At a meeting of the International Advisory Council (IAC) of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies held in Salt Lake City in April 2013, artist Linda Nearon, a member of the IAC Executive Committee, presented her painting, “The Majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge” to Cole Durham, Center Director. Linda and her husband, David, are longtime friends and supporters of the Center, and we are most grateful for this gift, and for others of Linda’s beautiful paintings that are hung in the office in the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. The inspiration for this most-recent of Linda’s paintings was a idea of Director Durham’s about the work of those who are devoted to the cause of religious freedom, who sometimes walk “out onto the bridge,” as if through mists, or in darkness, as expressed in scripture and in the work of poets such as T.S. Eliot (“The Wasteland”)*, but who, with persistence and Divine aid move forward through the difficulties to a better place.

*Who is the third who always walks beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you …. 

From The Wasteland – VI. What the Thunder Said