its truth. I have my own personal testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ lives, and because He lives, I, too, will be resurrected and live again, hopefully in His presence. Joseph Smith was the prophet of the restoration and we have a living prophet today, Thomas S. Monson. The twelve Apostles are called and ordained prophets, seers, and revelators. Good men and women serve us in the stakes, wards and branches of the Church, trying to live the best and serve the best that they can. The Book of Mormon is true. Living righteously brings joy and peace.

I solemnly bear witness of the truthfulness of these things.

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Sally Taylor was born in Salt Lake City and raised in Provo, Utah. She graduated with honors from BYU with her BA degree in 1960 and her MA in 1965. She received her PhD from the University of Utah in 1975, specializing in Shakespeare. She has published an article on Hamlet and has presented papers on Shakespeare in many places in the United States as well as in Australia and Finland. She published a Freshman English textbook that went into three editions with Harcourt Brace and a textbook for Technical Writing, as well as a book of poetry and individual poems in many journals. Her series of seven sonnets on Joseph Smith, Jr., were set to music by Murray Boren and performed on Temple Square. She loved teaching and received an Alcuin teaching award. Now a professor emeritus of English, she retired in 2004 from Brigham Young University.

She and her husband David served a full-time mission to French Guiana in South America in 1993-94 where she taught literacy and ESL (English as a Second Language), as well as the missionary discussions. When she returned home, she taught literacy at Project Read. She and her husband served a two-year service/leadership mission to the Lakeview Manor Branch, Lakeview Stake, in Orem, Utah from 2006-2008. She has served as Primary president (twice), ward/branch Relief Society president (twice), stake Relief Society president, and gospel doctrine teacher, as well as in many other callings. She is currently the family history consultant and photographer for her ward. She serves as an ordinance worker at the Mt. Timpanogos Temple. Her community service includes Orem City Parent Teacher Association president. She has also served as president of the State League of Utah Writers. She has four children and twelve grandchildren.

Posted February 2010

I was born and raised in an active Latter-day Saint family and from a very young age was fascinated with history, genealogy, and religion. At a young age I, like most children my age, wondered about my place in the world, how I was impacted by people, and, in turn, how I impacted others.

When I was a teenager I studied Mormon history and doctrine. I also studied about other Christian denominations, as well as other faiths like Judaism, Islam, and some eastern religions. While my studies were certainly not in-depth at that age, I began to form my own worldview and understanding of the simple questions regarding why I’m here, where I came from, and where I will go after death. I found that for me, Mormon doctrine made the most sense. It was logical and explicable.

While I vaguely remember one or two significant faith-promoting events when I was young, my early testimony came, in large part, from my studies and thought process. While I was in my teens I was convinced of the truthfulness of the church because, to me, it made the most sense. As a missionary serving in Belgium and France, my tender seeds of faith and understanding were reconfirmed and enlarged over and over.

Since that time, I have tried to immerse myself in different aspects of Mormon history. Much of my research has reflected my same early fascination with how people have acted and been acted upon in their everyday lives as a result of their beliefs. I have gained an immense appreciation for early Latter-day Saints, the common members as well as the leaders.

People have asked me if I’m still a believer after studying so much LDS church history. I can answer with a resounding yes. My studies have strengthened rather than tested my faith. First and foremost when approaching church history, as well as any type of history involving human beings, I acknowledge that none but the Savior lived a perfect life. We all have strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies that shape our actions. Therefore, even prophets of God have made mistakes, some more serious than others. That’s fine. As I like to say, “The Church is true – in spite of its members.”

Nevertheless, in the course of my research and writing, I have witnessed the growth of early members, some of whom eventually became church leaders. I have appreciated learning about the refining process of people of faith and devotion and how they, in turn, have served and strengthened others. Exploring these little things in church history, even the problematic parts of church history, has been a learning and strengthening process in my continued search for truth and understanding. And for that, I thank God.

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Craig L. Foster grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley. After his graduation from high school in 1978, he served a mission to Belgium and France, 1978-1980. He attended Brigham Young University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and also a Master of Library and Information Sciences degree.

Since 1991, Craig has worked at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, where he assists in genealogical research and writing for dignitaries including John D. Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Walter Cronkite, Sean Hannity, Charlton Heston, Larry King, Henry Kissinger, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, Jehan Sadat, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, and Oprah Winfrey.

Craig has participated at scholarly conferences throughout the United States, as well as other countries, including Canada, England, Denmark, and Ireland. He is the author of numerous articles in such scholarly journals as BYU Studies, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, FARMS Review, Journal of the West, Journal of Mormon History, Louisiana History, Mormon Historical Studies, and Utah Historical Quarterly. He has also written essays for the Encyclopedia of the American West and the Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History.

Craig is the author of two books: Penny Tracts and Polemics: A Critical Analysis of Anti-Mormon Pamphleteering in Great Britain, 1837-1860 (2002) and A Different God? Mitt Romney, the Religious Right, and the Mormon Question (2008). He co-authored, with Newell G. Bringhurst, The Mormon Quest for the Presidency (2008), and he co-edited, also with Newell G. Bringhurst, The Persistence of Polygamy: A Mormon Anthology (forthcoming in Fall 2010).

Craig is married to the former Suzanne Long. They are the parents of three children: Robert, Shannon, and Senia.

Posted February 2010

My commitment to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has both a spiritual and an intellectual component.

The simplest answer to why I believe is spiritual: when I live the Gospel, it feels more than right. Especially when I faithfully perform some difficult Church calling or apply Gospel principles in family or community life, I often feel a spiritual joy or a profound sense of peace. I have also experienced other memorable spiritual experiences, answers to desperate needs. They are real and meaningful to me but too subjective to be of much immediate value to someone else reading this. This “subjective empiricism,” however, is a central feature of LDS theology—the right of everyone to receive a spiritual witness if they are willing to test the Gospel.

That spiritual side of my conviction is buttressed by what I feel is intellectual evidence about the Church’s beneficial social impact, which deserves more attention from Church members and others than it has received in the past.

Social Impact of the Restored Gospel and Church

American fascination with individual liberty distracts us from the crucial role of social context and how that impacts our individual liberty. The scriptures are replete with evidence of this role: a recurring theme in scripture is exodus from a problematic social context to one where there is more freedom to live close to God’s commandments. The scriptures also contain numerous injunctions to nurture one’s parents and children.

The Church is a powerful spiritual and societal force for helping to implement Christ’s atonement. That requires some explaining. I understand Christ’s at-one-ment (unification) to be not only re-unification with God but also unification with our brothers and sisters past, present and future. As we help them to accept Christ’s atonement and Gospel, we become with Him “saviors on Mt. Zion.” That sense of not only drawing close to deity but building up and belonging to a benign, supportive social and emotional context is a goal of Gospel living. It provides, within certain constraints, what some call “freedom to”—that is, the conditions and support for initiative, creativity, and productive life that Eric Fromm (1941) describes as more important than “freedoms from” various external constraints.

Synchronic Unification

Historian Arnold Toynbee provides a secular perspective on the crucial role of Christ’s Gospel in healing the ancient Roman world and beyond. Toynbee saw early Christianity as a timely solution to a crippling split of the decadent Roman Empire into a cruel rich elite versus oppressed workers. People knew who they were and had intense family and feudal ties, but war, cruelty, and oppression of the poor were rampant and socially destructive. Christ’s doctrine of love, service, and humility offered clearly needed antidotes to the arrogance of power and the explosive hatred of master and slave (Toynbee 1946).

Today, the Restored Church is a no less needed unifier for today’s atomized post-industrial society, which may display less raw cruelty and extremes of wealth and poverty than did Roman society, although both problems are growing fast enough. Even more troubling, however is post-industrial individuals’ alienation from ancestors, peers, and posterity (Bellah, et al. 1985). One could say that we suffer from diachronic (across time) loneliness as well as synchronic (contemporary) anomie.

Some individualists, however, are not interested in collaboration, focusing on the costs rather than the benefits of cooperation, and reveling in a rugged loneliness. Their alienation often breeds greed and selfishness, labeled as “ambition” and “self-empowerment,” and raised to the level of virtue, a panacea for all social ills (Rand 1961). The popularity of this explicitly anti-Christian doctrine in America continues to astound me.

More frequently, loss of the village, tribe, clan, and family units—the context of human life for millennia—induces people to seek for substitute social groups. Many of these replacements are benign, such as internet social networking, workplace units, and therapy groups; but many others, like urban street gangs, racial supremacist groups, and drug cartels, are clearly maladaptive. Most religions offer their congregations as havens for the lonely crowd.

The LDS Church organizes its members into unusually small congregations: tribal-sized units of 50-300 members with high face-to-face interaction and mutual responsibility. The small size of these units (called wards or branches) is intentional and is crucial to their success in integrating its members. The small unit size, lay clergy, and assignment of every active member to some church “calling” differs radically from most typical Christian churches’ larger congregations, including America’s highly publicized evangelical mega-churches. Many LDS wards and branches quite effectively knit congregants together (synchronic unification), whenever enough of them are willing to apply the Gospel of love and to accept their opportunities for active participation in the life of the ward/branch.

As a student of Russian society and as a mission president in post-Soviet Russia, I often saw the powerful magnetism of these congregations. Good branches met an enormous need in that culture, reminding me of the power of Russian village life (the mir) a century ago, and the old Russian saying “Na miru i smert’ krasna.” [Even death is beautiful if you are with your people].

Overcoming Babel: the Permanent Pentecost of Missionary Work

Another aspect of the synchronic unifying power of Christ’s Church is illustrated by the Pentecost mentioned in Acts in the New Testament. During that remarkable spiritual event, people of many nationalities heard the Gospel in their own language and were brought into the early Church. The robust LDS missionary program represents a sort of permanent Pentecost seeking to overcome cultural and linguistic divisions to bring diverse people together. At any given time, from 50-60,000 volunteer LDS missionaries are spending from 18-24 months in over sixty countries of the globe, inviting strangers into the Church and doing humanitarian service.

Christ’s Gospel spread via this extraordinary missionary program has great power to overcome nationalist barriers between countries. An example of this is the role that Finns played in bringing the Gospel to the Russians, despite deep historic animosity between the two nations. In November of 1939, Soviet troops had invaded Finland, resulting in nearly continuous fighting through 1944. That left an understandable legacy of Finnish hatred for Russians. During my mission to Finland in the early 1960s, I often witnessed this and found that astonishingly few Finns studied Russian, despite powerful economic reasons to do so. I once asked an active Finnish Communist how he would feel if Russians returned to take over Finland. He shook his fist and angrily growled “Ei perkele tulee!” [That devil can’t come here!] However, in 1989, when Church leaders called young Finnish members to teach the Gospel to Russians and others, they eagerly accepted, seeming to forget that legacy of hate completely. In the following months they traveled regularly to the USSR, and befriended and taught many Russians and others who later became Church leaders in Vyborg, Leningrad, and Talinn (Browning 1997).

Much has been written, both positive and negative, about the effects of missionary work on those proselytized. Far less, however, has been written about the impact of mission work on those doing it. That impact is especially apparent among LDS members, a large fraction of whom serve missions and who often become fervent friends and unofficial ambassadors of the people with whom they have served.

The number of different foreign languages learned by LDS youth on missions is truly remarkable, ranging from Albanian to Vietnamese. At one point recently the Provo Missionary Training Center was teaching 48 different languages. While LDS missionaries return with widely varying levels of speaking skill, they frequently have reached a fluency equal to that of graduates of U.S. university language programs. These young returned missionaries’ positive impact on university language programs in America’s Intermountain West is considerable, and foreigners visiting Utah are frequently astonished by the number of people who fluently speak their languages in the middle of the Great American Desert. LDS youth from many countries participate in this remarkable program, returning to their home countries to provide similar benefits there and doing their part to improve international understanding.

Diachronic Unification

Unity with and concern for descendants is constantly urged on LDS members. In an age of incessant, ephemeral updates and short-lived trial marriages, where too many adults focus on finding and protecting their “space,” concentrate on their careers, and undervalue parental sacrifice, by contrast the LDS Church constantly emphasizes child care as part of eternal family life. Weekly family night, parenting classes in Sunday school, and constant reiteration of the value of the family are featured in LDS teachings and programs world-wide. If the family is the best socializing organ and if—as numerous studies indicate—nothing has the effect on academic success that family life does, then this diachronic unification has a profound synchronic effect as well.

Unity with ancestors is equally stressed to LDS congregations. Family history, digitizing of handwritten records to make them widely available, and temple work are all constantly urged on church members. One result is an extraordinary sense of meaning and belonging among elderly Latter-day Saints involved in any or all of the above. Another result is that the Church’s Family History Library and its enormous archives have grown to become a unique world treasure not only for those seeking their ancestors, but also for international medical researchers. Non-LDS users of these archives actually exceed the number of LDS users.

Whereas some may see this as focusing on the dead to the neglect of the living, attention to ancestors can have powerful positive effects on our understanding of our place in the world, as expressed by a new father contemplating the meaning of his son in Llewellyn’s classic novel How Green Was My Valley (1962):

I saw behind me those who had gone, and before me, those who are to come. I looked back and saw my father, and his father, and all our fathers, and in front, to see my son, and his son, and the sons upon sons beyond.

And their eyes were my eyes.

As I felt, so they had felt, and were to feel, as then, so now, as to-morrow and forever. Then I was not afraid, for I was in a long line that had no beginning, and no end, and the hand of his father grasped my father’s hand, and his hand was in mine, and my unborn son took my right hand, and all, up and down the line that stretched from Time That Was, to Time That Is, and is not yet, raised their hands to show the link, and we found that we were one, born of Woman, Son of Man, had in the Image, fashioned in the Womb by the Will of God, the eternal Father.

I was of them, they were of me, and in me, and I in all of them.

Conclusion

I believe in the Restored Gospel for many spiritual as well as intellectual reasons, not all of which are listed above. As wonderful as that Gospel is, I confess no less admiration for the Church’s unusual means of assisting Christ’s at-one-ment and believe those means are evidence of divine inspiration and guidance. Admittedly, Mormons could and should practice the Gospel much better and try to be real Latter-day Saints. Of course, the LDS Church has no monopoly on the above-mentioned activities, and its efforts have achieved neither the perfection nor sufficient breadth to influence more than a tiny fraction of humanity. However, in a world of ephemera and atomization, its little congregations and enormous missionary program do help knit Latter-day Saints together around the world, while the Church’s efforts to strengthen families and family history work promote an eternal sense of belonging.

Sources

Bellah, Robert, et al., Habits of the Heart. New York: Harper & Row Perennial Library, 1985.
Browning, Gary L. Russia and the Restored Gospel. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997, 24-30.
Fromm, Eric. Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon Books, 1941.
Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley. New York: The Macmillan Co, 1962, 297.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Penguin/Signet: 1957/1996.
Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History. Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 379.

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Don Jarvis was born in Ithaca, New York, and raised in Iowa. He served a mission to Finland 1959-62 and graduated from Brigham Young University in 1964 with a major in Russian and a minor in political science. After teaching high school in Utah for two years, he studied at the Ohio State University, earning a Ph.D. in foreign language education in 1970 with an emphasis on Russian. He joined the faculty of BYU that same year, where he taught until retiring in 2004.

At BYU he served as chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic languages, which has by far the largest university Russian language program in North America. He also served there as the founding director of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, director of General Education, and co-founder of the Foreign Language House program. He is co-author of the best-selling first-year Russian language materials entitled Nachalo (McGraw-Hill, 1996, 2002) and other publications dealing with language teaching and university faculty development, including Junior Faculty Development: A Handbook (Modern Language Association, 1991).

A past president of the two main US professional organizations for Russian professors, he has consulted for many universities, professional organizations, and government agencies.

From 1996-98, Don and his wife Janelle supervised the Russia Moscow Mission of the LDS Church, and then from 1998 to 1999, the Russia Yekaterinburg Mission. From September 2005 to March 2007 they served a humanitarian mission for the Church in Belarus.

Don and Janelle have six children and twenty-three grandchildren. They are active in community affairs, volunteering with the Provo School District to supervise teachers of English to adult speakers of other languages. They also participate actively in local politics.