A Bonfire of Faith

Thank you for being here on a somewhat stormy Tuesday morning. I pray the Spirit will be with us and will instruct us during our time together.

I love this university. I love you. I love this place. It’s not hyperbole to say that BYU changed the trajectory of my life.

We toss around the phrase alma mater—which refers to the place you went to college. But translated literally from the Latin, alma mater means “generous” or “nourishing mother.” It’s a fitting metaphor, particularly this week as we honor our real nourishing mothers.

I’m grateful to have my mother, Connie, and also my mother-in-law, Lynn, here with us today. My first memories of BYU were as a child, traveling out with my mother so she could attend Education Week. She was an early-morning seminary teacher, and she knew that this place was “intellectually enlarging” and “spiritually strengthening.”¹ May it ever remain so. Thank you to my mother and to all the mothers and women who keep the fire of faith alive on this campus and well beyond.

“Loyal, strong, and true,”² through and through, BYU is my alma mater. This is where I chose to serve a mission, where I discovered lifelong friends and mentors, where I grew in my testimony of the Savior and His restored gospel and Church, where I published my first scholarly works, and where—in one of the great miracles to occur on this campus—I got a BYU intramural championship T-shirt. And I know what you’re thinking—no, I did not have to purchase it at Deseret Industries.

But in all sincerity, I am a living testament that if you give to this place, it will give back to you ten-, twenty-, and a hundredfold. Ecclesiastes 11:1 teaches: “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.” In other words, serve, participate, and pitch in. Cast your bread in abundance on this campus—and not just at the duck pond.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my wife, Holly, and I met at BYU. She was schlepping a massive sign across campus after hosting a Marriott School event. (Holly studied tax accounting.) I can’t remember all the details, but I’m pretty sure the sign she was carrying said something like “Marry me and you’ll never have to file your taxes alone again.” 

I was reading Don Quixote at the time, and I mustered some quixotic courage to ask if she needed help carrying the sign. Her response was as swift as it was definitive: “No.”

Thankfully, only moments later, the sign, which was in fact just an advertisement for the Marriott School event, started slipping.

With our future marriage hanging in the balance, I envision heaven dispatching a half dozen or so angels—likely all four of our children—to ensure the sign fell. Because when it did, she reconsidered my offer to help carry it. I know this all sounds a bit too sappy, too saccharine, and too much like a mawkish Hallmark movie, but just wait—it gets worse.

The next day I texted her the following message:

Hi, Holly. This is Hal,
Your new sign-carrying pal.
Are you busy Saturday?
How about a play?
What do you say, yea or nay?

It’s bad, I know. “Doggerel” would be a generous descriptor. But in my defense, there was no ChatGPT in those days.

Holly, thankfully, did in fact say “yea.” And I immediately did humanity a favor and forever retired from text-message poetry.

A Peculiar Mandate

I hope you sense that Holly and I love this place. We have deep affection for BYU; it is indeed special. And I say that not to boast but to emphasize BYU’s unique role and responsibility “to lift and serve,”³ to hold fast to both reason and revelation, to build intellect and character,⁴ to “seek learning . . . by study and also by faith”⁵—to become, as BYU president C. Shane Reese has said, that “Christ-centered, prophetically directed university of prophecy.”⁶ 

BYU has been given a peculiar mandate. One of President Reese’s predecessors, Franklin S. Harris, called our spiritual mission a “fire that must be kept burning.”⁷

I’m convinced that our success in keeping the fire of faith alive on this campus has implications that extend well beyond Ninth East and Cougar Boulevard. The eyes of heaven are upon what happens here. There are thousands living and dead who have dreamed of an academic institution that would confidently respond to the question posed by Tertullian two millennia ago: “What . . . has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”⁸

We say, “Everything.”

We say revelation enhances reason, sainthood exalts scholarship, and discipleship adds to deliberation. President Russell M. Nelson has taught on this campus:

There is no conflict between science and religion. Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion—or both.⁹

So, brothers and sisters, my fellow disciples, friends, bring your kindling to the bonfire of faith. Add a branch or a twig or two. Or, better yet, toss in an entire cord of wood, because it’s here we must love more purely, learn more deeply, and serve more effectively.

Whatever spark, whatever unique light you have, shine it here to bless others. That spiritual fire—which is dimming or already dead in most corners of the academy—must burn ever brighter at BYU until the perfect day when Christ comes.

Embers of Religious Education

Harvard Law School’s Noah Feldman visited our campus in 2009. He began his forum remarks by describing a university “founded by deeply committed religious believers, considered radicals in their day, who faced bloody and unremitting persecution.”¹⁰ They were forced “to travel thousands of miles under very, very difficult conditions in shaky conveyances to found for themselves . . . a new Zion.”¹¹ This “community turned to education and founded a small religious academy that grew into a college, and from a college grew into a global and cosmopolitan university with students from all over the world.”¹²

Professor Feldman then confessed that he was not talking about BYU but rather about the founding of his own home university: Harvard. The parallels are striking between the two origin stories, and Professor Feldman wasn’t the first to notice them.

In March 1892, Charles William Eliot, then the nationally prominent president of Harvard, visited Provo. He met with Karl G. Maeser and James E. Talmage and addressed the student body of Brigham Young Academy. According to James Talmage’s journal, Eliot “drew a very pleasing comparison between the establishment and development of the Church [Educational System] . . . and the founding and growth of Harvard University.”¹³

Now I’m not arguing that BYU should become the Harvard of the West. For starters, I have given more money than I care to admit earning a degree from Harvard’s chief rival—a school, I should add, whose colors are blue and white and whose emblem is a big block Y. I should also say that if you do the pipeline from BYU to Yale, you save a lot in swag—so just keep that in mind. No, BYU must become BYU, that “Christ-centered, prophetically directed university” about which so much has been foretold.

But in pursuing BYU’s unique path, I’m convinced that we carry more than a few of those embers once kindled in places such as Harvard and Yale. While those institutions—and many others—have chosen to secularize, Christ calls upon us to continue to hold fast to our spiritual mission, our sacred light. It’s a heady and heavy responsibility, and heaven’s gaze is upon you students, you keepers of the flame, you guardians of the light. So let us remain humble enough, intellectually honest enough, and courageous enough to declare with Hamlet that “there are more things in heaven and earth . . . / Than [the academy has] dreamt of in [its philosophies].”¹⁴

Faith and Reason

Take a page in this regard from the theologian Thomas Aquinas, who worked for more than eight years on his magnum opus, employing as many as four scribes at a time. One day while praying, the story is told, he received a vision so forceful, so penetrating, and so numinous that he abandoned his theological treatise altogether. When his trusted secretary asked why, Aquinas replied that he’d seen things that made his writing seem like “straw.”¹⁵ This account should remind us of the Prophet Joseph Smith’s observation that you can learn more by gazing “into heaven five minutes . . . than you would by reading all that ever was written on the subject.”¹⁶

Then there’s the great scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who some consider to be the inventor of the world’s first mechanical calculator. In Paris, on the night of November 23, 1654, something happened between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and half past midnight. Pascal had an experience he treated as sacred. He memorialized it with the following words:

Fire.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob
not of the philosophers [or] of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.¹⁷

Pascal then placed the parchment with these and other words into his jacket lining, as if to position them closer to his heart. After this experience, Pascal turned his attention to Christian apologetics. During this period he devised what today is known as Pascal’s wager, one of the most often-cited arguments for why believing in God might be considered more reasonable than not.

The Prophet Joseph Smith remarked after his dispensation-ushering First Vision of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ:

I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me; and though I was hated and persecuted for saying that I had seen a vision, yet it was true . . . ; I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it.¹⁸

The Prophet Joseph knew that reason itself was on the side of his stunning theophany. And, he rightly concluded, it would fly in the face of reason to deny having witnessed it. Beware, then, my young friends, of falling prey to what President Reese has called “the false dichotomy” of thinking we must choose either reason or revelation—in fact, they are both indispensable in our quest for light and truth.¹⁹

Taking the Leap of Faith

As young married students, Holly and I were approaching graduation. We planned to move to Chicago for graduate school. We had traveled there twice and had put in deposits for my program and for an apartment. When we were back in Provo, one morning I awoke with what I can only describe as a revelation to pursue a completely different path and to take a job for which I wasn’t even being considered. I had no offer; I hadn’t even sent in a résumé. Talk about quixotic! All of this might seem irrational or unreasonable to the uninitiated, but reason itself demanded that I acknowledge the reality of this revelation.

Reason, then, together with revelation—the head and the heart—allowed Holly and me to jointly pursue this new path with faith. And although I was frequently tempted to waffle in the weeks that followed, in hindsight, Holly and I are immensely grateful that we did not fall prey to the false dichotomy of choosing either reason or revelation alone. It wasn’t until years—and a few jobs—later that Holly and I connected the dots to see the Lord’s hand guiding us to experiences and opportunities that have helped us serve more effectively. “Dispute not because ye see not,” the Book of Mormon teaches, “for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith.”²⁰

Imagine, for a moment, hiking Mount Timpanogos and venturing off-trail: You’re out of cell-phone range, and suddenly you find yourself stuck on a ledge from which you can no longer safely turn back. You spot a means ahead to get to safety, but there’s just one problem. To quote the nineteenth-century pragmatist William James, getting to safety will require taking “a terrible leap”²¹ of faith. James framed the dilemma this way:

Have faith that you can successfully make [that leap], and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself . . . , and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling . . . , you roll in the abyss.²²

Look to Jesus Christ

On the ledges of life, you will be tempted to doubt yourself or your faith—to feel as though you might not be able to make that leap. In those moments, I plead with you to look “unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.”²³

As the Savior of the world struggled and suffered incomprehensibly in the Garden of Gethsemane—prostrated with pain, body bleeding—He didn’t doubt Himself or His Father. No, instead we read that Christ “prayed more earnestly.”²⁴ Remember this: in the darkest nadir, when the Son of God asked that “the bitter cup”²⁵ might pass, Christ manifested more faith in His Father’s plan, not less. Christ pleads with us: “Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.”²⁶

There is another temptation that can sometimes dim or even extinguish brilliant fires of faith. It’s the temptation that comes when the going gets good—when we start to succeed or receive accolades for public accomplishments. The search for—or addiction to—external validation can sometimes incentivize us to drift from our spiritual mission.

Usually this temptation isn’t initially about doing something completely contrary to our moral compass—just modulating the needle ever so slightly to accommodate more money or more social standing. To be clear, self-reliance and accolades can all be very positive, as long as our spiritual integrity remains intact and our motivations remain pure.

Institutionally, BYU has, as of late, been receiving some impressive academic accolades. Rankings have come from places such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Financial Times, and U.S. News and World Report.²⁷ BYU didn’t seek it out, but this year the university received an elevated Carnegie Classification as a Research 1 institution—the highest such designation.²⁸ There’s palpable excitement and progress around BYU’s future school of medicine, and as we commence our sesquicentennial celebrations in the fall, BYU will enroll one of the largest classes in the university’s history.

Meanwhile, the BYU Wheatley Institute has increasingly become a national force for mission-inspired scholarship on its three initiatives: (1) the family, (2) religion and human flourishing, and (3) the inspired Constitution.²⁹ BYU is also in the process of exploring a fourth initiative on poverty alleviation.

In athletics, we are one of only two universities in the entire country to have both football and men’s basketball finish this season ranked among the top fifteen teams. BYU won NCAA national championships this year in both women’s and men’s cross-country. And in performance across all men’s and women’s Division 1 competition, BYU currently ranks tenth in the nation, according to the Learfield Directors’ Cup 2024–2025 winter standings released in April.³⁰

It’s impressive, and yet this litany of accomplishments doesn’t even begin to capture all the incredible progress and excellence across this campus academically, in performing arts, or otherwise. But it’s worth stating that no win on the field, no musical performance, no top-tier, peer-reviewed publication is worth even the slightest drift away from Christ or His kingdom.

Again, Jesus is our example in this regard. He resisted Satan’s temptations in the wilderness—which included the praise, power, and possessions of the world—by expressing loyalty to His Father and to His Father’s commandments. Jesus said, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”³¹

It’s heartening, then, to learn that our campus is experiencing year-over-year increases in recent graduates who report not only that they have grown academically but that they’ve grown in their testimonies of Jesus Christ and His living prophets and apostles. I don’t expect those kinds of data points to show up in national rankings, but they are the trends that truly transform the soul.

The Joys of Daily Repentance

I feel impressed to warn about one other thing that can dampen the fires of faith: sin. Sin sows sorrow and tumult. But Jesus Christ’s infinite and eternal Atonement provides a path to hope, forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace. To increase the fire of faith in your life and on this campus, I encourage you to repent early and often. This is a joyful process.

President Dallin H. Oaks once recounted hosting visiting journalists on BYU’s campus. They were favorably impressed with what they saw here. But after one of them used a public restroom at the Wilkinson Center, he came back to President Oaks with an impish smile. The journalist said:

“Well, I found out that you . . . are just like everyone else.” . . .

. . . “When I went to the rest room here in the Wilkinson Center, I found . . . there was something written on the wall.”

. . . [President Oaks began to respond, but the man quickly explained that he was just joking.] “It’s true there was something written in there, but I’ve never seen anything like that. . . . It was just one word: repent.”³²

The natural man is inclined to cover sin, but I plead with you, for the sake of your soul, commit now to repent early and often—counsel with your bishop as necessary. It will be an enormous blessing in your life.

Let me elaborate. Before the company Toyota was in the car business, it was in textiles. The founders noticed that when strings broke on the looms, they would go undetected until the end of the process, resulting in large runs that ruined the fabric and caused wasted time and resources. Eventually the company invented automatic looms that stopped immediately when a string broke so the problem could be addressed and fixed as early as possible. This reduced waste and increased productivity. When Toyota transitioned from textiles to cars, it implemented similar manufacturing practices, helping the company succeed against well-established competition.³³

To paraphrase the apostle Paul, we all sin; we all fall “short of the glory of God.”³⁴ The key, then, is to repent early and often—to experience what President Nelson has called “the joy of daily repentance.”³⁵ After all, repentance isn’t just reserved for our most grievous sins. President Nelson has taught:

When Jesus asks you and me to “repent,” He is inviting us to change our mind, our knowledge, our spirit—even the way we breathe.³⁶

I’ll share two stories about following this invitation to change.

My friend Sheri L. Dew is now the executive vice president of Deseret Management Corporation. As a young woman, she was invited to give a presentation about the Church to an all-girls club at her school. She was so nervous about it that when the day of the presentation arrived, she called and said she was sick. She felt enormous guilt for having done so. But, she said, this experience “flipped a switch.”³⁷ She vowed to never let something like that happen again. So while she was out working on the family farm, she began to ask herself questions about her faith as if she were being interviewed. Over time, this and many other habits helped her overcome any shyness, and the experiences led her to becoming one of the most effective communicators in the Church.

The second story is about my friend Logan Betts, who is currently a sophomore here at BYU. He entered high school knowing almost no one. Down and out, he simply decided one day that he was going to listen to one person’s story during lunch—he’d just sit down and hear their story. Then he did it another day, and then day after day, and then every day. He met all kinds of kids and heard all kinds of stories. Soon he started to make connections with those who had similar interests and backgrounds. By the end of that year, he had made so many friends and connections by just sitting and listening to his peers that they elected him as a student body officer.

Let us joyfully change, grow, learn, and repent. You will feel Christ’s love and become better. This is important for your mortal progress, but it’s also vital for your eternal salvation and exaltation. So next time, heed the writing on the bathroom wall when it says “repent.”

Light and Truth Are Still Breaking Forth

Let me end where we began: Harvard. Sixteen years before its founding, the scrappy band of English separatists alluded to by Noah Feldman and known to us today as the Pilgrims were forced to part ways with their longtime pastor, John Robinson.

Robinson gave the Pilgrims one final sermon before they sailed across the Atlantic.

[Robinson] was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word. He took [the] occasion . . . to bewail the state and condition of the Reformed churches. . . . [Though reformers John Calvin and Martin Luther] were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them: And were they now living . . . , they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light [and truth], as that they had received.³⁸

On this campus, we quote Doctrine and Covenants 93:36, which reads: “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth.”

In Latin, the word for “truth” is veritas. And “Veritas” just so happens to be the motto of Harvard. And “Lux et Veritas” (light and truth) just so happens to be the motto of Yale. In Hebrew, “light and truth” (lux et veritas) translates to “Urim and Thummim”—a familiar phrase, hopefully, on this campus.

Elder Clark G. Gilbert, a General Authority Seventy and the commissioner of the Church Educational System, recalled being a young faculty member at Harvard and noticing the campus chapel stood opposite one of Harvard’s imposing libraries. He said, “It was as if I was staring from the temple of faith to the hall of reason. These two ideals seemed to be facing off in a conflict.”³⁹

No such conflict ought to exist here. At BYU we synthesize illumination from both temples. One of the many theological breakthroughs of the Restoration is the revelation that the glory of God is indeed intelligence. We have the privilege and responsibility to gain light and truth—lux et veritas—so one day we may, in the words of our prophet, “render service of worth to somebody else.”⁴⁰

That Our Children May Have Books

The Lord has admonished, “Teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books.”⁴¹ In the same revelation, the Lord instructed Joseph Smith to start the School of the Prophets.⁴² Our BYU academic vice president Justin Collings recently pointed me to a letter Joseph Smith wrote in Nauvoo to the Saints abroad, stating, “The Temple must be raised, the University be built.”⁴³ But by the time Nauvoo had been abandoned and the Saints had once again been forced to flee, it wasn’t clear whether these early educational embers would smolder or simply be extinguished altogether.

Thousands of Saints were soon huddled by the banks of the Missouri River at Winter Quarters. Even before winter had fully set in, fourteen in the camp died in a single week.⁴⁴ “There were no vegetables,” Latter-day Saint convert Louisa Barnes Pratt wrote, explaining why so many were afflicted with scurvy, herself included. “I pined for vegetables till I could feel my flesh waste away from off my bones!”⁴⁵ When an elder from the Church visited Louisa, the man saw her state and sat down and wept.⁴⁶

Given these circumstances, and with Church leadership operating out of a crude hut called the Octagon, President Brigham Young might have been forgiven for tabling education. No one would have blamed him for focusing exclusively on the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And yet, only four days before setting off for the Rocky Mountains, President Young composed a letter aimed to assist William W. Phelps in acquiring a printing press:

This people cannot live without intelligence, for it is through obedience to that principle they are to receive their exaltation. . . . This principle is sufficient to show you the importance of using all diligence . . . to bring us the materials, whereby we can furnish our children with books, and the Saints with new things to feast the soul.⁴⁷

Now here you are, backpacks brimming with a superabundance of books, attending a university bearing the very name of the prophet of God who willed it.

For 150 years, Brigham Young University has been the bearer of a peculiar mandate, the keeper of a flame. Don’t let it dim. Don’t let it diminish.

In the days ahead, that flame must become a spiritual conflagration for Christ. Growing the flame will require more than resisting the temptations I’ve mentioned. It will require great leaps of faith; it will require living true to your primary identities as children of God, children of the covenant, and disciples of Christ.⁴⁸ It will require more charity, more service, more goodness, more light, and more truth. For, as the scripture states:

He that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day.⁴⁹

So let us prepare now for when the Light and the Truth of the World returns.

There will be no more tears and no more sorrows.⁵⁰ All who are lost will be found. All who are sick will be healed. All who are abandoned will be reclaimed. “The last shall be first,”⁵¹ and the least shall be most⁵²—every knee bowing and every tongue confessing.⁵³ The glorious eternal fire of faith you’ve kept strong on this campus will spread light and truth throughout the whole earth, ushering in never-ending peace and progress.

May we be a university ready—a people prepared. And may our feet be nerved for that final joyous leap to embrace our Savior, I pray, in the sacred name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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