I’m a strong admirer of Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ).  I’ve been proud of him for his criticisms of Donald Trump.  He is a principled, libertarian-leaning conservative and a courageous voice of political morality.  I regret that he’s leaving the Senate after this year.   I’m even fine with his recent successful call for a one-week FBI investigation of the charges against Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  The report of that investigation is now in, and it has evidently (and unsurprisingly)... Read more

    A number of years ago, I published a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God.  It was essentially my section from David Noel Freedman and Michael J. McClymond, eds., The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad as Religious Founders, a hefty (and heftily-priced) volume that featured a foreword by the celebrated/controversial Swiss theologian Hans Küng.   It’s a simple narrative biography, on the whole, that doesn’t pretend to break significant new historical ground, but seeks to tell the... Read more

    From Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Boston and New York: Mariner Books Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011):   When Plato challenged his students, in the fourth century B.C., to describe the motions of the celestial bodies through geometry, he didn’t expect the answers on paper to represent what was actually happening in the heavens.  That knowledge was unknowable because it was unattainable; you couldn’t go into... Read more

    I confess that I’m not quite accustomed yet to the new order of things, but my column for this week seems to have appeared in today’s print edition of the Deseret News and most definitely appeared today in LDS Living:   “Why a Worldwide Church Wasn’t Even Possible Until Now + the Miracle of General Conference”   Of course, if I’m confused, think about how completely lost the small cast of folks who’ve constantly posted negative comments about... Read more

    The great philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun (AD 1332-1406) speaks out on the controversy surrounding the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States:   If the soul is impartial in receiving information, it devotes to that information the share of critical investigation the information deserves, and its truth or untruth thus becomes clear. However, if the soul is infected with partisanship for a particular opinion or sect, it accepts without a moment’s... Read more

    From some notes that I’ve gathered:   George Q. Cannon, a counselor in the First Presidency to Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow, claimed on several occasions to have seen Christ and to have conversed with him face to face.  Cannon was a man of great integrity and remarkable ability who made a positive impression on people within and beyond the Church. He served as a newspaper editor, a publisher, a writer, and a long-time... Read more

    Here are a couple of passages that I like from Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s twelfth-thirteenth century Persian mystical poem The Conference of the Birds:   The wretches damned in hell will cry To those in paradise: “O, testify To us the nature of your happiness; Describe the sacred joys which you possess!” And they will say: “Ineffable delight Shines in the radiance of His face; its light Draws near us, and this vast celestial frame – The eightfold heaven... Read more

    The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2018 was announced yesterday.  It was apportioned between three people, including (at ninety-six) the oldest person ever to win a Nobel Prize and the first woman to win the Physics Prize in fifty-five years — and only the third to win it in the entire history of the Nobels.  Here are two articles summarizing what this year’s prize honors:   “This Is Why The 2018 Nobel Prize In Physics, For Lasers, Is... Read more

    The ugliness continues:   “Far-left cartoonist accused of targeting Kavanaugh’s 10-year-old daughter in vicious cartoon”   A note on the brazen Democrat double standard:   “‘She Denied It to Bill’s Victims’: Juanita Broaddrick Blasts Hillary Calling for ‘Due Process’ on Kavanaugh Accuser”   This item appeared several days ago, from one of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s college friends at Yale University:   “Former NBA player Chris Dudley says he never saw Brett Kavanaugh ‘blacked out’ at Yale”   Wow,... Read more

    Notes from an as-yet unfinished manuscript:   The Jesus Seminar: The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope.  The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass.  Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.[1]   Strikingly, though,... Read more