http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865678638/US-religious-freedom-commission-calls-out-Russia-in-its-annual-report.html?pg=all     Read more

    The Hamblin-Peterson Deseret News article for this weekend:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865678804/Processing-fish-and-calling-apostles-on-the-Sea-of-Galilee.html?clear_cache=1     Read more

    Unfortunately, I missed this wonderful little item when it appeared in New York’s Saratogian newspaper on its centenary back in February:   http://www.saratogian.com/lifestyle/20170220/100-years-ago-in-the-saratogian-feb-20   If only Ms. Lulu could be alive today!   Of course, nowadays she could just plug Islam and shari‘a in at the appropriate places in her talk, and she would be ready with a second gripping presentation.  In the late fifties and early sixties, she could have spoken about papist plots to subvert our Protestant Christian… Read more

    For the 248th week in a row, the nearly moribund Interpreter Foundation has published a new article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture:   On Doubting Nephi’s Break Between 1 and 2 Nephi: A Critique of Joseph Spencer’s An Other Testament: On typology   Coincidentally, I’m pleased to announce, my longtime friend and former FARMS colleague Noel Reynolds has joined the Foundation’s leadership.   I would like to take this opportunity, by the way, to thank those… Read more

    An excellent little essay by Stephen Smoot, who has been permitted temporary home leave from his exile in Toronto, near Canada’s national igloo:   http://www.plonialmonimormon.com/2017/04/on-internet-libraries-and-seeking.html   I couldn’t possibly agree more strongly.   I can’t count the number of times, for example, that I’ve been told by anti-Islamic internet commenters that I ought to learn something about the history of Islam, that I ought to read the Qur’an, and so forth.  (I regularly teach about the history of Islam…. Read more

    A number of common assumptions about education and religious belief seem to be, at a minimum, open to question:   https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/education-church-attendance/524346/   Many years ago, a friend of mine who was completing a Ph.D. at UCLA while I was also there challenged my lament about losses among the educated class.  It’s the working class that we should be most worried about, he said.  I’ve thought about his comment ever since, and have long since concluded that he was… Read more

    If this hypothesis is true, it really messes up the current consensus view of how humans arrived in the Americas:   https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/science/prehistoric-humans-north-america-california-nature-study.html?referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F   Thanks to Cody Quirk for bringing this article to my attention.     Read more

    It will be interesting to see how this goes:   http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/26/world/pope-egypt-mission/index.html   I’m pleased to note, by the way, that Gabriel Said Reynolds, who is prominently mentioned in the article above, published a significant work some years ago in BYU’s Islamic Translation Series, a project with which, prior to the Purge of 2012, I was once . . . umm, very deeply involved.     Read more

    My wife and I watched a very well-done performance of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Hale Centre Theatre in West Valley City tonight.  It’s a story that I love.   Here are a couple of quotations from the play:   “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway… Read more

    This week’s Thursday Deseret News column:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865678716/An-early-reference-to-the-First-Vision.html     Read more