Am I a wire religion friend's professor Anthony Swett here from B.O.U. Church History and Doctor and welcome to another great episode of the podcast.

I personally cannot remember the first time I heard the phrase holy week.

Can you?

I do remember seeing on some common calendars days with designations like Palm Sunday and Good Friday and wondering what they were.

I simply had no idea growing up as a Latter-day Saint what those terms were.

Now of course I knew what Easter was but days like Spy Wednesday I had never heard of that.

Even growing up Easter for us was never quite as big of a deal as Christmas.

Now maybe it was because chocolate eggs aren't quite comparable to all the presents around Christmas as a kid.

But I think when I reflect on it more deeply part of what influenced me was that our family and our culture made a big deal of the events and the days and the countdown to Christmas.

Christmas was a season Easter was a day.

Until as I've gotten older and learned a little more for many global Christians Easter is a season centered around the seven days leading up to the resurrection known as Holy Week.

I was grateful to open up the Church's 2023 Come Follow Me Manual and on the Easter lesson they have written, quote,

one way to focus on the blessings of the Savior's Atonement this week is to spend time each day reading about the last week of Jesus' life.

They then list each day of the week and scriptures associated with it beginning with Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Sunday known throughout the Christian world as Palm Sunday.

Professor Eric Huntsman of BYU's Department of Ancient Scripture along with Trevon Hats from BYU's Harold B. Lee Library have recently published a beautiful new book called Greater Love, Half No Man,

a Latter-day Saint Guide to celebrating the Easter season giving suggestions for Latter-day Saints of what they can do to make Holy Week and Easter season more meaningful.

In fact to help celebrate Holy Week the Religious Study Center and Deseret Book who published this book are giving away a free PDF chapter from the book for why religion listeners as a resource guide to help Latter-day Saints celebrate and make the most of the week.

That free PDF is available on our website at whyreligion.bYU.edu when you click on this episode. Here's Eric Huntsman.

I will always say to my students when we get to the Holy Week so you know Latter-day Saints should know everything Jesus said and did in that final week as well as or better than other Christians.

In reality we tend to know them less, right? And this is just an attempt to help individuals with how the resources to kind of counter them.

On today's episode Professor Huntsman opens us up to Holy Week and the broader Easter season as we prepare over the next few weeks to celebrate the greatest event in human history, the Atonement and Resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ and the events that led up to that sacred Sunday.

This is why religion.

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