It’s Been a Whole Year!

I am pleased and quite amazed to announce that Heavenly Ascents has been going for just over a year now! It really doesn’t seem that long.  Although I would consider my posting frequency to be rather erratic at times, this post is the 102nd posted so far. Now if I could just find a way to turn those into pages of my dissertation, I’d be doing pretty well!  

I would like to thank all of you who read and support this blog.  This site has had almost 40,000 views since it was started. I have gained many new friends through it and I am so glad that I decided to do this.  If I hadn’t, I would never had made contact with you. Thank you for all your help and for enriching my life so much! Thank you to all of you who love God and the Scriptures and who have the desire to search for Truth wherever it can be found. 

Some the top posts (most visited) have been:

PhD Studies

I have decided to pursue my PhD studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.  I won’t go into all the reasons why I chose St Andrews over Durham University, as I was very impressed by and sincerely respect Durham and its faculty also.  At St Andrews, I was able to speak with Profs Jim Davila, Kristin de Troyer, and also Grant Macaskill, and was obviously very impressed with them and with the facilities that St Andrews and the School of Divinity offers its postgraduate students. I felt very at-home there and felt that the faculty I spoke with shared many of the same interests as I.  I am excited to be heading to Scotland in the Fall.

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Old Cathedral, St Andrews, Scotland

New Blog

For anyone interested, in light of my family’s upcoming move overseas, I have set up a new blog for us to record our experiences, both for the benefit of our family and friends, as well as to those who may be contemplating a move to the UK (especially for academic purposes).  I hope to record info regarding our preparations, moving experience, settling into a new environment, life in Scotland, our travels, and info regarding the University of St Andrews and my experiences studying there.

The site is entitled The Larsen Family Adventures and can be accessed at www.larsenquest.wordpress.com.  The title is not too creative, I know — I had originally wanted to call it Maqom (Hebrew for “the place”), but in the end decided against it as this is not a very easy title for everyone to remember. :)

If anyone is wondering, I do plan to continue posting here on Heavenly Ascents throughout my PhD program, and will continue with similar themes of temple, apocalyptic, ascent to heaven, Enochic and other intertestamental literature, and other topics of interest in religious studies.  I plan to, as I have promised in the past, very soon start looking at a book that analyzes some Greek/Orphic gold tablets that are buried with the dead and that provide them with instructions on what they are to do and where they are to go in the Afterlife. Although this material is somewhat outside my area of “expertise” (if you can call it that), I am very excited to share it with you! Look for a series of posts on this material very soon!

 

Correction: For those of you who have seen my notes from the UK Temple Studies Group Symposium posted recently, I have a couple of corrections that I have made to my notes from Rick Huchel’s presentation. 

First, I was unsure of a Greek word that he used — it should be choros instead of what I had as either “chorus” or “coronas.” I apologize for the mistake there.

Also, I have included a note which makes clear that while discussing the nature of the LDS Temple rituals, Huchel was citing published LDS sources and did not include specific details of ceremonies considered sacred by the LDS Church.  I think it important to make this clear due to Huchel’s obvious reverence and respect for the Temple and its sanctity.



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