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

In 2026, we are releasing a series called Old Testament Reflections. Each week, a scholar offers a short reflection on the Come Follow Me reading.

Today's reflection, The Lord weeps for his children.

Some questions from Moses Chapter 7 is written and read by Stephen Peck.

This is my first Come Follow Me blog post as a two-year fellow of the Maxwell Institute.

So let me introduce myself a little. I'm coming here from

the biology department at BYU, where I am an evolutionary ecologist. I've taught classes in history

and philosophy of biology, bioethics, ecology, population genetics. And for the most of my career,

I've used simulation models to explore complex ecological systems.

I'm also a fiction writer of really weird books and stories.

All of this will come into play in my work for the Maxwell Institute.

My focus in these blog posts will be to learn, as I have in science, to love questions, the imagination, and experimental

explorations of what, while wrong, might bend our gaze in a way that allows questions to

grow deeper and more complex. I'm very comfortable with ambiguity, paradox, and with not being

right. I've been a big fan of my mentor, Jim Faulkner.

I took his philosophy class as an undergraduate

and he has been a friend and an intellectual companion sense,

and I love his series, making the scriptures harder.

I will explore things much in the spirit of his works.

Moses 7 is a wonderful chapter.

It is full of curious and troubling things that can look one way from the perspective of certain theological commitments about the nature of God's causality,

but look very different from a restoration perspective. The chapter invites us to open our hearts and minds to a richer theological understanding of God as revealed in this chapter.

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