Church Historian Marlin K. Jensen and Asst. Church Historian Richard E. Turley Jr. will be among the many speakers at this year’s BYU Church History Symposium. The event is free, open to the public, and requires no registration. More information can be found at the symposium web page. Full announcement below.
Preserving the History of the Latter-day Saints
On Friday, February 27, 2009, BYU Religious Studies Center will convene the fourth annual Brigham Young University Church History Symposium, Preserving the History of the Latter-day Saints.
Elder Marlin K. Jensen, Church historian and recorder, will be the keynote speaker for the symposium. Assistant Church historian and recorder Richard E. Turley Jr. will also speak, together with a host of scholars—historians, archivists, editors—from the Joseph Smith Papers Project, the Church History Department, and Brigham Young University. A cornucopia of presentations is planned, each treating some aspect of preserving Church history generally, regionally, locally, internationally, institutionally, or individually.
The revealed commission to preserve the Church’s history is as old as the restored Church. It has been taken seriously ever since, but never have more resources been committed to it than there are today. And never have there been more exciting efforts under way to preserve Latter-day Saint history. The ongoing publication of the Joseph Smith Papers and the construction of the state-of-the-art Church History Library typify the accelerating effort to fulfill the revealed commission to preserve Church history.
More than twenty dynamic speakers are slated, including Mark Ashurst-McGee on “Joseph Smith’s Journal Keeping and the Creation of His History,” Jill Mulvay Derr and Carol Cornwall Madsen on “The New Mormon Women’s History, 1872—1985,” Matthew Heiss on “The LDS Church’s Evolving Program to Document the Church around the World,” Jared Tamez on “The 1901—1908 Minutes of the Atlautla Mexico Branch,” and Reid L. Neilson on “The Publishing Legacy of Andrew Jenson’s World Tour.”
The symposium is free and open to the public.
When: Friday, February 27, 2009, 1:00 p.m.—6:00 p.m.
Where: Conference Center, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
For more information, please visit http://rsc.byu.edu/preservinghistory.php
Note the JI’s discussion of the schedule.
“The revealed commission to preserve the Church’s history is as old as the restored Church.”
Interesting concept from the recent Joseph Smith lesson on apostasy:
“In one meeting I heard him say: ‘I will give you a key that will never rust,—if you will stay with the majority of the Twelve Apostles, and the records of the Church, you will never be led astray.”
“I heard the Prophet Joseph say [. . .] The Lord would never suffer a majority of this people to be led away or deceived by imposters, nor would He allow the records of this Church to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
I found out about this today and am excited to hear Elder Jensen speak in particular. Does anyone know if they will announce the times of the particular speakers? I probably won’t want to stay the whole five hours.