On “Mormon Scholars Testify”

I’m pleased to say that a new entry, from Dr. Jonathan Westover, has now been posted at Mormon Scholars Testify.

It’s the first new entry on the site in quite a while.

I’ve let the site go more than a bit, because I’m rather overextended.  (And the extensive traveling hasn’t made things easier.)   However, I’m hoping to start posting entries again fairly regularly.

And I was very pleased recently when Mormon Scholars Testify was included, on the Church’s official website, on a small list of additional resources for institute and seminary teachers.  (See here.)  This represents the first time, I believe, that the Church’s website has directed people to non-official sources — and Mormon Scholars Testify made the cut.

So I invite qualified people to submit entries when they can.  (I know that several are out there who read this blog.)  And I also invite some volunteer help.  It would be useful to have people who could read through submissions and make sure that they’re grammatical and in the right format.  It would also be useful to have people — they needn’t be the same people — who could help recruit new submissions.  If you’re at a college or university, or in a research institute, you might be especially well positioned to identify faithful Latter-day Saint academics, scientists, and so forth and to invite them to contribute.

I don’t want to be the bottleneck any more.  To this point, I’ve recruited or received every single submission to Mormon Scholars Testify and I’ve edited every single one.  Fortunately, I’ve had the wonderful Tanya Spackman to post them to the site.

If you would like to help, please contact me at [email protected].

By the way, some criticized me for Mormon Scholars Testify when I first launched it.  Supposedly, I was sending the message that only academics matter, that non-academics are beneath my notice, and etc.

As certain of my critics are wont to do, they were misreading what I was doing in the least charitable way they could.  In response to requests from Elder M. Russell Ballard and others, I was simply trying to find a way to share testimonies — or to encourage the sharing of testimonies — online.  And academia is where I live and work and know people to recruit.

“What would that arrogant elitist Peterson think,” some demanded, “of a site called Mormon Housewives Testify or Mormon Farmers Testify?”

I can answer that question:  I would be very pleased to see such sites.  If anybody out there wants to start Mormon Teens Testify or Mormon Accountants Testify or Mormon Athletes Testify or Mormon Mechanics Testify or Mormon Fly Fishermen Testify or Mormon Web Designers Testify or Mormon Stamp Collectors Testify or Your Nebraska Mormon Neighbors Testify or anything like thereunto, I wish that person well and much success.

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For Elder Ballard’s 2007 BYU-Hawaii address on this subject — the remarks that eventually impelled me to launch Mormon Scholars Testify — see:

“Sharing the Gospel Using the Internet”

This talk, given by Elder David A. Bednar at the 2014 BYU Education Week, is also very relevant:

“Share More Gospel Messages on Social Media, Elder Bednar Says”

The remarkable fact is that you can now sit at your computer in Mesa or Mexico City or Draper or Seoul or Tulsa and painlessly, at essentially no extra cost to you, reach potential audiences in Kenya, Ireland, Tibet, Pakistan, the Philippines, Ukraine, and Brazil.

The admonition “Every member a missionary” caused me some concern after I moved to my neighborhood in Utah and began work at Brigham Young University.  In my daily life, I scarcely encountered non-Mormons anymore.  How was I to be a missionary?  But now, it’s easy.