“BYU to Publish Scholarly Religious Works,” Ensign, Oct. 1999, 80
BYU to Publish Scholarly Religious Works
New plans for scholarly publishing at Brigham Young University will bring selected Latter-day Saint historical documents to print in books and journal articles. To publish books and scholarly religious studies on LDS subject matter, the university has revived its BYU Press, discontinued in the 1980s. Journal articles will be published in BYU Studies, the university’s scholarly journal which is celebrating 40 years in print this year.
The overriding objective of the BYU Press will be “to reach the scholarly market and to place high quality Latter-day Saint studies in the best libraries in the world,” said Elder Merrill J. Bateman of the Seventy, president of BYU.
Noel Reynolds, associate academic vice president at BYU and chairman of the university’s Council on Religious Education, commented, “Discerning readers and serious libraries look to university presses to publish top quality, specialized materials of scholarly quality rather than catering to commercial pressures.”
Works published by the BYU Press will come through several religious research entities on the university campus, including the Religious Studies Center, an arm of the Religious Education Department; the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History; and the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS).
The first in a series of Islamic texts and translations produced by the Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (CPART), a division of FARMS, will also be one of the works to appear under the BYU Press imprint. In this series of books, important Islamic texts will appear in Arabic on one page with the English translation on the facing page. “These texts are being translated for the first time into English,” reported Daniel C. Peterson, director of CPART. “This series will make a real contribution to Western understanding of large Islamic populations around the world.”
Books published by the BYU Press will be available for purchase by the general public. Subscriptions to BYU Studies may be obtained by contacting BYU.