Hello and welcome to the scriptures are real.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and this is the podcast where we talk about things or times where the scriptures

became real to us because we believe there's great power in the scriptures, and we draw

in that power even better when the scriptures are more real and apply to us in a more easy way.

I'm so excited to have with me my guest.

This is Stephen Smoot, who I've known for years now. I'm not even

sure how many years now, a PhD student at Catholic University. Welcome, Stephen. Thank you,

Kerry. Thanks for having me on the show. Glad to be here. I'm excited to have you here. So why don't

you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So as you mentioned,

I'm currently a PhD student at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. I'm getting my

PhD in Semitic and Egyptian languages and literature. So I have one foot in biblical studies,

specializing in the Hebrew Old Testament. and I have another foot in Egyptology.

Those are kind of my two areas of study that I've turned into sort of a hybrid Frankenstein's monster of a PhD program and emphasis, and that's what I'm pursuing now.

Before I was at Catholic University, I was at the University of Toronto where I did my

master's degree in Egyptology, and before that, I was at BYU, where I did my undergrad studies

in Hebrew Bible, in Old Testament studies.

So this has been a trajectory long in the making to end up where I am now, academically speaking,

but it seems to be working out just fine for me. So hopefully that goes well.

Other than that, I currently am a research associate with the B.H. Roberts Foundation, which is a new

nonprofit research organization that recently launched a website

called Mormoner.org. So that's Mormon than an R. So Mormonar.mur.org where you can check

out different research resources. And before my PhD work and my work at the BHH. Roberts Foundation, I was a long-time associate

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