Rev. Dr. Andrew Teal speaks at BYU on Tuesday as part of his Latter-day Saint tour

Third-degree burns threaten to prematurely end a semester as a visiting scholar at BYU for an Oxford theologian and Anglican priest, but not before he delivers the campus forum address at the school in Provo, Utah, on Tuesday.

Rev. Dr. Andrew Teal suffered the burns walking barefoot on an Orem patio with heat reflective clapboards. He was hospitalized for almost a month while doctors performed multiple skin grafts, first taking skin from a corpse.

“I ran around in someone else’s soles for a while,” Rev. Teal said with a smile and a good-natured laugh during an interview on Monday.

At the invitation of his friend Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the BYU supporting institution, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he is spending the autumn at BYU.

Rev. Dr. Teal will speak at the Marriott Center at 11:05 am. He said he would share how the Church of Jesus Christ and its scriptures have blessed his life and how he has made a commitment to stand up for the Church.

“I just want people to come along and be open-minded,” he said, “to listen to this heretic from England who offers and asks that we travel together with integrity and honesty, but above all with love.”

His burns ruined his plans as a visiting scholar at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. He was only a few times in the institute’s offices.

Doctors have now grafted skin from his own thigh onto his feet, but he said he still walked in pain, his feet wrapped in white bandages and tightly clad in medical Velcro sandals.

The injuries exceeded his expectation that he would write a few chapters for a book about the early Latter-day Saints. He said the work is to be an outside look at Joseph Smith as an outcast and then at the outcasts of the outcasts – “in other words,” he said, “the people he drew and what of them after his martyrdom happened. ”

He will come back to the book later, he said, but he has no sense of loss. Instead, Rev. Dr. Teal that his injuries and the time in bed and the grace of caring for others changed the process of his desire to travel with Latter-day Saints.

As a result, he has focused his time in Utah more on the idea of ​​a theology, religion and constitution center at Oxford University. He hoped such a center would strengthen the partnership between BYU and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he specializes in early Christian church history as a chaplain and theologian.

He said he hoped the center could be a way to address the persistent intolerance of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints among otherwise good people in academia and other churches.

“The Academy can be quite negative about the Latter-day Saint fellowship, and what I have an absolute obligation is to stand next to that fellowship and admit out loud that Elder Holland, the Oxford Ward, the London Mission, and When I came here too and connected to the university, my love and following for the Lord Jesus has skyrocketed.

“People who know me best know this is serious business. I’ve been a priest since I was 23; I am now 57; It has been a long time, but in the past five years this discipleship has taken on a fruitfulness brought about by being close to the Church without my ceasing to be an Anglican priest or chaplain or theologian, but an integral part of it. So I have to say that out loud, and I have to say: ‘That’s why I want to stand by this community’ and actually be a channel to bring other people from other religious currents, beautiful people from other traditions, together, so that they, including the power that Find vitality and kindness and the presence of God in this restored community. “

The forum will be broadcast live on BYUtv, BYUtv.org, KBYU-TV 11, Classical 89 FM, BYUradio 107.9 FM and SiriusXM 143.

After the forum, Rev. Dr. Teal are attempting to stay in the United States until at least November 11, when he and Elder Holland will speak provisionally for BYU’s International Center for Legal and Religious Studies before returning to England for additional care.

“You can make that headline,” he joked. “’Let him stay! Don’t extradite Teal! ‘”

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