Sic et Non

    Lighten up!  I’m just quoting the guy!   I came across this online, but haven’t yet checked or identified its ultimate source:   Question:  “Many prominent scientists – including Darwin, Einstein, and Planck – have considered the concept of God very seriously. What are your thoughts on the concept of God and on [Read More…]

    A few days ago, I posted a blog entry and a link under the title of “Catholic Higher Education in Ruins.”   We Latter-day Saints shouldn’t, though, feel complacent, let alone smugly superior.   Some of you may have missed this bracing article by my friend and BYU colleague Ralph Hancock that appeared in [Read More…]

    In Kurt Aland’s Synopsis of the Four Gospels, which I’m using as the structural basis (and the Greek text) for my ongoing commentary, Section 19 (Matthew and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus) is equivalent to Section 6, so, for discussion of those name-lists, I simply call your attention to my previous entry:   http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2014/12/16095.html   [Read More…]

    A new year, and there still seems no hope of these things ever stopping:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865618763/New-year-a-time-for-looking-both-backward-and-forward.html   Even on holidays there’s no respite.     [Read more…]

    “The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one.” Robert Smith Surtees (d. 1864), English editor and novelist     [Read more…]

    A fascinating story from Christmas season of 1944 in war-ravaged Central Europe:   http://www.thoughts-about-god.com/christmas/hl_whyafraid.htm     [Read more…]

    Chapter 14 of That Hideous Strength, the concluding novel in C. S. Lewis’s brilliant “Perelandra trilogy,” as it’s often called, is entitled “Real Life is Meeting.”   The title comes from a passage in the Austrian-born Israeli Jewish thinker Martin Buber’s famous 1923 book Ich und Du (“I and Thou”):  “All real life [Read More…]

    I pass on a little story that, among other places, I’ve seen in D. Michael Quinn’s The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power.  I mention that particular source in order to win some credibility for the story.  For some, Dr. Quinn (perhaps alongside Grant Palmer) is the only honest historian of Mormonism, and his works [Read More…]

    The great lyric soprano Renée Fleming joins the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Orchestra at Temple Square for a performance of What Child is This?   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VmADpBVmCw     [Read more…]

    Luke 1:26-38   This account of the Annunciation, as it’s called, occurs only in the gospel of Luke.    Such stories, told from Mary’s perspective, have suggested to many readers that Mary herself was among the “eyewitness” sources used by Luke in the composition of his gospel (see Luke 1:2).  I find that [Read More…]