Ryan A. Davis

RYAN A. DAVIS {[email protected]} holds a PhD from Emory University and is a Hispanist at Illinois State University, where he studies modern Spanish narrative and cultural history. In the field of Mormon studies, he has published on and researches missionary athletes, missionary rock/folk bands, and Spanish Mormon Westerns.

Enos Encoded: Narrative Structure in the Small Plates

Articles/Essays – Volume 58, No. 2

If the Book of Mormon possesses, in the words of the late Elder Neal A. Maxwell, “divine architecture,” then it follows that one task of theology ought to be to seek God in the structure of the book. In this vein, Adam Miller argues that “theological readings aim to develop a text’s latent images of Christ.” Given that the Book of Mormon is, whatever else it may be, a narrative, then those searching for God in it would do well to pay attention to the ways the text’s narrative structure (i.e., its “divine architecture”) develops “latent images of Christ.” Miller gestures toward a methodology for divining Christ in texts when he writes that the power of theology “derives from its freedom to pose hypothetical questions: if such and such were the case, then what meaningful pattern would the text produce in response?” In what follows I offer such a theological reading of the small plates of Nephi, paying particular attention to the book of Enos.

Resurrection Morning

Articles/Essays – Volume 57, No. 3

Listen to an interview about this piece here. Sometimes in the morning, I wake earlier than the others. I slip out of my room and sit down on that well-worn spot on the couch that…