Welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute, Book of Mormon Studies podcast. I'm Rosalind Welsh, the host, and today I have a wonderful guest who's also my friend. Her name is Dr. Sharon Harris. Sharon is an assistant professor of English at Brighamian University. She has the coolest research focus. She studies music and literature in 17th century England.

She also is a very accomplished Roman scholar.

Often we find that people trained in literary readings

are already ready to go when it comes to scripture

because they're trained in these specialized ways of reading.

And so she's written a wonderful book, a brief theological introduction to Enos, Jeremy, and Omni.

But today, we are not talking about that.

Today we are talking about Alma 1 through 29, and we're focusing in particular on some of the highlights of the

scholarly research that has appeared over the course of Book of Mormon studies on these very,

very rich chapters. This portion of the Book of Mormon is very well known. It has some of the

most beloved stories in it, very, very rich. And so not surprisingly, the scholarship yield has been very rich as well.

And so we're going to dive into there's so much. We can't even do a survey. But we're going to touch on each of us two pieces that we find to be especially helpful

and enlightening when it comes to these chapters of Alma.

So contrary to my typical practice, I am going to lead off here because we decided that

we go through these articles roughly in order of the text itself, focusing on the text in the order that we encounter

at reading the Book of Alma.

So I will start first by talking about a chapter from a book.

I don't know how well-known the book is, but it should be better known.

It's a book called The Voice of the People, Political Rhetoric in the Book of Mormon,

and it's by a scholar named David Gore.

It was published in 2019 by the Maxwell Institute as part of a series at the time called

Groundworks that was really digging into sort of scriptural scholarship, scriptural readings.

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