Hello and welcome to another episode of the Maxwell Institute's Book of Mormon Studies podcast.

My name is Rosalind Welch and I'm joined today by Dr. Rachel Johnson.

Rachel is a postdoctoral fellow here at the Maxwell Institute.

She has the coolest area of research.

I love it whenever she shares anything with us.

Her area of study is materialism, not the way you might think, not materialism as in

like consumerism, but the idea that the entire cosmos is made of matter, this distinctive Latter-day Saint teaching.

So materialism and embodiment in our own Latter-day Saint theology and also in early modern Catholicism.

It's a really, really cool project.

She's incredibly smart.

We're so happy to have Dr. Johnson with us on the podcast today.

Welcome, Rachel.

It's so nice to be here.

Thanks for having me. Today we are going to be talking about the book of ether. Today we're focusing solely on the book of ether and we're going to try to dig into it and provide a kind of introduction

to our listeners as they begin their own studies of the

Book of Ether.

So we're going to provide some new lenses and some new ways of thinking about what they

might encounter here in the Book of Ether.

This very mysterious, very different, very unique part of the Book of Mormon.

It really stands alone.

There's nothing else quite like it in the entire book. So before we talk about specifics, Rachel, help us know what kind of context

can prepare us to understand what we're about to encounter when we open the book. Yeah, like you said,

...