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From Beside “The Father of Waters”

From Beside “The Father of Waters”

Last updated on: September 25, 2025 at 11:14 pm by Dan Peterson

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From Beside “The Father of Waters” 2025-09-25T23:14:19-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Rembrandt, “Return of the Prodigal Son” (1668)

Although the website of the Interpreter Foundation is supposed to have died many years ago, new materials mysteriously continue to be posted there. Today offered yet another example: Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: “The Symbolism of Two Sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son,” written by John W. Welch:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Seek Ye Words of Wisdom: Studies of the Book of Mormon, Bible, and Temple in Honor of Stephen D. Ricks, edited by Donald W. Parry, Gaye Strathearn, and Shon D. Hopkin. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/seek-ye-words-of-wisdom/.

“It is with great pleasure that I add my voice of congratulation and commendation in honor of Stephen Ricks. As friends, colleagues, collaborators, and coauthors, we have been blessed to think alike, and our lives have crossed paths in university assignments, church callings, family education, and scholarly pursuits. From the first moment we met in Oxford on Stephen’s way home from his mission in Switzerland, I knew that his heart, mind, and soul had been prepared, raised up, and refined to contribute in many brilliant ways to correctly aimed scholarship in the kingdom of God. Dynamically, whole-heartedly, and even whole-mindedly, Stephen was one of the first of a crew of recently minted PhDs to join ranks with the new FARMS organization in the early 1980s. Along with earning tenure and excelling in his departmental responsibilities, Stephen distinguished himself in many areas of scriptural, linguistic, historical, and spiritual religious studies, especially in the Book of Mormon, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. It is in recognition of his wide-ranging contributions in so many areas that I pay tribute to him through the following widely based reflection on the parable of the prodigal son.”

In the late 1830s, the people of the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, welcomed, fed, and sheltered Latter-day Saint refugees fleeing from persecution and the governor’s infamous “extermination order” in Missouri. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

We’re still out in the Mississippi River Valley, engaged in this month’s cycle of filming for our forthcoming Becoming Brigham series of documentary short features. Today, we spent much of our time inside and outside of the Printing Office in the Nauvoo “flats” and at other sites nearby, notably including the very important Red Brick Store. It was in the Printing Office that the third and fourth editions of the Book of Mormon were printed, as well as three editions of the Doctrine and Covenants, a church hymnal, and the Church’s official newspaper Times and Seasons, and the Wasp and, later, the Wasp‘s more diplomatic successor, the Nauvoo Neighbor. John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff ran the Printing Office — it’s no coincidence that John Taylor’s house still stands directly next door — and, significantly, Elder Taylor’s nephew George Q. Cannon worked there. George Q. Cannon later went on not only to serve as Utah’s territorial delegate to Washington DC and as a counselor to four presidents of the Church but edited the Deseret News and founded Deseret Book.

We’ve been quite efficient on this filming expedition, I think, and we finished early today. We had lunch at Lock19 in Nauvoo — pretty good! — and then returned to the flats, where some of our number joined site tours and attended plays put on by young performing missionaries. I spent my time, though, sitting on a bench in the shade near the Smith Homestead, the Nauvoo House, and the Mansion House, soaking it in and chatting with a number of the sister-missionary guides (from Utah, Idaho, Spain, the Philippines, and — lately, this seems almost inevitable — from Star Valley, Wyoming) between their tours . The weather was extraordinarily pleasant, I could see the Mississippi River in the distance, and I enjoyed the downtime very much. Then several of us headed to the Seventies Hall to take in a 25-minute presentation by (I think) ten young performing-missionary elders of a short play, The Spirit of God, that centered on Samuel Smith, a younger brother to Joseph and Hyrum. One of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, Samuel was the first missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His mission, which focused on distributing the newly-published Book of Mormon, largely seemed a failure — but among those whose entry into the Church came as a direct result of it were Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball. On the whole, I enjoyed the performance. So did the audience generally.

We moved our lodging for tonight from Keokuk to the Holiday Inn in Quincy, Illinois. A pleasant change. By the way, it’s traditional on these filming trips for our filmmaking group and the actors to join together in one of our hotel rooms for “movie night,” where we watch a movie that’s been chosen by one of our number. Tonight, we watched the 1995 film The Englishman Who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain, which was chosen for us by James Jordan, one of our core filmmaking team. I haven’t seen it, probably, since roughly . . . well, 1995.

The mathematician and theoretical physicist Father Georges Lemaître in roughly 1933. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Here are a couple of interesting articles to think about:

This is actually NOT a photo taken at the recent BYU Women’s Conference (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

And this caught my eye, from the Deseret News: “How a new documentary depicts religious women: ‘This isn’t a rebuttal to Hulu, reality TV, or other portrayals of Latter-day Saint women,’ says the film’s director”

Émile Friant (1863-1932), “The Frugal Repast” (Le Repas Frugal), depicting a humble family in France (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Finally, here are two items from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

Posted from Quincy, Illinois

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