*** 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
This new installment of Kyler Rasmussen’s Bayesian explorations went up earlier today on the Interpreter Foundation’s blog: “Estimating the Evidence Episode 11: On Imprinted Words” *** As may be evident, I’ve been on the road in New England — and I mean really on the road — for the past week or so, and that has kept me both busy and away from my computer. So I’ve fallen a bit behind. This pair of items… Read more
*** Up this morning in Brattleboro, we first drove out to see Naulakha, the house that the British writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) built in 1893 for his American wife and where the Kiplings lived from 1893 until 1896. (They left it partially because of an unfortunate family dispute with an unpleasant and alcoholic in-law and, although they hoped eventually to return, never lived in it again thereafter.) While based in Naulakha, though, Kipling worked on Kim and… Read more
*** My father would have been 108 years old today. He died at the end of June, in 2003. I still miss him very much. I think about him every day. Certain sights always, invariably, remind me of him. There are many things that I would like to tell him, many questions that I would like to ask of him. He would have enjoyed where we’re staying tonight. Virtually all, if not absolutely all, of… Read more
*** On Saturday, en route from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, we stopped off at Sharon, Vermont, at the birthplace of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Although I had visited all of the other major eastern Church historical sites multiple times, I had never previously gone up to Sharon. (It’s a bit of a geographical outlier, pretty far removed from everything else, and, apart from his birth itself, little of Joseph’s life took place in Sharon.) The place was… Read more
*** I was curious to learn the origin of the name Smugglers’ Notch. It turns out that notch, in the parlance of New Hampshire’s White Mountains and presumably also, is a term for a deep, narrow, mountain pass. (Hence the name of the electorally famous Dixville Notch, about which we hear quite a bit every four years during the New Hampshire primary and the quadrennial presidential election.) If you look carefully at the photo above, you’ll… Read more
*** As many, many others have over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about the 9-11 attacks and, even more so, about their victims. So many lives snuffed out. So much pain and sorrow. My friend Anne Palmieri shared the words below on her Facebook page. They’re familiar; we all know the story. But I found myself moved to tears as I reread them this morning, and I think that some of you will find… Read more
*** New today, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Book of Moses Essays #72: The Two Ways (Moses 5): Adam, Eve, and the New and Everlasting Covenant (Moses 5:4–6) *** We watched the Tabernacle Choir’s commemorative special on the victims of the September 11th attacks this morning, and this evening we watched a substantial portion of Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenters: 9/11 – 2021½. Marred somewhat (especially toward the end) by the intrusion of… Read more
