Have you ever noticed an interesting phenomenon like I have recently that when you become familiar with something there's a tendency to think that we know the thing and we quit looking at it closely?

Like the other day I was sitting in my car but instead of sitting in the driver's seat I happened to sit in the passenger seat and as I sat there I happened to notice a button that if pressed it would change the display screen for my car. It was a button I had never

seen before. You guys, I've been driving this car for six years. Six years. How did I miss that?

Well I missed it because I had quit looking and I had become too

familiar with my car from the view that I normally occupied it. It wasn't until I changed

positions or context that I saw something new.

Similarly, I was watching a TV show the other day where a man had been away from his wife for

three months while he went and lived alone in the wilderness.

When his wife came to visit him and he saw her again in that

rugged new context and he hadn't seen her for a while, the first words out of his

mouth were, oh my, you're so, so beautiful. Like, her beauty almost shocked him. Sometimes our

familiarity with something blinds us to its actual reality.

This phenomenon doesn't only happen with cars and with people.

It also happens with scripture.

We have read or heard a story many times, and so we think we know the scriptural text.

And maybe we do, but what we don't realize is that it can be seen another way or from

another viewpoint. And in seeing it from that new angle we begin to see it

more clearly and some things emerge that we may have overlooked.

Take our signature text of our faith, the Book of Mormon. We may be able to recall

Book of Mormon characters. We may see Book of Mormon doctrines. But have we ever

viewed the Book of Mormon through the position of theology?

Well, that is what a team of a dozen scholars at the Niala Maxwell Institute for Religious

...