BYU students who are looking to be spiritually enlightened can attend the Book of Mormon Lecture on Tuesday, Jan. 15.
The lecture will begin at 7 p.m. in the Gordon B. Hinckley Center. The lecture topic will be, “Sealing’s and Mercies: Moroni’s Final Exhortation.” This free and open public event will be sponsored by the Willes Center at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship.
Paul Hoskisson, a religion professor and director of the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, organizes the yearly lecture of the Book of Mormon. This will be the third lecture that he has organized in the series. Hoskisson feels that students interested in attending this event will gain knowledge and understanding.
“Anyone interested in gospel scholarship, especially the Book of Mormon, will enjoy hearing this senior faculty member analyze the final words of Moroni’s admonition to those who will read his father’s abridgment of the Nephite record, … ‘Another Testament of Jesus Christ,'” he said.
Presenter of this year’s Book of Mormon lecture, Professor James E. Faulconer, a BYU philosophy professor since 1975, has published widely on topics related to Latter-day scripture. He has spoken for hundreds of academic presentations in his career, and this will be his first time speaking for the Willes Book of Mormon lecture.
Some of the main points that Faulconer wants his audience to gain after watching his presentation is to see the complexity of Moroni’s chapter and to better understand the main points that Moroni is making.
Faulconer believes those who attend his lecture will gain a better understanding of how to grasp scriptural meaning.
“They’ll see a way of reading scripture that is different than most are accustomed to, a way called ‘close reading,’ in which the reader goes slowly, paying particular attention to the details of the passage, looking at individual words and phrases and syntactical structures, and allowing that slow reading to raise questions to consider,” he said.
Religion Professor Richard Cowan encourages his students to attend religious lectures that can help students increase their spiritual knowledge. Cowan sees Moroni’s final exhortation lecture to be beneficial to students’ learning experience because they can see scripture stories from a different perspective that they have never seen or heard before.
“Moroni chapter 10 is one of the oft quoted sections of the scripture, so any chance to understand it better is important,” he said.
