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The Interpreter Foundation, Twelve Years On

The Interpreter Foundation, Twelve Years On

Last updated on: August 5, 2024 at 1:16 pm by Dan Peterson

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The Interpreter Foundation, Twelve Years On 2024-08-05T13:16:13-06:00 Dan Peterson

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I believe that this image, which perfectly represents the output of the Interpreter Foundation, is in the public domain.

The launch of the Interpreter Foundation was publicly announced twelve years ago, at the beginning of August 2012, during the concluding session of the 2012 FAIR conference. (The decision to launch the Foundation had been made only one week before, over soup and salad at the Olive Garden Restaurant in Provo.) As part of that public launch, the first article appeared in a new online publication that is now called Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. Kindly offered by David Bokovoy as a public gesture of support for the new Foundation and its journal, the article was “Thou Knowest That I Believe”: Invoking The Spirit of the Lord as Council Witness in 1 Nephi 11.

As of this coming weekend, during the 630 weeks that have ensued since the decision to launch Interpreter, the Foundation’s journal has published at least one article — and sometimes two or even, occasionally, three — each Friday for 629 weeks in a row. Interpreter is now well into producing its sixty-second volume.

The Foundation has also convened multiple public conferences and, by this fall, will have published twenty-eight books. It sponsors a weekly radio broadcast every week, too, as well as a blog.

Further, the Interpreter Foundation has been able to help support Royal Skousen’s seminal Book of Mormon Critical Text Project (see “The Journey to the Earliest Book of Mormon Text: Royal Skousen’s 36-year Project”), which will be celebrated this coming Saturday afternoon (10 August 2024) on the campus of Brigham Young University with a free public gathering, jointly sponsored by the Foundation and BYU Studies, under the title The Completion of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project 1988 — 2024. (For details of time and place, see here.)

All of this (and more) has been accomplished largely by volunteers and — I can testify that this has periodically caused the Foundation’s president some serious worry — on what is, relatively speaking, a shoestring budget. (If you would like to donate, the folks at Interpreter would very much like you to donate! Interpreter is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.)

In addition to its basic functions (e.g., publishing articles and books), Interpreter has branched out into filmmaking. The Foundation’s first venture into making movies was Robert Cundick: A Sacred Service of Music, a half-hour documentary about the late composer and Tabernacle organist that, having been broadcast on BYU-TV, is now available for viewing on the Interpreter Foundation’s website.

Since that first experimental project, Interpreter has created the feature film Witnesses (2021) and the docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon (2022). Witnesses is available not only in its original English but with subtitles in Portuguese, Spanish, and French, and it will soon be available with Italian and German subtitles and, believe it or not, with dubbed Turkish.

On 10 October 2024, Interpreter will release its next feature film, Six Days in August, into theaters. On the model of the overall Witnesses project, the plan is to produce a docudrama to accompany Six Days in August, with a combination of scholarly commentary and dramatic footage, continues to seek interested donors to support this extension of Six Days in August.

Also being developed — in both English and French — is a series of videos entitled Not by Bread Alone: Stories of the Saints in Africa, which is designed to preserve and share fascinating accounts from the first generations of the Church in an area where it is growing both rapidly and solidly.

Interpreter has typically celebrated its birthday on the Saturday in August that follows the annual FAIR conference. This year, the program celebrating Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project will occupy that Saturday, so Interpreter will mark its birthday with a celebration in October connected with Six Days in August. But I thought that Interpreter’s birthday should not be permitted to pass without mention here.

Steven Harper is featured in a very short Interpreter Foundation video called “The Book of Mormon Came from Somewhere!” If you like these short videos, please pass them on. (Sharing them is easy.) The Foundation doesn’t have an advertising budget, so we really depend upon word-of-mouth sharing and recommendations to get things out there. You can help us greatly in this.

Just as their parents are, children around the globe are entranced by the weekly Sunday evening broadcasts of the Interpreter Radio Show.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Steve Densley and John Thompson hosted special guest Nathan Arp during the 21 July 2024 installment of the Interpreter Radio Show. They discussed Nathan’s recent article in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship in addition to Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson 34.

Their conversation was recorded, and it has now been archived — minus commercial breaks — and made available for your enjoyment at your convenience (and at no charge). The “Book of Mormon in Context” portion of this show, for the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson 34, will also be posted separately on Tuesday, 13 August 2024.

The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard each and every week on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. Or, as an alternative, you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

Raphael, “The School of Athens” (1505). (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
In this painting, located in the Vatican Apartments, Plato (the older bearded man, shown gesturing upwards) walks with his younger student, Aristotle (who motions downward, suggesting how his philosophical approach would come to differ from his master’s). In the foreground, Michelangelo sits, looking downward, resting his head on his fist. Over toward the right border of the painting, the very young Raphael himself, wearing a black beret-like hat, looks directly at the viewer.

The academic sociologist of religion (and sometime Evangelical Protestant pastor) Ryan Burge is never uninteresting, and that unsurprisingly holds true for a recent article of his that I’ve come across: “Do Educated People Believe in God More or Less?” You might enjoy taking a look.

Ariane Sherine and Richard Dawkins at the January 2009 launch of the “Atheist Bus Campaign”
(Wikimedia Commons public domain) image

Finally, lest anybody out there come to the unfounded, even dangerous, conclusion that theists and theism represent any kind of positive force in the fortunately uncaring and purposeless universe, I feel that I need to close with a disgusting horror that I’ve just retrieved from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: “The Church of Jesus Christ and ShelterBox Educate Single Adults on the Plight of Refugees”

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