Voices in the Human Conversation

Video broadcasts with BYU Humanities Faculty, originally broadcast on the KBYU 'Voices in the Human Conversation' Program.

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• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: From Sonnet to Song, Russell Cluff

  It is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's importance—and the musicality of her verse—that inspired Dr. Russell Cluff to create a musical album, based on her poetry, that he calls the "Return of the Tenth Muse." The project might rightly be considered Quixotic, since we currently live in a world vastly disparate in terms of time, distance, language, culture, and musical tastes from that which saw the development of one of the Hispanic world's greatest poets.

• Loving Kindness and Compassion in Dostoyevsky, Michael Kelly

  Dr. Kelly discusses themes of kindness and charity in the works of Fyodr Dostoyevsky

• The Fruits are Exquisite: G.E. Lessing Zion and the Search for Truth, Michelle James

  Dr. Michelle James discusses the enlightenment writing of author G.E. Lessing

• Illuminating the Papyri from Herculaneum, Oxyrhymchus, and Beyond, Roger Macfarlane

  Professor Macfarlane discusses multispectral imaging and ancient texts.

• Wheels, Windmills, and Webs: Don Quixote's Library and the History of Reading, Dale Pratt

  One way to enter the book and Don Quixote's world is through his library. Don Quixote's library in the Renaissance Scholar's Reading Wheel, or book wheel, have become key metaphors for understanding the history of reading.

• The Critical Text Project of the Book of Mormon, Royal Skousen

  Professor Royal Skousen has been the editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project at BYU since 1988. This monumental study of the Book of Mormon text has produced several exciting and meticulously researched volumes detailing the translation and transcription processes involved in the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.

• Seven Striking Features of the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, Donald W. Parry

  Professor Parry has served on the international team of translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls since January of 1994. As a member of this team, he makes regular trips to study the original scrolls in Jerusalem. He has authored a number of books on the scrolls, the Hebrew Bible, and the Book of Isaiah.

• Popol Vuh: The Creation, Allen J. Christenson

  Dr. Christenson has studied Maya culture, literature, and art for many decades. He has published an English translation of the Popul Vuh, the single most important ancient Maya book to have survived the impact of the arrival of Europeans in the new world in the 15th and 16th centuries.

• The Great World of the Spirits of the Dead: Some Contexts for D&C 138, George S. Tate

  World War I forms a backdrop for Professor Tate's lecture on this section of the Doctrine and Covenants, received by President Joseph F. Smith shortly before his death in 1918 (and the only canonized section of scripture from the 20th century).

• Civic Lessons from Jazz, Gregory Clark

  Jazz is not democracy, and democracy, as Tocqueville suggested, may be inherently a lonely way to live. We probably can't engage in civic life with the expectations for success that good musicians bring to their opportunities to perform. But as a necessarily democratic art, jazz has things to teach us about the rhetorical practices of citizenship, lessons that might enable us to create a more satisfying life together than we now have.