Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Janiece Johnson specializes in American religious history, specifically Latter-day Saint history, and the prosecution for the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Dr. Johnson has master's degrees in American religious history and theology, and a PhD in American history, taught and researched as a professor at BYU Idaho and BYU, and is now an acquisitions director at Deseret Book, and she is the author of numerous books and articles, including the award-winning Convicting the Mormons: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American Culture, and her newest book on Revelation in the series Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants that was published by the Maxwell Institute and Deseret Book.

Dr. Johnson's current research centers on the Book of Mormon and the relationship of early Latter-day Saint converts to this new American scripture.

Janice, that is an impressive retinue of projects that you're involved in, and it seems like you've worked with a lot of good organizations.

[laughs] Probably, yeah.

You know, I t- I actually, teaching Book of Mormon, um, I'd ask students to bring a book, to just get a little blue cover book, and I was like, "You can get the little miniature version and throw it in your backpack and you're not gonna notice it's there." But just because that, it, having, I think, a different format, some will like a study edition.

I really like the Maxwell Institute study edition because that was really good for me to read it in a different way.

I've also read, you know, the 1830 edition all the way through, and sometimes I think we need that, that change.

My name is Terryl Givens.

I'm a senior research fellow here at Brigham Young University's Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.

So I am a Latter-day Saint.

Uh, I began my professional career at University of Richmond and More by chance than by intention, I just ended up writing about Latter-day Saint history, culture, and theology for an academic audience.

And when I was in my early 20s, I did an internship at what was then called Farms.

It's now BYU Studies or Maxwell Institute, I think.

And I did an internship with John Welch, who was the LDS scholar who first found chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.

And so I spent a summer with Professor Welch and some of the other guys who were working at farms and read a lot of the philological work that they were doing on Old Testament scriptures and on Book of Mormon scriptures and how Hebraic scriptures literary and poetic forms appeared in the Book of Mormon.