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A year-end report

A year-end report

Last updated on: December 11, 2024 at 12:30 pm by Dan Peterson

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A year-end report 2024-12-11T12:30:05-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Christmas at the Hamilton New Zealand Temple (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Between sixteen and thirty-five percent of all annual charitable gifts in the United States are given in December. Nearly 30% of annual online donations occur in December, with spikes on Giving Tuesday and the last days of the month. Ten percent of all giving occurs on 29-31 December, as donors make final contributions before the tax year closes. December’s giving surge can make or break a nonprofit’s annual fundraising goals.

I wrote the letter below with such facts in mind. (I dislike seeming mercenary, but ensuring the Interpreter Foundation’s continuing financial viability is one of my principal responsibilities as the organization’s president.) The letter has already gone up on the Foundation’s website and has been sent out to our various mailing lists. So I thought that I might as well share it here, as well.

Dear Friends:

We’re coming to the end of 2024. Accordingly, on behalf of The Interpreter Foundation, I want to look back at some of the year’s highlights and forward to one or two of the things that we anticipate for 2025. Please think of it as something of an annual report.

It has been a productive year, which may help to justify this longish letter! For one thing, our basic activity—essentially the heartbeat or pulse of the Foundation—has continued steady: Our flagship publication, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, will have published sixty-three (63) articles during 2024. As in every year since our founding, we never missed a Friday. (There were fifty-two [52] Fridays in the year, which means that some Fridays saw more than one article.) Those sixty-three articles represent more than 1,950 printed pages during 2024, from fifty distinct authors. Many of them were accompanied by Kyler Rasmussen’s “Interpreting Interpreter” summaries, which now appear in both written and video form.

In support of such production, we convened Interpreter’s first ever “Journal Development Conference” in October. Most of our editors were able to attend, which is an important step for an organization that is almost entirely both volunteer and virtual, whose personnel are widely dispersed.

I’m also pleased to report (although it hasn’t yet been formally announced) that Interpreter will now be included in BYU’s ScholarsArchive, which officially describes itself as

“Brigham Young University’s institutional repository for the scholarly and creative content produced by the University. ScholarsArchive makes research, publications, data, and journals produced by BYU faculty and students available to a global research audience.”

By the end of December, the Foundation will also have published six books for the year 2024:

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, ed., Joseph Smith: A Life Lived in Crescendo

Warren P. Aston, Godfrey J. Ellis, and Neal Rappleye, Into Arabia: Anchoring Nephi’s Account in the Real World

Stephen D. Ricks and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, eds., The Temple: Plates, Patterns, & Patriarchs: Proceedings of the Seventh Interpreter Foundation Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference

George L. Mitton, Joseph Smith and Our Preparation for the Lord’s Final Judgment

Stephen D. Ricks and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, eds., The Temple: Symbols, Sermons, and Settings: Proceedings of the Fourth Interpreter Matthew B. Brown Memorial Conference “The Temple on Mount Zion,” 10 November 2018

Matthew L. Bowen, Ancient Names in the Book of Mormon: Toward a Deeper Understanding of a Witness of Christ

The past year also saw our 2024 Temple on Mount Zion Conference, for which videos and audio recordings are now up online. The British biblical scholar Margaret Barker did a two-part webinar for us on successive Saturdays in November, which is likewise available in both audio recordings and video. In August, we hosted a celebratory meeting on the Brigham Young University campus in which Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack summarized the findings of the multi-decade Book of Mormon Critical Text Project, which is now coming to its conclusion. And we helped to host the visit to BYU of Dr. Samuel T. Wilkinson, of the medical school at Yale University, after which we posted video interviews with him and with Dr. Ben Spackman.

Every week, too, for each of the fifty-two Sunday evenings of 2024, various Interpreter Foundation volunteers joined together for the two-hour Interpreter Radio Show to discuss approaching “Come, Follow Me” lessons and other topics of interest.

The year 2024 also saw the completion and premiere of the Foundation’s latest theatrical film, Six Days in August, which we hope you’ve had the opportunity to see. It will soon be available via streaming and in both DVD and Blu-ray formats, and substantial progress has already been made on the documentary or docudrama material that is intended to follow it. Moreover, installments of our documentary series Not by Bread Alone: Stories of the Saints in Africa have already begun to appear, in both English and French.

I haven’t even mentioned Interpreter’s blog, but I shouldn’t close without mentioning the Foundation study tour to Guatemala and Mexico that took place in early November 2024. The tour was preceded by a series of lectures from preeminent scholars in their fields such as Brant Gardner, Benjamin Jordan, and Richard D. Hansen. In May of 2025, Interpreter will be conducting an educational tour of Victorian and Church historical sites in Britain.

The Interpreter Foundation will continue to be productive during 2025. We will continue to publish books and blog entries and weekly journal articles and to produce radio shows and podcasts. (I’m personally excited, for example, about a series of articles by Scripture Central’s Matt Roper that will examine the current status of elements in the Book of Mormon that were once thought to be embarrassing anachronisms.) A major conference on the Small Plates of the Book of Mormon is currently in the planning stages. Moreover, we unveiled new branding for the Foundation in 2024—a new logo, typeface, and design, for example—and an entirely redesigned website is now in its final development stages.

We’re gratified by what has been accomplished thus far. We’re excited for the future. And we recognize that none of this would have been possible without dedicated volunteers and generous donor support. Thank you! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Daniel C. Peterson

P.S. If you haven’t made a gift yet this year or if you would like to make another donation, click on this link.

“The Star of Bethlehem”
Frederic Leighton (1862)
Wikimedia Commons public domain
One of the Magi stands looking at the star in the East from the terrace of his house. The lower part of the picture indicates a party, which he may have just left.

Since I failed to include a piece of Christmas music in yesterday’s very lengthy blog entry, I include two pieces in this one:

Johann Sebastian Bach’s O Jesulein süss (“O, sweet little Jesus”) powerfully evokes the spirit of an old German Christmas, from back in the days when Germany was still a more or less Christian land: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWuuT2-E0fE

And I’ve always loved Miklos Rozsa’s score for the movie Ben Hur. And his “Star of Bethlehem” is, in my opinion, one of that film’s two musical highlights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0cFMotGzUs

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