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The year 2025 is an exciting time for Brigham Young University. Starting in the fall semester, we will be celebrating BYU’s sesquicentennial, marking150 years since the university was established in 1875. The university is busy making final preparations for the big celebration, which will center on the gifts of light we each have and share with each other. The theme is “That light groweth brighter and brighter”—“that all may be edified of all” (Doctrine and Covenants 50:24; 88:122).

Since BYU’s beginnings in 1875, religion classes have always been central to the BYU mission. The deed of trust for Brigham Young Academy stated that “the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon and the Book of Doctrine and Covenants shall be read and their doctrines inculcated in the Academy.”[1] The early religion classes were taught by faculty from across campus, and it wasn’t until 1930 that the first full-time religion teacher at BYU was hired, Guy C. Wilson.

In Religious Education we are also preparing for our part in the university sesquicentennial celebration. We are calling it “Religious Education by the Numbers.” Since we have responsibility for all BYU students, we’re researching questions such as: How many students have participated in our classes? How many journal articles, books, and book chapters have our faculty published? How many viewers have watched our scripture roundtable discussions or listened to our Y Religion podcast episodes? How many students have we taken on travel study programs to Nauvoo, Jerusalem, or other destinations?

We’d love to hear from you about how have you been blessed by the work of Religious Education. Did you take a class from one of the first full-time religion faculty: Guy C. Wilson, Sidney B. Sperry, Russell R. Swensen, Wesley P. Lloyd, or J. Wyley Sessions? Or take a class from Dean Jeffrey R. Holland? Did you go on the first study abroad to Jerusalem in 1968, or were you in the first group at the Joseph Smith Academy in Nauvoo in 2000? Did you participate in our first Student Symposium in 1999? Were you part of the first master’s degree cohort in chaplaincy in 2008?

If you would like to contribute to our celebration by sharing any of these experiences or an uplifting story about how Religious Education has blessed your life, please let us know by sending an email to religion150@byu.edu.

We look forward to celebrating all that has occurred in Religious Education in its first 150 years and embracing our bright future ahead.

Gaye Strathearn
Associate Dean, BYU Religious Education

Notes

[1] Quoted by Richard O. Cowan, Teaching the Word: Religious Education at Brigham Young University (Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2008), 2.