In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation’s sacred religious and legal texts – the Bible and the Constitution – to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates

One of the first things I tell my students, and that I repeat throughout a semester, is that texts do not interpret themselves. Every time a person reads scripture they see it with new eyes and with s

Psalms! Theres over 150 of them marked in the book by the same name in the Old Testament. How can we read them? Are they more useful as a narrative thread, or as a spice to season our spiritual diet?

Job, as a literary and biblical figure, gives us a lot to think about. He goes from riches to rags to riches again. He loses his family but begins another. Hes at the center of a contest between god

InOriginal Grace,Adam S. Miller proposes an experiment in Restoration thinking: What if instead of implicitly affirming the traditional logic of original sin, we, as members of The Church of Jesus C

Can one be directed by God when one doesnt know that one is being directed? The answer, of course, is yes. We learn about how God directed Esther in ways that may not have been recognizable to her, t

If an eighteenth-century clerictold you that the difference between civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far, the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by a

How do we learn from failure? Especially the end of an organization as large as a kingdom? What if two kingdoms fall? Today, as we look at the end of both Kingdoms of Israel, I hope that we can explor

Elijah and Elisha are well-known to Latter-day Saints. The prophecy that Elijah would return was foretold in each of the four books of the Latter-day Saint canon. Indeed, Elijah visited the Prophet Jo

Solomons reign was glorious, but what he gained in wealth, wives and infrastructure he lost in spiritual standing. He had not been faithful to the God of Israel. Instead, he adopted a cosmopolitanism