Sic et Non

 

 

I’m very pleased to announce the forty-fourth consecutive week of publication in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture.  This week’s piece, like last week’s, is by Ben McGuire.

 

Forty-four straight Fridays.  Pretty good, no?

 

 

 

 

I’m often asked when and where I’m speaking publicly.  So I’ve finally decided to put together a little running calendar of more or less significant public speeches that I’ll continually update whenever I have additional information or new details.  I hope it will be helpful to those who’ve asked.

 

Sunday, 26 May 2013, 7:30 PM

1315 East 900 South, Provo, Utah (directly across from Provo City Cemetery)

“The Middle East: The Story behind the Headlines.”

The fireside is aimed at single adults.  But they may not mind too terribly much if a few married types sneak in.

 

Saturday, 22 June 2013, 7:00 PM

Hunter West Stake Center, 2800 South 6400 West, West Valley City

A high priests fireside

 

Saturday, 29 June 2013

Panel discussion, with Pat Bagley and Victor Navasky, on “Satire and the Sacred: From Mohammad to Mormon Underwear”

Annual convention of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists

Salt Lake City, Utah

 

Sunday, 21 July 2013

Latter-day Saint Students Association, University of Oxford (England)

“Faith and Scholarship”

 

Thursday and Friday, 1-2 August 2013

Annual FAIR Conference

Utah Valley Convention Center, Provo, Utah

 

Friday, 16 August 2012

Graduation convocation of Brigham Young University’s College of Humanities

 

Tuesday through Friday, 20-23 August 2013

BYU Education Week

 

Thursday, 19 September 2013

Summerhays Lecture on Science and Religion

 

Friday, 11 October 2013

St. Louis Chapter of the BYU Alumni Association

“The Middle East”

 

Saturday, 19 October 2013

Keynote address, Book of Mormon Archaeological Foundation

Utah Valley Convention Center, Provo, Utah

 

 

 

 

I simply want to give a bit of attention and honor to Lee Rigby, the twenty-five-year-old father of two-year-old Jack, whom a couple of Islamist fanatics hacked to death yesterday on a busy London street.  He was a member of the Corps of Drums, posted to the 2nd Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.  Apart from the fact that he was a soldier, he was apparently chosen pretty much at random.

 

Only Muslims can ultimately cure the disease of violent Islamist extremism that now afflicts not only their community but the rest of the world.  I’m heartened to see that at least some Muslim leaders recognize this and are taking action.

 

“Law enforcement should handle the criminality and not the ideology,” says Dr. Maher Hathout (a prominent Muslim leader based in Southern California whom I have met and whom I respect). “The ideological battle is ours.”

 

Indeed, it is.  And I wish the Muslim community well in this struggle.  The image of Islam in the West is being destroyed not by anti-Islamic propagandists (though those exist and certainly don’t help matters), but by the acts of members of the Muslim community itself.  That community’s good name depends upon the success of moderate Muslims in neutralizing the appeal of Islamic radicalism to their youth — as does, much more importantly, not only our safety but theirs.

 

 

 

 

With the Benghazi matter still unresolved to the satisfaction of many (very much including myself, though some others have pronounced themselves more than satisfied — indeed, bored — since the very moment it arose), and with the discovery that the Justice Department was intruding upon journalists at Fox News and the Associated Press and perhaps even upon their families, and with the IRS having apparently targeted conservative individuals and organizations for harassment, it’s not surprising that a few voices are beginning, albeit very tentatively, to whisper about the possibility of a presidential impeachment.  (And this new item about the IRS scandal, which concludes with the famous Watergate question “What did the president know and when did he know it?” isn’t likely to end such talk.)

 

I’m not there yet.  Not even close.

 

And I have to admit that I’m not there yet partly because, if Barack Obama were to depart the White House prior to 2016, it’s not as if we’d be instantly blessed with a competent, honest, constitutionally modest, conservative presidential administration.  No, we’d be faced with President Joe Biden.  He would, I admit, be incredibly amusing.  He has a well-deserved reputation as a Gaffemeister — and please don’t miss this delightful recent specimen — but I honestly don’t think he’s up to the job, whether in terms of intellectual ability, temperament, philosophical approach, or character.  At least Obama is fairly bright, and — I know some will challenge me on this — he doesn’t have Mr. Biden’s astonishing history of plagiarism and overt dishonesty.

 

(My political sentiments are both my own and completely correct.  They don’t represent the political sentiments of Brigham Young University, which, quite properly, has none.)

 

 

 

 

Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread.

 

My Thursday Deseret News column for this week:

 

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865580492/A-case-for-the-traditional-view-of-marriage.html

 

Some of the comments, by the way, are already turning stupid.

 

 

 

 

I just received this note from my wife’s friend Kristine Frederickson:

 

As most of you know I recently published a book, Extraordinary Courage: Women Empowered by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, with Deseret Book. The book explores the lives of eleven women:

·   Vienna Jacques, a 19^th century American woman who converted to the LDS Church and exhibited great faith when asked to donate her life’s savings to the Church;

·   Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, who courageously obeyed God although she was ridiculed and scorned by many for doing so;

·   Josephine Butler, a 19^th-century British Christian activist who worked to reclaim fallen women and to teach them of God’s love for them and for every person on earth;

·   Ellis Shipp, a 19^th-century Utahn who, against great odds, left home to secure a medical degree in the East that she might provide care and assistance to fellow women and who subsequently used her medical skills to bless many families throughout the western U.S., Canada, and Mexico;

·   Mary Fielding Smith, the widow of the martyred Hyrum Smith, who chose to go West with fellow LDS Saints and, although faced with enormous challenges, successfully organized teams and wagons and guided her family and other needy friends across the plains to the Salt Lake Basin;

·   Lucy Mack Smith, mother of the Prophet Joseph Smith, who suffered myriad personal indignities and watched family and friends martyred in defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ yet remained charitable and devoted to the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout her life;

·   Esther, the Jewess, who lived about one hundred years after the Babylonian captivity, who became the queen of Persia, and who acted with impeccable integrity, risking her life to save her people;

·   Susanna, from the ancient Apocrypha, a little known Jewess in Babylon, who maintained her virtue even in the face of death;

·   Priscilla, who was baptized by Paul and was the first known female Christian missionary in the New Testament who, with her husband, valiantly bore testimony of Jesus Christ in the decadent Roman Empire;

·   Abish, a Lamanite woman in the Book of Mormon with a personal testimony of Jesus Christ, who had to wait until opportunity presented itself and then bravely shared her testimony with other Lamanites;

·   Mary Murdoch Murray, a courageous convert to the LDS church who left her native Scotland at an advanced age to travel by ship, train, and on foot in a handcart company, in hopes of gathering with family and fellow Saints in the Salt Lake Basin.   

 Each of these women is extraordinary! When each one’s life is properly situated in its distinct historical setting her life truly comes alive and provides points of contact and models from which each of us can explore and better understand our own lives and the choices before us in this critical day and age.

 After years of research and writing my admiration for these women has grown and I want others to get to know them too. I hope this project will increase faith and devotion to the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The righteous choices these women made blessed their lives and I believe that studying them will help strengthen and empower individuals today to become more committed disciples of Jesus Christ.

 As you feel it appropriate I am reaching out and asking you to make others aware of the book via email, on the various social media sites you participate in, and in other ways ask you to contact friends and loved ones, let them know of its release, and ask them to share this information with others as well.

 

Extraordinary Courage is currently available in Deseret Book at their Wasatch front stores, and if they do not have the book in stock it can be ordered from those same Deseret Book locations. It can also be purchased online as either an ebook or a print book to be shipped to a specific address by using the following link: http://deseretbook.com/Kristine_Wardle_Frederickson/a/22815#q=Kristine%20Wardle%20Frederickson&page=1&sort=score&facets.  Another way to access this link is to go to Deseretbook.com and, in the search bar, type “Frederickson,” and the link will come up.

 

Thank you for any assistance you might provide.

 

 

 

 

Richard Heller, an outspoken British atheist with all the attitude of the late Christopher Hitchens but, I think, little if any of Mr. Hitchens’s remarkable panache, has written an open letter to the British Minister for Faith and Communities, denouncing tax exemption for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

 

http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2013/05/21/cmment-an-open-letter-to-baroness-warsi-on-the-recent-mormon

 

I’m curious to see whether the minister replies, and, if so, how she replies.

 

If she responds to Mr. Heller’s open letter, it will be fascinating both intrinsically and because the minister, Baroness Sayeeda Hussain Warsi (Urdu: سعیده حسین وارثی‎), is a Muslim.  (She is a British solicitor and Conservative Party politician, of Pakistani descent, who was created a life peer in 2007.)

 

With the rise of the militant and much more assertive New Atheism (represented by Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and one or two others, but by no means limited to them), I expect to hear more and more calls for an end to tax exemption for religious organizations, not only in the United Kingdom and abroad but in the United States.  And I expect, too, that such calls will come to focus particularly on socially conservative religious groups that fail to embrace same-sex marriage and related matters with sufficient enthusiasm.

 

Interesting times.

 

 

 

 

 

A favorite writer of mine, both on contemporary society and politics and on the ancient classical world, is Victor Davis Hanson.  Here are two of his recent articles ruminating on last year’s presidential election:

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348253/tainted-campaign

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348873/president-won-—-sort-victor-davis-hanson

 

The second is the more substantial, but both are worth a look.

 

 

 

 

I’ve just come across a very thoughtful blog produced by a young returned missionary, and I want to mention it here for those who might be interested:

 

http://virtuoussociety.com

 

The title of the blog strikes me in particular, I suppose, because one of my favorite books in the Islamic philosophical tradition — in certain ways, but by no means all, something of an Islamized version of Plato’s Republic (another favorite of mine) — is al-Farabi’s The Virtuous City.  And because I’ve always had a strong interest in the notion of “utopia” and the social order of the Millennium.  Not that that’s what Tom Stringham’s blog is necessarily about . . .

 

 

 

 

I’m happy to announce that The Interpreter Foundation has posted its twenty-seventh (27th) “scripture roundtable,” this one focused on Lesson 23 in the 2013 Gospel Doctrine lesson manual.  Craig Foster (apparently represented by the bear totem of his clan), Brant Gardner, Daniel Peterson, and Martin Tanner discuss the “School of the Prophets” in Kirtland, Ohio, and the broader scriptural theme expressed by the phrase “Seek learning, even by study and also by faith”:

 

http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/category/scripture-roundtable/