Stanley Jay Knapp: Transformative Teaching
The following remarks are excerpted from an address Michael Wood delivered at the Family, Home, and Social Sciences Fall meeting on August 28, 2024.
Stanley Jay Knapp passed away on June 26, 2024, at the age of 60, after 15 months of battling a glioblastoma brain tumor. He was a beloved colleague, mentor, and friend who served in the Sociology Department for 29 years. His loss is incalculable.
Stan was not content with teaching only the sociological theory canon. Stan aimed much higher, pushing students to interrogate their taken-for-granted ways of thinking about all the relationships that comprise the social world, ranging from dyads and familial relations to covenant relations between God and His people. His teaching had a profound impact on his students.
Here’s a personal example. On September 16, 2010, two days after my 23rd birthday, I attended Stan’s lecture on James Faulconer’s work contrasting Greek and Hebrew thinking.1 The lecture opened my mind to a new way of thinking about the concept of Truth: not as a static thing one can possess, but as a way of being—being True.
This insight shook me, took root, and transformed my religious imagination, eventually leading to new ways of understanding God, discipleship, and testimony. Regarding testimony, I came to see it not just as the capacity to say “I know that the word is true” but as the awareness of the joy of “being true,” of making the word of God effective in your life, of “nourish[ing] the word.”2
I remember this lecture so clearly because it made me feel like the ground beneath me had vanished, leaving me suspended in the air. But instead of falling, I was soaring, seeing the world as if for the first time. After leaving that evening class, I rode my bike around campus in the dark for several hours, trying to understand what I had just learned.
For many years to come, I’ll be where Stan left me that night in 2010, metaphorically and perhaps literally riding my bike around campus, reflecting on the profound legacy of his life and teachings.
Notes
1. See James E. Faulconer, Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions (The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1999), appendix 2.
2. See Alma 32:41.
George Ryskamp: Whole-Hearted
George Richard Ryskamp passed away on July 1, 2022, at the age of 72, on the first day of his retirement after working as a professor in the History Department for nearly 30 years.
“[He] gave his whole heart to the family history program at BYU, and the students felt his commitment to them,” says Jill Crandell, former director of the Center for Family History and Genealogy and Ryskamp’s colleague. “His work in Spanish genealogy is well-known in the profession, and he left a legacy with many students who served internships in Spain under his tutelage.”
Ryskamp’s lifelong passion for family history was sparked by a series of genealogy classes he attended as a 12-year-old. He later studied history at BYU in hopes of helping others discover their own histories.
Though Ryskamp also earned a degree at BYU Law and worked as an attorney for many years, his love for family history persisted. Notably, in 1984, he self-published Tracing Your Hispanic Heritage, which became a definitive guide for connecting Latin American ancestry to Spain.
Eventually the Spirit and his passion led him back to BYU as a family history professor. In this position, Ryskamp took student interns with him on research trips to Spain, France, and Italy. While director of CFHG from 2003 to 2013, he spearheaded the Immigrant Ancestors Project, which allows researchers to locate information about immigrants that is unavailable in their destination countries. He additionally led the development of the Script Tutorial website, which aids in deciphering archaic handwriting styles or alphabets.
“He was instrumental in bringing me and several other faculty members to the university, and we all feel his loss,” says Crandell.
