There are few human attributes that I dislike more than cynicism.   I hate it when people sneer at sincere expressions of faith, idealism, and/or love, and, in some cases, seem to deride even goodness itself.  I hate it when some sorts appear to deny the very possibility of goodness, or of selflessness and sincerity.   Such attitudes are particularly common on the Web, on message boards and in newspaper and other such comments.  Anonymous and pseudonymous cynics… Read more

    Matthew 12:9-14 Mark 3:1-6 Luke 6:6-11   I really should have connected this entry with the previous one, “New Testament 111,” because it concerns the same fundamental issue.   The Pharisees overlook the miracle of the divine healing in their zeal to find an accusation against Jesus.   It would be rather like criticizing the swimming technique of a lifeguard who had just pulled a drowning man from the ocean, or faulting the grammar of a note of… Read more

    http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865624576/Significant-Church-history-discovery-made.html     Read more

    “Death is only the death of death, not the death of life.”  (Muhammad Ankan)     Read more

    Matthew 12:1-8 Mark 2:23-28 Luke 6:1-5   Latter-day Saints take the concept of the Sabbath very seriously, though I sometimes think that we can easily clutter it up far too much and often do so.   But we don’t make a fetish of it.   For that matter, I might add, neither do many Orthodox Jews, whose punctilious observance of the Sabbath some non-Jews like to mock as merely formal and legalistic.  Such mockery is unfair.  I’ve seen… Read more

    Precisely three years ago, I woke up happily unaware that I was beginning the worst day of my life to that point, and that it would mark the beginning of the worst several months that I had ever experienced.  The year 2012 was a miserable one for me.  This was the most painful thing, but it was just the first of several painful things.   Here’s the blog entry that I wrote within hours:   http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2012/03/my-beloved-brother-d-23-march-2012.html   Here’s my brother’s… Read more

    An interesting statement of a hawkish stance on responding to the so-called “Islamic State”:   http://nationalinterest.org/feature/unleashed-america-must-pummel-isis-12457   My attention was caught by the authors’ distinction, and how they made it, between the military vulnerability of the “Islamic State” and the relatively elusive character of al-Qa‘ida.   It parallels quite closely the distinction that I often make (in print and, as recently as last night, in presentations) between the successful guerrilla tactics of the Gadianton Robbers in the Book… Read more

        For those of you who woke up this morning wondering about relativity, this will be an interesting read:   https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-80-can-space-expand-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-23dff8c10f3d   Posted from Vancouver, British Columbia     Read more

    My friend and former Maxwell Institute colleague has posted a remarkable story of what seems pretty clearly to be academic incompetence and malfeasance:   http://fornspollfira.blogspot.ca/2015/03/on-sinking-ship-and-its-captain.html   This story didn’t occur at Brigham Young University.   Posted from Langley, British Columbia     Read more

    On Saturday, I spoke to a relatively small audience at the University of British Columbia’s downtown Vancouver Robson campus on “The Perplexing Book of Mormon.”  That evening, I spoke to another modest audience at the Vancouver Stake Center about some of my favorite pieces of evidence for the authenticity and antiquity of the Book of Mormon.  And, tonight, I gave a slight variant of that same talk to a very large audience, a capacity crowd, at the Langley stake… Read more