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by Matt Crawford
The widow of Zarephath is one of my favorite stories from the Old Testament. Perhaps the greatest reason that this story resonates with me is because the widow is an outsider. She is not a member of the house of Israel—a fact the Savior confirms (see Luke 4:24–30)—and she meets Elijah at the gate of the city. That is, she is physically on the outskirts of this village where she lives. At least symbolically, the location of the widow’s initial contact with Elijah infers that she is marginalized. Yet her belonging came as she did one thing: she obeyed a prophet. [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 27 – 1 Kings 17–19
Jenny Reeder is the nineteenth-century women’s history specialist at the Church History Department for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She has a PhD in American history from George Mason University, and an MA from New York University in history, archival management, and documentary editing. Jenny is on the Church Historian’s Press Editorial Board, the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts Advisory Board, the Mormon History Association’s book awards committee, and the editorial board of Mormon Historical Studies. She has taught at BYU Education Week and has been a featured speaker at BYU Women’s Conference, the BYU Easter Conference, and Time Out for Women. She recently published First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith with Deseret Book, and past publications include At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women and Witness of Women: Firsthand Experiences and Testimonies of the Restoration. She leads the “Discourses of Eliza R. Snow” project, collecting and publishing all of Snow’s sermons on the Church Historian’s Press website and a selection of discourses in an upcoming print volume.
Rebekah Clark is co-author of the book Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah and works as a historian for Better Days, a nonprofit public history organization dedicated to expanding education about Utah women’s history. She holds a law degree from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, studied as a visiting student at Harvard Law School, and practiced law in Boston for four years. She graduated with a degree in American History and Literature from Harvard University, where her honors thesis focused on Utah women’s activism in the national suffrage movement. She has worked at the LDS Church History Department and taught as an online adjunct faculty member at BYU-Idaho. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Utah State Historical Quarterly, the Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies, Pioneer Magazine, and BYU Law Review and in podcasts by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Church News, What’s Her Name, Zion Art Society, and the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. In addition to her work with Better Days, she currently serves on the board of the Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team. Rebekah lives in Highland with her husband Andrew and their five children.
Brittany Chapman Nash is a specialist in Latter-day Saint women’s history and coedited the award-winning four-volume Women of Faith in the Latter Days series and Fearless in the Cause: Remarkable Stories of Women in Church History. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Humanities from Brigham Young University and a master’s degree in Victorian Studies from the University of Leicester in England. Brittany worked as a historian for ten years in the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has served on committees in the Mormon History Association, Better Days 2020, and Young Women general board. She is a member of the Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team, a group dedicated to popularizing the history of Latter-day Saint women. Brittany lives with her husband, Peter, and two young children in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she enjoys working at home with her little ones. She loves learning people’s stories, helping plants to grow, and watching cooking shows with her husband.