The Glory of God is Intelligence

Upon checking my email this afternoon, I discovered that my mother had sent me a news article about the newly forming Nauvoo University. Although I really should be finishing up last-minute preparations, I couldn't help stopping and reading it, since I have a soft spot in my heart for Nauvoo.

BYU used to have a semester program operating in Nauvoo, in a building right across the street from the temple. The building used to be a Catholic girls' school, and it was dripping with character. When the LDS church first purchased the building, there was a wing with nuns still living in it, and the nuns would take their meals with the students.

By the time I got there, in Winter of 2003, the nuns had moved and the wing where they lived had been torn down. But that funny building, which looked like the 1970s collided with a medieval convent, was still there, and it was my home for four months. I loved to go across the hall from my bedroom to the project room and curl up in a couch where I could see the temple out the windows. The view from my own window was pretty good, too, I could see a big swath of the Mississippi river and it was especially pretty at sunset.

I could go on ad nauseum, but the point is that BYU closed their Nauvoo program in 2006 because the medieval convent was an ancient building that cost way too much to maintain. This news was very sad for me to hear, although, having lived there, I understood completely how it cost more to keep it up than it was worth. In any case, I wasn't the only one who was saddened by this news, and one person, my computer science professor in Nauvoo, Evan Ivie, decided to do something about it. So, what did he choose to do? Take the idea and run with it, and now he has plans to turn the Semester at Nauvoo into a full-fledged Nauvoo University. If anyone can do it, Brother Ivie is the person for the job.

I'd really like to write more about this, but I'll have to do it sometime when I'm not running out the door to the airport. If you're as curious as I was, though, you can always check out the Nauvoo University website: nauvoouniversity.com