6 things I learned from the new Church podcast, ‘The Priesthood Restored’

 (by Lindsey Williams ldsliving.com 1-28-21)

https://www.ldsliving.com/6-things-I-learned-from-the-new-Church-podcast-The-Priesthood-Restored/s/93876

Christ Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, by Hermann Clementz

 

Saints in the Holy Land - part 10

"The BYU Jerusalem Center (conclusion)" 

(by Dan Peterson sic et non blog)

For some time thereafter, no matter how careful we were, some new and usually rather ridiculous charge would still occasionally surface. One amusing instance of this was the accusation published by an Orthodox Jewish newspaper in both Jerusalem and New York during October 1987 that the nefari­ous Mormons were using their building’s highly visible location to impose a large illuminated cross on the nighttime horizon of Jerus­alem. And it was true! (Sort of.) At night, when all the rooms on the sixth level had their lights burning, and when the lights were on in the stairway that runs down the center of the building, an imaginative person could make out a kind of electric cross. Denials that the appearance of a cross was intentional carried no weight with the critics, needless to say. Nor did it help to point out that, in contrast to other Christian groups, Latter-day Saints don’t use the cross in their architecture or liturgy—a fact for which we are routinely assailed and assaulted by Protestant anti-Mormons. Finally, offi­cials of the center simply had to make sure that lights on the sixth level were either turned out or that the windows were covered when they were on.

But these little skirmishes mean little. The battle had been won. The building had been completed, despite intense opposition. What does it mean? Perhaps no one fully knows. Sitting on slightly more than four acres and with a total floor space of 103,420 square feet, Brigham Young University’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies is among the most beautiful buildings in Jerusalem and is certainly one of the most visible. (Indeed, it has itself become a tourist attraction that draws thousands of Israelis and their guests each year.) Like a waterfall, it flows down the slope of Mount Scopus. Its many levels are adorned with Italian marble and Burmese teakwood. Its Danish- built organ–created by the venerable firm of Marcussen & Søn, founded in 1806–is one of the finest in the Middle East. From its upper auditorium, where sabbath services are now held for students enrolled in its academic programs and for other local members of the Church and visiting tourists, a breathtaking panoramic view of the Old City of Jerusalem can be seen through three walls of plate-glass windows. Through them, too, the sadness and strife of occupied East Jerusalem can also sometimes be seen, as, behind the pul­pit, clouds of tear gas and smoke arise from the ongoing conflicts that occasionally rend the City of Peace.

A community of Latter-day Saints now exists in the Holy Land. It is not a community of agriculturalists and canal-builders, as our ancestors had pictured, but a community of scholars, teachers, and students. In a very real sense, I believe it fulfills the dreams and aspirations of the early missionaries who labored so faithfully in the Near East to build outposts of the kingdom of God in that his­toric but tortured land. What role the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies will play in the future of the Church and in the future of the Near East remains to be seen. Perhaps, if we prove wor­thy of the blessings we have received, it will someday serve the region as a city on a hill, a candle held high to give light to those around it.[1] Whatever benefit it may prove to others, however, it is certainly benefiting us. We can already confidently say that–notwithstanding some periods of reduced occupancy and even closure over the years, owing to both political instability and pandemic–it is building up a new generation of Latter-day Saints to whom the land of Palestine is familiar and for whom the stories of the Bible and the events of the area’s history live in a way they have never lived for our people in the past. If even a small proportion of those who administer and enjoy the programs and courses of the center come away from their experience at Jerusalem with something of the impact that others such as Lorenzo Snow have received, the spiritual life of the Church can only grow in depth and devotion. If even a few return from Palestine with a clearer understanding of our Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters, our capacity to carry out the mission entrusted to us by the Lord can only increase.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2021/01/revision-8-10-the-byu-jerusalem-center-conclusion-plus-diplomatic-breakthroughs-in-the-middle-east.html

Congress Opens Prayer with 'Amen And Awomen'

Saints in the Holy Land - part 9

"Students Occupy the BYU Jerusalem Center"

(by Dan Peterson sic et non blog)

 On 4 March 1987, occupancy permits were issued for the not­ quite-completed Center and, on the recommendation of both the Church’s legal staff and its local lawyers, students and faculty immediately moved into the twenty-million-dollar structure. On the eighteenth of May in the following year, President Jeffrey Holland of Brigham Young University signed a forty-nine year lease for the land on which the building sits, with a renewal option for another forty-nine years beyond that. He again committed the University and the Church to refrain from any kind of proselyting “as long as such activity is not allowed by the government of Israel.”

Not all critics of the center and the Latter-day Saints were silenced by the fact that students had actually occupied the build­ing. For years, they were still on the lookout for any sign of missionary activity on the part of students, faculty, or staff at the Center. Students are required even today to sign a pledge that they will not engage in such activity. They are even told to refer people who ask questions to generally available encyclopedia articles or to online resources rather than themselves engaging in conversations on religion. For one thing, the person inquiring might be some kind of provocateur seeking to create an incident. An oversight committee of Israeli officials, created as part of the agreement that permitted the construction of the center, must approve concerts, organ recitals, and public lectures in the build­ing, after screening them for any evidence of secret missionary agendas. (The committee’s jurisdiction extends only to nonaca­demic functions in the center; University and Church officials insisted that purely academic matters remain internal.)

The limitations within which the Church and its members have agreed to work in Israel (and occasionally elsewhere in the Near East) sometimes create ironic situations. It is only in the Near East that I have been taught, and have taught others, that it is part of a Latter-day Saint’s religious duty not to proselyte and, indeed, to avoid speaking on religious subjects with the local population. An illustra­tion of the kind of awkwardness that I have in mind occurred in my own personal experience. When, a few years ago, some of us at Brigham Young University were laying the groundwork for an inten­sive Arabic language program to be conducted at the Jerusalem Cen­ter, we were not yet certain that there would be enough interested students on our own campus to make the program worthwhile. It would be necessary, we thought then, to recruit superior students from other universities as well. So we tentatively decided that we would circulate advertisements for our program to appropriate departments at other schools and place them in several journals deal­ing with Near Eastern studies. But, someone suddenly exclaimed, what if a Jewish student applies to participate? Many of the best stu­dents of Arabic in the United States at any given time are, after all, Jewish. They have a natural reason for interest in Near Eastern fields and often have a head start on the study of other Semitic languages because of a knowledge of Hebrew. Our critics in Israel, however, would not be any the less upset with us if we seemed to be “proselyt­ing” among American Jews instead of Israelis. Well, it was suggested, perhaps we could screen people out who seemed to have “Jewish” names. But another person responded that such screening was illegal in the United States and probably wasn’t completely effective anyway. Some American Jews don’t have obviously Jewish names. And what if, someday, it came to somebody’s attention that we had systematically turned down Jewish applicants even when they had excellent creden­tials? In my own typically helpful way, I suggested that maybe, at the bottom of our ad, we could have a small eagle and a swastika accompanied by a note in German that no Jews need apply. Obviously, we were caught between discrim­inating against Jews, which was not only wrong but illegal in the United States, and not discriminating against Jews, which would eventually get us into horrible trouble in Israel. The irony that Israeli policies encouraged us to discriminate against American Jews was every bit as rich as the irony of devoutly non-proselyting Latter-day Saints. Eventually, though, we decided that the risks of recruiting students elsewhere were simply too great, and we abandoned the idea—which, as our own students’ enthusiastic response soon demonstrated, wasn’t really necessary anyway.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2020/12/revision-8-9-students-occupy-the-byu-jerusalem-center-plus-a-christmas-wrap-up.html