A new article — this one by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw and Ryan Dahle — has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.. I commend it to your attention: “Textual Criticism and the Book of Moses: A Response to Colby Townsend’s “Returning to the Sources,” Part 1 of 2” Review of Colby Townsend, “Returning to the Sources: Integrating Textual Criticism in the Study of Early Mormon Texts and History.” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 10,... Read more
A passage that I extracted from Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith [Downers Grove: IVP and Nottingham: Apollos, 2011], 335-336. One society may stigmatize homosexuality while another condones it. And so on. Therefore, if different societies have made differing moral judgments (and if moral judgments depend inextricably on contingent cultures), then there can be no crosscultural and objective moral truths that apply to all cultures. What is moral is what is deemed “normal” by a... Read more
First, I share a few links that I’ve been accumulating in my files, to things that caught my interest: “Will Natural Herd Immunity End the Pandemic? Is natural herd immunity a viable path to controlling the pandemic? Here is why that is a terrible idea.” “There is no ‘scientific divide’ over herd immunity: There’s a lot of talk of scientists divided over Covid-19, but when you look at the evidence any so-called divide starts to evaporate”... Read more
However, in the interest of historical accuracy I must say that the Islamic fundamentalist response to the dominance of the West is not the only response that the Islamic world has offered. And it is only comparatively recently that it has become the most obvious one. In the early days of the Modern Period, it was thought that things simply needed to be adjusted somewhat. Islamic peoples and nations had been world leaders in the past, and they... Read more
Another passage from Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999): Cosmologists who study the origins of our universe via this micromoment tell us that the specificities of this present cosmos and not some other one — that is, with its precise distribution of galaxies and stars with their particular movements — “would not have arisen if the recessional velocity of the matter formed in the hig bang were not... Read more
Tom Kimball, formerly affiliated with Signature Books as its marketing director and formerly a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, moved some years ago to the vicinity of Kirtland, Ohio. Tom didn’t exactly consider himself a friend of mine, nor of my religious beliefs. I was saddened, though, to learn this afternoon of his death, apparently by his own hand. I wish him peace. *** Freshly available via the website of the... Read more
As Muslims began to realize the extent of Western technical and material superiority, they were often appalled. Islam was no longer at the cutting edge, no longer triumphant. Islam, it seemed, was losing ground. The impact was as if, not at merely one general conference but at one after another after another, the announcement were to be made from the pulpit of the Conference Center that we had actually lost members during the preceding year. That our missionary... Read more
Tarik LaCour has responded to me over at his blog, The Mad Dog Naturalist: “Clearing the Air” He’s right. If we disagree at all on the general task or tasks of apologetics, the disagreement seems very slight. I agree that the “heavyweights” of sophisticated philosophical atheism merit response, and he agrees that lightweight anti-theistic and anti-Mormon popularizers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the “CES Letter” need to be addressed. We differ very strongly,... Read more
Why was Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt so important? A Western nation had managed to take control of one of the central and largest of Islamic states. Cairo, the greatest Arab city, was under the command of foreigners. Foreigners, of course, had been ruling Egypt for some time. Indeed, they had been ruling since the Persian conquest of Pharaonic Egypt in the sixth century before Christ. Persians, Macedonians (the Ptolemies, who included Cleopatra), Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Kurds, Turks,... Read more
Dr. Lynn Johnson kindly alerted me to this 2014 article from Frontiers in Psychology. It was written by Anne Berthold and Willibald Ruch of the Department of Psychology (Personality and Assessment) at the University of Zürich, in Switzerland — which I can testify (having served as a young missionary in the Switzerland Zürich Mission and visited Switzerland thereafter on numerous occasions) is not precisely a hotbed of Christian apologetics: “Satisfaction with life and character strengths of non-religious and religious people:... Read more
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