With our friends, we headed up to Astoria this morning. It’s the oldest city in the state of Oregon and, in fact, having been founded in 1811, was the first permanent American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains. Astoria is located on the south shore of the mighty Columbia River, near where the Columbia confronts the Pacific Ocean — creating the most continually turbulent estuary in the United States (and, possibly, in the world). Astoria was named after John... Read more
We drove back from Depoe Bay over to the Portland Airport this morning to pick up friends of ours who had just flown in from Salt Lake City. Then we drove westward to Seaside, where we and our friends enjoyed dinner out with another pair of Utah friends who are also visiting here, both of them natives of Oregon. He earned his medical degree from the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine. He is also a past mission... Read more
This went up yesterday on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “The Interpreter Foundation Podcast — August 21, 2025: Wresting the Scriptures.” For the 21 August 2025 episode of the Interpreter Foundation Podcast, Bruce Webster, Kris Frederickson, and Martin Tanner discussed the wresting of the scriptures by critics. I continue to draw ignorant (and, thus, poorly aimed) fire from certain quarters regarding the position that I took in a recent FAIR presentation and a recent Meridian Magazine article on... Read more
This column of mine, which I originally published in the Deseret News for 4 July 2013, seems to me relevant also to our celebration of Labor Day, which is today: “A day for celebration and remembrance” Driving over to Depoe Bay from Portland, we passed very near McMinnville, and I couldn’t help thinking of the famous 1950 McMinnville UFO sighting. So, as we drove along, my wife read to me from “The History of the 1950 Trent UFO Sighting... Read more
During the April 1929 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Elder Orson F. Whitney, an exceptionally talented writer and speaker and a senior member of the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivered an address that has been quoted frequently in recent decades by other leaders of the Church and by many other Latter-day Saints. It has given comfort to many, for obvious reasons. Consider, for example, the three following passages from his remarks: The... Read more
Honestly, I think that some critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are deranged. I can understand coming to the conclusion that the Church’s truth claims are false. What I can’t understand and what I regard as very likely unhinged is jumping from that conclusion to the further conclusion that absolutely everything that the Church and its leaders do is (some combination or other of) evil, deceptive, dishonest, ridiculous, and worthy of sneering contempt. Yet I... Read more
“Why God Placed Adam and Eve Under Paradoxical Injunctions: A View of the Garden Scene through the Optics of Communication Theory,” written by Jared Balmer Abstract: This paper investigates the pragmatic aspect of communication between God and our first parents while in the Garden of Eden—the psychological impact of placing them under contradictory injunctions that result in a situation of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” God could not introduce knowledge that, by definition, also involves... Read more
Thursday is our day at the website of the Interpreter Foundation for posting reprints of book chapters. Today is Thursday, so we’ve posted the reprint of a book chapter. Please note that today isn’t Friday. But Friday is the day on which we publish new articles in the Interpreter Foundation’s journal. I spell this out here as clearly as I can, so as not to confuse and upset one of our readers, who has previously imagined that, by posting... Read more
A new article of mine has gone up in Meridian Magazine: “Brigham Young, Race, and Slavery: Reexamining Utah’s 1852 Service Act.” If you can bear to do so, please feel free to take a look at it. Also on the subject of Brigham Young, we were back again today in the Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City — the headquarters of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers — for more filming. The footage that we obtain there will... Read more
On Sunday night, at the recommendation of friends, my wife and I watched a film titled The Way. Telling the story of several people who are walking the famous pilgrimage route Camino de Santiago, it was directed by Emilio Estevez, who appears in it himself at several points, and it stars his father, Martin Sheen. With that recent viewing of the movie on my mind, my attention was caught by this article, which was not — but easily could have... Read more
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