{"id":113996,"date":"2025-12-11T16:38:01","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=113996"},"modified":"2025-12-11T16:38:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:38:51","slug":"113996","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/12\/113996.html","title":{"rendered":"A year-end report and Christmas letter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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\"Wikimedia<\/a>
Since the Salt Lake Temple is undergoing major renovations and Temple Square is being significantly reconfigured, the area is a major construction zone at the moment, and will be so for at least a bit longer. This is how it looked during the Christmas of 2008. The Conference Center is the low building in the upper lefthand corner of this Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph. It\u2019s much larger than it looks here.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I wrote the Christmas letter below for the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s volunteers and donors. \u00a0It went out two or three days ago, and I think that sharing it here might now be appropriate:<\/p>\n

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Dear friends:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re in the thick of the Christmas season. It can be a hectic time of the year, but it\u2019s also a wonderful occasion, if we handle it well, to think about the things that matter most to us, including family and the unspeakably good news of God\u2019s gift of His Son. We wish you a joyous holiday and the best possible New Year.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re also approaching the end of 2025. Accordingly, on behalf of The Interpreter Foundation, I want to review some of the past year\u2019s highlights and preview one or two things that we anticipate for 2026.\u00a0 Please think of it as something of an annual report.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been another productive year. You may already have noticed the complete redesign of our website. If you haven\u2019t yet done so, please feel free to give it a thorough going-over, because the changes aren\u2019t merely cosmetic: Our treasure house of books and articles and other materials has grown enormously since the Foundation was launched in 2012, and this new design makes them far more manageable and more easily searchable. It will serve us and you for years to come. If you discover any bugs (and there could well be some; it\u2019s been a massive overhaul), please let us know.<\/p>\n

Happily, our basic effort\u2014essentially the heartbeat or pulse of the Foundation\u2014has continued steady through the extensive redesign: That\u2019s our flagship publication, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship<\/i><\/a>. By the end of the year, the Journal <\/i>will have published 66 articles totaling more than 1,800 pages. (Continuing the record that we\u2019ve maintained since the very beginning, we didn\u2019t miss a single week. By the end of 2025, the Foundation will have published at least one article weekly for 701 consecutive Fridays.\u00a0 And indeed, as in prior years, there were some weeks in 2025 when the Journal <\/i>published more than just one article.) \u00a0Additionally, many of the year\u2019s articles were accompanied by Kyler Rasmussen\u2019s \u201cInterpreting Interpreter<\/i><\/a>\u201d summaries, which now appear online in both written and video form.<\/p>\n

Volume 65<\/a> deserves special mention: It\u2019s an important collection of articles by Matt Roper reflecting the results of a multiyear research project.\u00a0 They examine elements of the Book of Mormon that, ever since its first publication in 1830, have been cited by critics as anachronisms and, thus, as evidence against the book\u2019s authentic antiquity.\u00a0 How do those issues stand today? \u00a0(Hint: The Book of Mormon looks better than ever.)<\/p>\n

Moreover, by the end of December, the Foundation will also have published six books<\/a>\u2014in seven volumes\u2014for the year 2025:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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