The 2025–26 academic year at Brigham Young University promises to be historic. The campus community will celebrate its sesquicentennial, appropriately pausing to reflect on our past, evaluate our present, and chart a course for our future. To guide these activities, the campus has repeatedly returned to President Spencer W. Kimball’s prophetic address “The Second Century of Brigham Young University,” delivered at BYU’s centennial celebration in 1975. We have scoured its language describing the gifts and needs of students in BYU’s second century, as well as the charges delivered to the faculty to “become a unique university in all of the world.”[1]

Recently, because of a host of administrative changes in Religious Education, I found myself returning to President Kimball’s talk, wondering what he said about leadership. His message included this observation: “You are headed in the right direction! Such academic adjustments as need to be made will be made out of the individual and collective wisdom we find when a dedicated faculty interacts with a wise administration, an inspired governing board, and an appreciative body of students.”[2]

In my four years as dean, my love for that appreciative study body has deepened, as has my gratitude for a dedicated faculty and an inspired governing board. This year, however, I have also come to value the “wise administration” about which President Kimball also spoke. Our administration in Religious Education is changing significantly. Associate dean Gaye Strathearn, department chair Shon Hopkin, and associate department chair Frank Judd are all stepping down to assume leadership and teaching roles at the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies. In their places, new leadership has been appointed: Lincoln Blumell as associate dean, Kerry Hull as department chair, and Ryan Sharp as associate department chair. While I look forward to counseling with and learning from our new administrators, I will miss my daily interactions with Gaye, Shon, and Frank in the leadership of Religious Education. Their “individual and collective wisdom,” as described by President Kimball, has moved Religious Education toward “Becoming BYU”—that is, the “Christ-centered, prophetically directed university” about which President C. Shane Reese has repeatedly spoken.[3] I know I am more Christ-centered and better prophetically directed from having served with them, and I believe our students, faculty, and campus community are as well. Thank you for your wise administration of BYU Religious Education.

Scott C. Esplin
Dean, BYU Religious Education

Notes

[1] Spencer W. Kimball, “The Second Century of Brigham Young University,” BYU Founders Day address, October 10, 1975, https://speeches.byu.edu.

[2] Kimball, “Second Century of Brigham Young University.”

[3] C. Shane Reese, “Becoming BYU: An Inaugural Response,” BYU inauguration devotional address, September 19, 2023, https://speeches.byu.edu.