Hello and welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast, where we seek out faith illuminating scholarship.

I'm Rosalind Welch, Associate Director at the Institute.

This season, we're exploring the questions we should be asking.

Thanks for joining us.

A favorite poem of mine is John Dunn's Death Be Not Proud.

In this poem, Dunn takes a swing at the Grim Reaper himself,

arguing that, because of Christ, death is temporary and faded to perish just

like the rest of us.

Dun concludes with great drama, Death Thou Shall Die.

But there's something in the poem that protests too much.

The dread of death is not so easy to dispel, even for Christians. I'm Rosalind Welch, host of the

Maxwell Institute podcast. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Ryan Tobler, a scholar of American religious

history. Dr. Tobler worked as a postdoctoral fellow here at the Maxwell Institute for a year,

and now is off to a new position as a lecturer at the

University of Heidelberg. We'll miss him, but we're thrilled for his success.

Ryan and I discussed an article he wrote about the beginnings of the practice of baptism for

the dead among the early Latter-day Saints. He taught me that baptism for the dead doesn't only answer

questions about the afterlife. Baptism for the dead is also for the living. It's profoundly

empowering in modern life, changing our relationship to our own inevitable death, and healing

our troubled relationship with our bodies. President Nelson recently

taught that Jesus Christ is the reason we build temples. Dr. Tobler shows us how baptism for the

dead kick-started the modern restoration of temple work and how it draws us to Christ in its

...