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Two full days. Very full.

Two full days. Very full.

Last updated on: May 30, 2026 at 11:34 pm by Dan Peterson

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Two full days. Very full. 2026-05-30T23:34:45-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The northern entrance of the Joseph Smith Building at Brigham Young University in Provo (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The Interpreter Foundation’s second (and final) day began early, at eight o”clock on a cold and rainy morning, with a really strong two-hour plenary session: Steve Smoot opened with a stimulating presentation on “The Combat Myth in Jacob’s Christological Reading of Isaiah.” Jeff Bradshaw followed with an insightful discussion entitled “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Precious Temple Teachings of the Small Plates of the Book of Mormon.”

The weather turned sunny and beautiful in the afternoon. In the Thomas L. Martin (Classroom) Building, the MARB, I caught Laura Frieda Buckwalter’s “1 Nephi, and What’s More, 2 Nephi: Macro-Parallelism of Nephi’s Literary Diptych.” Sister Buckwalter is a master’s student at Duke Divinity School. (She is soon going on to doctoral studies at Claremont Graduate School.) I had just barely missed catching “A Synchronic Semantic Analysis of the Book of Mormon: Early Modern Word Senses in 1 and 2 Nephi,” which was delivered in the same session by her fellow Duke Divinity School master’s student, Lauren Hastings. (I’m delighted to see that the research on Book of Mormon vocabulary that Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack have been pursuing for many years is now finding application in the work of a new generation of scholars.) Concluding that session, I heard Jared Marcum of BYU-Hawaii, address “The Slaying of Laban: Nephi as Redeemer (Gō’ēl) and Type of Christ.” He offered a good reading of the narrative.

The penultimate plenary session, back in the auditorium of the Joseph Smith Building, featured the always-interesting Brant Gardner, whose title was ““My Eyes Water my Pillow by Night”: Illuminating the Unwritten History Behind the Small Plates.” Of the final plenary session, the less said the better.

Alas, I spent a lot of the day in private conversations outside of the plenary and concurrent sessions. I say “Alas,” but they were interesting, pleasant, and worthwhile. I don’t regret them at all, except in the inescapable sense that they meant that, yet again today, I missed many of the presentations. (I also spent a bit of time hiding out, making some unsatisfying changes to my own paper, with which I’ve never been satisfied.) I missed many very interesting presentations. Not only for that reason, but definitely including it, I look forward to eventually seeing these papers appear in print. And I hope that an even broader audience will be able to hear and see them still sooner than that, when video recordings of them go up online. This has been, from what I’ve seen and heard and been told by other attendees, a very good conference.

Brigham Young’s winter home in St. George, where we did some recent filming (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I call your attention to the most recent article that I’ve published in Meridian Magazine. It’s entitled “Brigham Young’s 225th Birthday: Remembering When He Outwitted Mark Twain”

And please note this brief “teaser” for the nineteenth installment of the Interpreter Foundation’s ongoing Becoming Brigham documentary series, the full version of which will be posted on Monday — which, as a matter of fact, will be the 225th anniversary of the birth of Brigham Young: “Another Birthday! 225 Years”

The non-plenary or breakout sessions for the Interpreter Foundation’s just-concluded two-day “Small Plates of Nephi” conference were held in the Thomas L. Martin (Classroom) Building on the Brigham Young University campus in Provo, Utah (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I was told an interesting story today during one of my conversations at the Interpreter Foundation’s “Small Plates” conference. I think that I’ll write it up here before I forget it; anyway, it’s not the kind of thing that I’ll ever be able to cite in a formal publication.

The talk turned to near-death experiences, a topic in which (as some of you may be aware!) I have long had considerable interest. One of the people in the conversation was (and still is!) a professional in a health-care field, and he told me of a one-time patient. A young girl, the account goes, had been seriously injured and, for a brief while, seems to have died. But then she regained consciousness, and one of the first things that she said was “Mom, why didn’t you ever tell me about my brother?” It turns out that the young girl’s parents, by this time divorced or estranged, had had a son before the girl’s birth. But he had died and, for reasons that weren’t explained to me, the mother and father had chosen not to tell her about her brother. However, the little girl reported, she had met him — she mentioned him by name — and he was fine. The mother went white as a sheet (according to what I was told). “Maybe,” she told the health-care person told me the story today, “I should go back to church.” But after a couple of months had passed, the young girl’s memory of her alleged meeting with her deceased brother was altogether gone and the mother’s resolution to get religion had faded.

The story is a bit unusual because — the literature on this is fairly extensive — memories of near-death experiences seem typically to be both exceptionally clear and exceptionally persistent over time. But I thought the account interesting and worth sharing. Make of it what you will.

The Areopagus (or Mars Hill), with the Acropolis of Athens in the background
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

From the Deseret News: “Faith leaders feel behind on setting AI policies, admire what Latter-day Saints have in place: In Athens, Greece, Elder Gerrit W. Gong shared with other faith leaders the principles that now guide the Church of Jesus Christ’s AI use”

“Emma Smith, the Elect Lady,” by Theodore S. Gorka. Emma is shown tending the ill following the Latter-day Saint exodus from Missouri. In the background, in the upper left, the Prophet Joseph carries one of the sick toward her. The painting can be read differently, of course. Maybe Joseph and Emma are the ones who are HURTING these poor, innocent, suffering people. All that is required to see it that way is determination. (LDS Media Library)

It’s horrible to look on as theists openly, shamelessly, boast about the harms and the wickedness that they seek to visit upon innocent humanity. A recent example of this has been archived in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, and I’m privileged — though, of course, appropriately appalled — to be able to share it here: “Journalists Preview the Church’s New Humanitarian Center.”

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