I am Tyler Griffin
I've been teaching in the department of ancient Scripture here BYU for the last six years.
Previous to that, I spent seven years in seminaries and Institute's at the Institute in Logan, next to Utah State.
Previous to that I was six years in the seminary at Boxelder High School in Brigham City.
And so my whole career has been based in religious education.
But my Bachelor's degree was in electrical and computer engineering
So here I was as a geek in a religious education setting
and I was having a hard time combining those two worlds until I found, Instructional technology.
Which was this nice go-between where I could use some of that technical background
but use it to enhance learning.
So from a very early, early day in my career, I've been focused on,
how do we make these scriptures come to life,
in a way that it resonates and that it communicates easily with these youth, who are digital natives.
Some of them grow up with electronic devices in their hands,
and they don't respond the same way as my generation
and older generations have responded to say just the black words on a white page of Scripture.
And so there's been a lot of thought, and products, and activity trying to shore up
meaningful, and purposeful, and authentic and relevant, and urgent materials
that would help these students in the rising generations
come to love these scriptures as much as we love them.
and so coming to BYU, it was interesting to see that accelerated with more opportunities around us,
to produce those materials.
But there was always something missing,
I was always watching this landscape of incredible scholarship, incredible research, incredible writing
on various aspects of the Book of Mormon.
But it wasn't very accessible to the main target audience that I face every day
and being in the teaching track here at BYU,
I'm not required to publish,
but I am required to teach a lot of students in a lot of classes
and so I have more than a thousand students every semester,
and I hear their concerns, I see their struggles
And often there would be many answers to their questions, but they just they had no way to find them,
and they found it very difficult to try to search those things out on the internet
because of how much Anti-material is out there.
So when I first heard, that there was such an organization as Book of Mormon Central.
And when my my good friend Taylor Halverson explained to me what it was that they were going to do
and then I heard Jack Welch talk about it being a repository of all
research that has been done on the Book of Mormon, kind of a Book of Mormon Central.
That exactly like the name say, this one stop shop to find materials
that have been vetted, they're good solid research, they've been peer-reviewed
it's good stuff, it won't be an embarrassment to the church.
And it doesn't put us out in a realm of of weirdness.
I thought this is wonderful,
this is exactly what we've needed for a long time, is a repository or a central location where we can go
to then branch us out and point us in the right directions.
And the amazing thing is that Book of Mormon Central took it one step further
and instead of just being that repository with the Knowhy's that they're putting out every week,
they're able to take a lot of the more scholastic and deeper academic research.
And they're able to package it in such a way that it becomes far more accessible,
for the youth and young adults, and I might add for anyone,
who, regardless of where they are in their demographic or their age category.
They've been able to capture the essence of some of the best research out there, package it in a beautiful way
and deliver it in a few minutes
that can open up your mind and make you think about the text differently.
That's always the number one indicator for me of the success of a group or an organization or a program is,
what is the degree to which that organization, or that app, or that idea,
what is the degree to which it gets people to go back into the scriptures and study them at a deeper level.
And that's my favorite thing about Book of Mormon Central, is when people will watch the Knowhys,
it won't make them feel like they've studied their scriptures,
and so they don't need to open the Book of Mormon that day,
it'll actually cause them to want
to open the scriptures and read additional scriptures that might be related to what they just saw.
So I am a big fan, and I finally have a place now where I can start sending my students,
when they have questions about certain things that come up with reference to the Book of Mormon.
I can say, check out Book of Mormon Central, if you can't find anything there then let's talk.