For the 230th Friday in a row, the Interpreter Foundation has published an article in its flagship journal:   Opportunity Lost   It’s beginning to look like a pattern.   Posted from Richmond, Virginia     Read more

    The days of at least one dead white European male’s hegemony at the University of Pennsylvania are over!   http://www.weeklystandard.com/demoting-shakespeare/article/2005912   ¡Viva la Revolución!   Posted from Richmond, Virginia     Read more

    http://mormanity.blogspot.com/2016/12/more-than-just-faith-promoting-sports.html   Posted from Alexandria, Virginia     Read more

    An interesting and thought-provoking perspective:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-islamic-christmas-tree-the-other-perspective_us_58322a54e4b0eaa5f14d4730   I don’t agree, by the way, that “Western bombing” is a principal cause of the current Middle Eastern refugee crisis.  ISIS and the Syrian civil war are the main causes there.  (If you want to include Russia in “the West,” I suppose you can blame it for some of the casualties in Syria.  Our new friend, dear Mr. Putin, is quite brutal.)  Instability in Iraq is also a cause, and you… Read more

    https://www.memri.org/reports/owner-egyptian-daily-response-recent-cairo-church-bombing-nothing-justifies-crimes   Posted from Alexandria, Virginia (not Alexandria, Egypt)     Read more

    It’s a bitterly cold night in the Washington DC area.  But we enjoyed it nonetheless.   We attended a performance tonight, at the Folger Shakespeare Library, by the Folger Consort.  They did The Second Shepherds’ Play, one of the most popular medieval English mystery plays.  It survives in a sixteenth-century manuscript that belonged to the Catholic Towneley family of Lancashire — Protestant authorities shut the mystery plays down in England in the 1570s — and is now held… Read more

    This is quite interesting, but it also strikes me (given the paucity of actual evidence) as highly speculative:   http://www.livescience.com/57203-lucy-early-human-species-was-polygynous.html   I can easily imagine several other explanations for the very limited data, and, barring additional discoveries, I don’t see how we can rule them.   Posted from Alexandria, Virginia     Read more

    Here’s the background on an excellent and growing series of podcasts involving faithful Latter-day Saint scholars and thinkers:   Can We Talk?   And here’s a good resource on the unfortunate “Letter to a CES Director” that has, despite its fairly comprehensive lack of merit, had considerable harmful influence on some Latter-day Saints:   Home Page   Posted from Alexandria, Virginia     Read more

    The latest installment of my weekly Deseret News column has appeared, and, as usual, most of the folks writing in to the Deseret News about it don’t like it at all:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865669327/The-Book-of-Mormon-at-Christmas.html   I always get a kick, by the way, out of those who complain that “Peterson should also have discussed x” or “Peterson didn’t address y.”  I’ve been doing these columns for roughly six years now, I think.  Even without including the joint semiweekly Hamblin/Peterson Saturday… Read more

    Oy veh!   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443008/university-holiday-party-not-inclusive-fiscal-year-texas-professor-guidelines?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-12-14&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives   In some respects, there are few stupider places on Earth than certain American college campuses.   If this story is accurate, one college in Texas seems to have achieved a whole new level of idiocy.     Read more