*** I once held and expressed political views. I no longer do. In order to protect the wholly apolitical Interpreter Foundation, I’ve managed to transcend them, and I’ve been so successful in doing it that I can’t even name the current American prime minister or identify the two major political parties in the United States. (Labour and the Whigs, I think. Or perhaps the Christian Democrats.) Still, because (as I like to think) I’m in reasonably good… Read more
*** New, today, in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: Stephen O. Smoot, “Framing the Book of Abraham: Presumptions and Paradigms” Review of Dan Vogel, Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2021). 250 pp. $18.95 (softback). Abstract: The Book of Abraham continues to undergo scrutiny in both academic and polemical publications. The latest offering of substance in the latter category, Dan Vogel’s Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review… Read more
*** First of all, I published this article in Meridian Magazine earlier today: “When the Lord Remembers Your Name: The Oliver Granger Prophecy” *** Out of curiosity, I went to one of the local Deseret Book outlets a couple of days ago (near University Mall, in the southern part of Orem). I was pleased to see that DVDs of the Interpreter Foundation’s dramatic film, Witnesses, are available for sale at that store — and… Read more
*** A new installment of Kyler Rasmussen’s series of Bayesian essays on the claims of the Book of Mormon and the Restoration more generally has now gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Estimating the Evidence Episode 12: On Hebraic Views and Late Wars So has a newly archived episode of our weekly radio program: Interpreter Radio Show — September 12, 2021 Stripped of interruptions, the 12 September 2021 broadcast of the… Read more
*** New, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Come, Follow Me — D&C Study and Teaching Helps Lesson 40, September 27–October 3: D&C 109-110 — “It Is Thy House, a Place of Thy Holiness” *** And here are links to five articles from an earlier number of the journal that you might have missed: Stephen E. Robinson, “John W. Welch: A Personal Reminiscence” Abstract: In these glimpses of the early private life of… Read more
An article — this one by David M. Calabro — went up yet again today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. I think that many of you will find it interesting: “An Early Christian Context for the Book of Moses” Abstract: This study argues that the Book of Moses was an early Christian text. The book’s language, literary genre, and references to its own production could fit with a date in the late first century ad…. Read more
*** On Friday, the last day that I was in Newport, Rhode Island, we drove by the Touro Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in the United States. It was, alas, closed — just as it was on the previous occasion that my wife and I drove by it. (It’s still a functioning house of worship, not merely a tourism site.). The synagogue is fairly plain on the outside, though I’m told that its interior is more interesting. What… Read more
*** One of the many unappetizing features of our unfortunate present age — a wonderful period of human history in so many ways, with remarkable technological advancements and unprecedented comfort and overall health, but riven with hostilities and dulled in far too many cases by despair, purposelessness, and anomie — is our haste to brand others as liars simply because they disagree with us or see things differently than we do. This is a kind of social… Read more
A new article — this one by Adam Stokes — appeared earlier today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “The People of Canaan: A New Reading of Moses 7” Abstract: Moses 7 is one of the most famous passages in all of Restoration scripture. It is also one of the most problematic in regard to its description of the people of Canaan as black (v. 8) and as a people who were not preached to… Read more
*** At least two of my very favorite people, both of them faithful and productive Latter-day Saint scholars and both of them wonderfully kind friends who have had a tremendous impact for good on my life, earned their doctorates here in Providence, Rhode Island, at Brown University. And, for whatever little it may be worth, Brown, a member of the Ivy League, is another place that I contemplated attending at one point — this time for… Read more
