From Brigham Young University's Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute podcast, Faith

Illuminating Scholarship. I'm Rosalind Welch, host of the podcast, and today I have for you a conversation

with my colleague, Dr. Christian Heal. As a research community, Christian and I and our colleagues have spent some time

discussing our mission and our strengths, and we've identified four key research areas to organize our

efforts. These are the Book of Mormon, the Bible, interfaith understanding, and latter-day discipleship.

These four areas reflect our mission statement,

which is to inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of

Jesus Christ as we engage the world of religious ideas. And they reflect BYU's strategic

investment in what we call mission-inspired scholarship,

which includes a special focus on faith and religion and on blessing the world beyond our campus.

We'll keep on doing everything that we have been doing, but now we hope you'll understand

a little better why we do it. So this episode is the first in the series that will introduce our four initiatives

and give you a taste of the work we're engaged in. We'll kick it off today discussing

Latter-day Saints study of the Bible and its relationship to the academic discipline of biblical studies.

Reading scripture is one of the fundamental spiritual practices of

Latter-day Saints. For many of us, opening our leather-bound quad combination or the

scripture app on our iPad seems as normal as breathing. Christian helps me understand how

scholarship on the Bible can enrich our understanding of this ancient book that connects us to other faith traditions across the globe.

We talk about what biblical studies is and is not, its gifts and its challenges for the believing readers of the Bible,

and what Latter-day Saints scholars, with an understanding of the Book of Mormon and modern scripture, can add to the discussion.

These are the kinds of questions we hope to advance in coming years with the Institute's Bible initiative.

During our discussion, Christian introduced me to a new metaphor for a deep study of the scriptures, the pilgrimage.

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