Daniel C. Peterson | |
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| Born | Daniel Carl Peterson January 15, 1953 California, United States |
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| Employer | Brigham Young University |
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| Spouse | Deborah Stephens Peterson |
| Children | 3 |
Daniel Carl Peterson (born January 15, 1953) [1] is a retired professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University (BYU).
A native of southern California, Peterson received a bachelor's degree in Greek and philosophy from BYU and, after several years of study in Jerusalem and Cairo, earned a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Peterson was a professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic at BYU, where he taught courses in Arabic language and Islamic religion, history and culture. He has authored several books and numerous articles on Islamic and Latter-day Saint topics. [2] [3]
He also founded and served as director of BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative from 1992–2010. [4] [5]
Peterson has served in various capacities including chairman of the board for what is now known as BYU's Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. In 2007, in recognition of his establishment of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, Peterson was named a Utah Academy Fellow and declared a lifetime member of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. [6]
Peterson retired from BYU on July 1, 2021, but is still active in several public non-scholarly projects, including the production of a feature film that tells the story of the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon. [7]
Peterson is known for his work as an apologist and scholar on subjects dealing with claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), of which he is a member. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the FARMS Review (now the Mormon Studies Review ), a periodical produced by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, serving since 1989. The institute replaced Peterson as editor in June 2012. [8] [9]
Peterson is also a regular participant in online fora about Mormonism where he discusses the Latter-day Saint faith and its apologetics. [10] One of his projects has been the development of a website featuring the testimonies of Latter-day Saint scholars. [11] The site is currently entitled Latter-day Saint Scholars Testify [12] and is part of FAIR. As of 2025 it hosts 357 testimonies.
Peterson is the first and current editor-in-chief of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. [9]
Peterson served as a missionary in the Switzerland Zurich Mission, with Edwin Q. Cannon serving as his mission president. Peterson later served on the Church's Gospel Doctrine Committee and as a bishop. [13] [ better source needed ]
Peterson and his wife, the former Deborah Stephens, have three sons.
Stephen Edward Robinson was a religious scholar and apologist, who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) was an informal collaboration of academics devoted to Latter-day Saint historical scholarship. The organization was established in 1979 as a non-profit organization by John. W. Welch. In 1997, the group became a formal part of Brigham Young University (BYU), which is owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 2006, the group became a formal part of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, formerly known as the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts, BYU. FARMS has since been absorbed into the Maxwell Institute's Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies.
Signature Books is an American press specializing in subjects related to Utah, Mormonism, and Western Americana. The company was founded in 1980 by George D. Smith and Scott Kenney and is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is majority owned by the Smith-Pettit Foundation.
The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, or Maxwell Institute, is a research institute at Brigham Young University (BYU). The institute consists of faculty and visiting scholars who study religion, primarily the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The institute is named after a former LDS Church apostle, known for his writings and sermons.
Terryl Lynn Givens is a senior research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University (BYU). Until 2019, he was a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond, where he held the James A. Bostwick Chair in English.
Royal Jon Skousen is an American linguist and retired professor of linguistics and English at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. He is "the leading expert on the textual history of the Book of Mormon" and the founder of the analogical modeling approach to language modeling.
John Woodland "Jack" Welch is a scholar of law and religion. Welch is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and currently teaches at the J. Reuben Clark Law School (JRCLS) at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, where he is the Robert K. Thomas University Professor of Law. He is notable for his contributions to LDS (Mormon) scholarship, including his discovery of the ancient literary form chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.
Sidney Branton Sperry was one of three scholars who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who began the scholarly and systematic study of the Book of Mormon in the mid-20th century — the other two being John L. Sorenson and Hugh W. Nibley. Sperry was also a leading Latter-day Saint scholar of the Bible.
Ronald Kent Esplin is the managing editor of The Joseph Smith Papers project and the former director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at Brigham Young University (BYU).
William James Hamblin was a professor of history at Brigham Young University (BYU), and a former board member of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) at BYU.
Boyd Jay Petersen is program coordinator for Mormon Studies at Utah Valley University (UVU) and teaches English and literature at UVU and Brigham Young University (BYU). He has also been a biographer of Hugh Nibley, a candidate for the Utah House of Representatives, and president of the Association for Mormon Letters. He was named editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought for the term 2016-2020.
Grant Revon Underwood is a historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU). He is also the author of The Millennial World of Early Mormonism and the editor of Voyages of Faith: Explorations in Mormon Pacific History.
Harry Donl Peterson was a religion professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) who primarily studied topics related to the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price.
Gilbert Woodrow Scharffs was a Latter-day Saint religious educator and author.
Mormon studies is the interdisciplinary academic study of the beliefs, practices, history and culture of individuals and denominations belonging to the Latter Day Saint movement, a religious movement associated with the Book of Mormon, though not all churches and members of the Latter Day Saint movement identify with the terms Mormon or Mormonism. Denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by far the largest, as well as the Community of Christ (CoC) and other smaller groups, include some categorized under the umbrella term Mormon fundamentalism.
Mormon Studies Review is an annual academic journal covering Mormon studies published by the University of Illinois Press. Previously, until and including its 2018 issue, the journal was published by Brigham Young University's Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. In November 2018, ownership transferred to the University of Illinois Press, which continues to publish the journal.
Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship is a nonprofit, peer-reviewed, and educational academic journal published by the Interpreter Foundation primarily covering topics related to the canon of scriptures of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormon studies, and Latter-day Saint apologetics. It was established in July 2012 by the Interpreter Foundation with Daniel C. Peterson as founding editor-in-chief. Peterson had previously been the founding editor of the FARMS Review, which in 2011 had been renamed the Mormon Studies Review (MSR) by the heads of the Maxwell Institute (MI). The MSR launched soon after Peterson's release from MI without direct apologetics as one of their goals. Peterson believed that direct apologetics was a necessary feature of a publication like the MSR while others did not. This philosophical difference between Peterson and the editors of the MSR led to the creation of the Interpreter Foundation, which retained apologetic content.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Benjamin E. Park is an American historian concentrating on early American political, religious, and intellectual history, history of gender, religious studies, slavery, anti-slavery, and Atlantic history. Park is an assistant professor at Sam Houston State University.
Brian M. Hauglid is an emeritus professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University (BYU). From 2014 to 2017, he was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, and he was the director of the Laura F. Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, a part of BYU's Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
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