Interpreter’s Sixth Birthday Party

The Interpreter Foundation celebrated its sixth birthday last evening with about eighty-five volunteers and guests.  The centerpiece of the evening — apart from the extravagantly delicious grilled meats prepared by Bruce Webster — was a report by Dr. Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw (one of Interpreter’s vice presidents) and his wife Kathleen of their recently-completed service as missionaries in Kinshasa, The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

There’s much to be celebrated.  As of Friday, for instance, we’ve published at least one article — sometimes two articles and occasionally even three — every Friday for 315 weeks in a row.  (We’ve existed for 316.5 weeks.)  Just since our last birthday party a year ago, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture has published 59 articles by 40 different authors.

Much of the credit for this goes to Allen Wyatt and Alan Sikes, who have ensured that remarkably regular production schedule.  And, before Allen took over, it was Jeff Bradshaw who saw to that.

But, of course, the journal isn’t all that we do.  A new initiative this year, for instance, has been the weekly Interpreter Radio Show, which airs on K-TALK Radio (AM 1640) every Sunday evening from 7-9 PM (Utah) time, and which is also available online anywhere in the world and is eventually archived on the Interpreter Foundation website.  When we began the program, which costs us nothing, I felt that it could easily be justified if it reached an audience comparable to a respectably-sized stake fireside, which would be, I suppose, somewhere around 250-300 people.  After all, we would be willing to do a stake fireside, wouldn’t we?  Estimates are, however, that the live Interpreter Radio Show has been reaching somewhere around 5000-5500 listeners each week, to say nothing of those who listen to archived past programs.  So I consider the Interpreter Radio Show a success.  It’s not a huge audience, but it’s a pretty decent one.  I’m very grateful to Martin Tanner for his efforts in this regard.

We were also able to showcase Interpreter’s latest book publication, Matthew Bowen’s Name as Key-Word: Collected Essays on Onomastic Wordplay and the Temple in Mormon Scripture.

One fact that was fun to point out is that, every quarter, the value of the labor that’s contributed by our volunteers — even though it’s only spottily reported and even though our price-valuation of it is fairly conservative — exceeds our actual financial expenditures.

I was able to announce a forthcoming volume from Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project,  The Nature of the Original Language.  I urged those in attendance to mark Tuesday, 25 September 2018, on their calendars.  That evening, from 7-9 PM, in the Hinckley Center on the campus of Brigham Young University, BYU Studies and the Interpreter Foundation will co-sponsor a lecture by Professor Skousen (with accompanying remarks from Dr. Stanford Carmack) on their findings.

Finally, I told the audience a bit about the docudrama that we’ve undertaken on the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon.  I’m very excited about it.

Incidentally, the Interpreter Foundation welcomes — indeed, relies upon — donations.