We had an enjoyable time last night with our monthly reading group (via Zoom, in our case from St. George), discussing R. Lanier Britsch, Moramona: The Mormons in Hawai’i, 2d ed., updated, revised, and enlarged (Laie, HI: The Jonathan Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies, Brigham Young University-Hawai’i, 2018), with its author, who is part of our little group. Here’s a wonderful story, already familiar to some of you perhaps (as it was to me), that he... Read more
I continue my account of a party sent in 1872 by President Brigham Young to rededicate Palestine for the return of the Jews. It included George A. Smith of the First Presidency, Lorenzo Snow and Albert Carrington of the Twelve, and the poet and Relief Society president Eliza R. Snow: Their travels took them to England, Holland, Belgium, France, Bavaria and other parts of Germany, Austria, Russia, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and Syria. The journey was strenuous, but... Read more
This passage in David Jewitt and Amaya Moro-Martín, “Everything Scientists Know So Far about the First Interstellar Objects Ever Detected: Strange bodies from beyond the solar system have defied predictions,” Scientific American 323/4 (October 2020): 42-49, caught my attention. For one thing, it tacitly acknowledges that the origin of life on earth remains an unsolved mystery. But we should note that the idea of panspermia, or even of directed panspermia, doesn’t ultimately answer the question of how life arose at all;... Read more
Drawing on R. Lanier Britsch, Moramona: The Mormons in Hawai’i, 2d ed., updated, revised, and enlarged (Laie, HI: The Jonathan Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies, Brigham Young University-Hawai’i, 2018), 131-133: In accordance with the doctrine of the physical gathering that was so prominent a feature of the nineteenth-century Church, early Latter-day Saint leaders in Hawai’i sought a gathering place for its members there. For a while, they settled on the island of Lānaʻi. But... Read more
When the French middle school teacher Samuel Paty was murdered on 16 October 2020 in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, beheaded in an act of Islamist terrorism by an eighteeen-year-old Russian-born Chechen refugee named Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, several people asked me for my response. After all, I’m an Islamicist. And Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov’s brutal attack had been motivated, superficially at least, by a desire to avenge the honor of Islam: In a class on the freedom of religion, Samuel Paty had shown his students... Read more
My wife and I have belonged for many years now to a regular monthly reading group that includes some of our favorite people. One of them is Lanny Britsch, an emeritus professor in the Department of History at Brigham Young University whose research and teaching have long focused on Asia and the Pacific. This month, we’re reading R. Lanier Britsch, Moramona: The Mormons in Hawai’i, 2d ed., updated, revised, and enlarged (Laie, HI: The Jonathan Napela Center for... Read more
At noon today, we had an hour-long closed Zoom call for BYU Middle East Studies faculty and students with Matthew H. Tueller, the ambassador of the United States of America to the Republic of Iraq, and previously, among other assignments, deputy chief of mission in Egypt and ambassador to Kuwait and Yemen. Matt is an old friend, a fellow Latter-day Saint and a fellow graduate of Brigham Young University. We first met as students at the Center for... Read more
John C. Whitmer was the son of Jacob Whitmer, one of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. He was also the nephew of David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses, and likewise the nephew of Oliver Cowdery, another of the Three Witnesses. (Oliver had married Elizabeth Ann Whitmer, David and Jacob’s sister.) He was, furthermore, the nephew of four others among the Eight Witnesses: Christian Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., and John Whitmer, and Hiram Page (who... Read more
Note: For at least a while, based upon discussion with folks at Patheos, I’ll be experimenting with a new approach to my blogging: Fewer posts, but longer. We’ll see how it works. What follows here is inspired by and indebted to Chapter 5, “Spacetime is Quantum,” in Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017), 125-137: Physics made enormous progress, almost literally unthinkable strides,... Read more
Note: For at least a while, based upon discussion with folks at Patheos, I’ll be experimenting with a new approach to my blogging: Fewer posts, but longer. We’ll see how it works. When leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fell to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles after the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, they faced one crisis after another. The Prophet was dead. Many of the Saints wondered what this meant and what... Read more
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