Peter L. McMurray

PETER L. McMURRAY {[email protected]} is a musician and composer pursuing graduate studies in ethnomusicology. His wife Eunice Si Yi McMurray is an erstwhile medical student. They have lived in the Boston area for much of the past decade, though they are currently planning to move to Berlin and Istanbul for a two-year research project. They currently serve on the Cambridge Massachusetts Stake History Committee.

This Little Light of Ours: Ecologies of Revelation

Articles/Essays – Volume 44, No. 2

I’ve been asked to speak about the power of personal revelation today. But I’d like to tell you a (slightly) different story about revelation, one full of highs and lows, but in recent years perhaps more lows than highs. Or maybe more accurately, more questions than answers. And while revelation has remained deeply personal for me through these years, one of the central, ongoing questions in my life has been my connection to you, to all of you, to the Church, to everyone else, to the world itself.

A Voice Crying from the Dust: The Book of Mormon as Sound

Articles/Essays – Volume 48, No. 4

The Book of Mormon opens with a provocative conundrum: how can the sensory world of revelation most effectively be rendered in language? After introducing himself and his process of making scripture, the prophet-narrator Nephi recounts his father Lehi’s throne theophany and calling to be a prophet.This calling entailed two dramatic audio-visual encounters with the divine. In the first, Lehi prayed, and in response a pillar of fire appeared on a rock in front of him. By means of the pillar, somehow, “he saw and heard much” with such intensity he quaked, trembled, and was ultimately incapacitated by the experience (1 Nephi 1:6–7).