The Sharon Institute is dedicated to supporting, producing, and disseminating scholarship and creative work at the interface of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ and the intellectual and academic disciplines. Our mission is to promote and facilitate the work that illuminates the positive contribution that the knowledge and truth resident in the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ can bring to a very broad range of academic disciplines and to the “arts and letters” broadly conceived.
It is given to many to know the mysteries of God… according to the heed and diligence which they give unto him And therefore, he that will harden his heart, the same receive the lesser portion of the word; and he that will not harden his heart, to him is given the greater portion of the word, until it is given unto him to know the mysteries of God until he know them in full. ~Alma the Younger
We seek to fulfill this mission by various means, including sponsoring and hosting annual conferences, publishing a scholarly journal as a quality outlet for relevant scholarly and creative work, and in other ways fostering academic work grounded in and reflecting the moral and intellectual power of gospel principles.
“When in the course of Divine Providence, it becomes our duty to record one of those remarkable events which gives birth to a new era and lays the foundation for the renovation of the moral world; it fills the mind with wonder, astonishment, and admiration: How welcome are the rays of the morning light, after the shades of darkness have clothed the earth in gloom! So after a long and tedious night of moral darkness under which the earth has rolled, and her inhabitants groaned for the last fourteen hundred years; an angel! an angel!! commissioned from the Almighty, descended, and rolled back the curtains of night from the minds of some, and caused the sun-beams of truth to enlighten, cheer, and warm the hearts of many. Welcome! welcome to our earth, thou messenger of the Most High! and thrice welcome, the tidings which thou hast borne!!”
— Elder Orson Hyde, Times And Seasons, Vol 2, No. 23, p. 551″
“Many insights have been ‘freely given to us of God’ that remain to be spoken of articulately, humbly, and scholastically—in classrooms and from the rooftops of our academic enclaves for, as said: ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid’ (Matt. 5:14). Let us not keep that light hidden under a bushel, especially others need the truths which we have—for their happiness here, for their salvation in the world to come! We will need to be at least as diligent as the children of this world are in pursuing their research and in advancing their values, for the children of light often are lax and slack. It was Jesus himself who, at the end of the parable, observed: ‘And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light’ (Luke 16:8; italics added). LDS behavioral scientists must extract both the obvious and hidden wisdom embedded in the value system of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
–Neal A. Maxwell, “Some Thoughts on the Gospel and the Behavioral Sciences,” BYU Studies, 1974, 16(4), p. 7.