What’s Good at BYU

BYU President Reece has written and had published a call for BYU to be more BYU.   It is inspiring.  He identifies and rejects five secular false dichotomies

https://www.deseret.com/education/2024/03/25/religious-education-at-byu-school-mission/

He is also aware of what time it is:

1.  He correctly identifies the inevitable trend when religious institutions to date have tried to become more intellectually respectable and have completely lost their religious character and been subsumed into the academic mass as a result.

2. “it is worth noting that secular academics have not, by and large, escaped or abandoned orthodoxy. They have merely embraced secular orthodoxies in the place of religious ones.”

3. “the modern exaltation of authenticity often privileges untrammeled subjective experience above all else. ”

4. “To challenge the secular assumptions and ideological priors of the broader academy is not to flee from hard questions; it is rather to resist spiritual colonization at the hands of a dominant dogma. ”

You should read the whole thing, especially for the paean at the close. My hair literally stood on end.

https://www.deseret.com/education/2024/03/25/religious-education-at-byu-school-mission/

PS–there are probably various ways one could take the title of this post.  We mean it as an antonym to our series on what’s the matter at BYU?  That series showcases alarming indications and this showcases inspiring ones.