How I Became a Seeker

Author: Steven Harper

I’m an introvert with an advocate personality. So I was pretty reserved in grad school seminars until a fellow student went off about how people shouldn’t have kids, and I launched into a lecture about how I’m the seventh of ten children of really great parents. My parents made sure the scriptures were read early and often in their home, but it was up to me to decide whether I would love the scriptures. I learned that the Book of Mormon is true shortly before I served in the Canada Winnipeg Mission. But It took me awhile to learn to love the scriptures. Not until I was teaching Dora, a Lutheran woman in her sixties, did I really want to know what they said and meant. That desire didn’t leave when I returned to BYU, so I changed my major from engineering to ancient near eastern studies and started a series of courses in Biblical Hebrew. I learned that the Bible was way more complicated than I had thought, and I doubted I could master the complexity. When I took a course on early Church history I decided I had to master that, so I switched my major and set my sights on a PhD in early American history. Along the way I wrote an MA thesis about who joined the Church in the 1830s and why. I wrote my dissertation on a little-known 1737 fraud by which the sons of William Penn evicted the Lenape Indians from their homeland. I started teaching in the history and religion departments at BYU-Hawaii, then in 2002 got the chance to join the Religious Education faculty at BYU in Provo and become an editor of The Joseph Smith Papers. That combo was enticement enough to leave Hawaii, where I thought I would miss the land but ended up missing the people. A decade later I taught the Bible (go figure) to great students at the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. Before that I had been serving on committees tasked by the Church Historian and Recorder with planning a new history of the Church. When I got home from Jerusalem I was invited to join the Church History Department in Salt Lake City to be the managing historian of that project. For the next six years it was my humbling privilege to work with devoted and talented people to produce Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days. More than one million people are reading it online and more than 400,000 print copies have been sold. In 2018 I got my other dream job back: professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU. I was also named the editor of BYU Studies, where I had formative experience as a student intern a long time ago. The best thing about me is my wife and children, but they forbade me to say much about them here. Hannah Salvesen is my daughter, and I’ll share lots of links to the great stuff she produces. Thanks to Hannah and Scott Salvesen for building this site and advising me patiently about all things related to the world wide web. View all posts by Steven Harper