Matthew 13:18-23 Mark 4:13-20 Luke 8:11-15   When these passages speak of those who fall away quickly, they describe them as having “no root in themselves.”   I assume that this means something like having no testimony, or, at least, having an inadequate testimony.   We should always be working strengthen our personal convictions, to send our roots deeper into the soil.  It surprises me — it surprised me as a bishop — to see how many people fail… Read more

    In his important book Religion of a Different Color, Paul Reeve recounts an interesting episode involving Brigham Young:   An early mixed-race (Black and American Indian) member of the Church named William McCary — a rather tenuous and somewhat erratic and even unbalanced fellow, as it turned out, who ultimately didn’t endure faithfully to the end — had encountered racial prejudice among some Church members.   In response to this, President Young counseled the Saints to “use the man… Read more

    “Did the New Zealand Shooter Change the Cultural Script?  In livestreaming the massacre, he may have created the next innovation in the mass-killing contagion.”   ***   It hardly needs to be said that I’m not a Clintonista.  I’ve never voted for either Bill or Hillary, and I never will.  Nor am I any kind of special fan of their daughter, Chelsea.  But this is flatly absurd:   “Students At New Zealand Vigil Confront Chelsea Clinton: You ‘Stoked’… Read more

    There has, quite understandably, been a huge amount of coverage of the recent dedication of the Rome Italy Temple.  But another temple is about to be dedicated.  This one is in the Congo.  One of the leaders of the Interpreter Foundation is there, and he will be supplying information about the new temple and about the members of the Church whom it will serve.  Here is his first installment:   The Kinshasa DR Congo Temple: A Personal Perspective… Read more

    Matthew 12:43-45 Compare Luke 11:24-26   One of the things that this passage says to me, sadly, is that the condition of someone who’s once been converted but then abandons his or her covenants and relapses into “worldly” ways is very likely to be worse than it was before that first conversion.   I regret to say that I’ve seen precisely such a phenomenon in more than a few cases.   It’s very depressing, but it no longer… Read more

    Christian Anfinsen (1916-1995) earned his doctorate in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1943.  At various points, he taught chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania (where he earned his master’s degree) and at Harvard (for seven years) and  worked as a researcher at Denmark’s Carlsberg University, the Heart Institute of National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and the National Institute of Arthritis, Metabolism, and Digestive Diseases; and served as a professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University from 1982 until his… Read more

    Here’s a moving item from CNN:   “In photos: World reacts to New Zealand terror attack”   If you scroll down through the photographs, you’ll find one that shows Judy Gilliland at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles.  With her name in mind, here’s an item by Tad Walch that appeared in the 27 November 2017 issue of the Deseret News:   “Dodger Dogs, Mormons and Muslims: One couple’s moral authority builds interfaith bridges”   ***… Read more

    Matthew 12:22-30 Mark 3:22-27 Compare 9:32-34; Luke 11:14-15, 17-23; John 7:20; 8:48; 8:52; 10:20   I’ve written in the past about what I call “New Age anti-Mormonism.”  It’s the sort of anti-Mormonism associated with such zany madcaps as Ed Decker and Bill Schnoebelen.   New Age anti-Mormonism is more than a little crazy, but, in a way, I respect it.   Why?   Because it recognizes that some elements of the story of the Restoration are very difficult to… Read more

    On Wednesday night, my wife and I attended a Utah Opera performance of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”).  It’s the opera that I know best; my wife felt that she needed to ask me not to sing along.  It was a solid performance, though not my favorite:  I prefer Sarastro as an imagined Egyptian priest, not as a 1960s hippie guru.  And his beard reminded me of George Clooney’s as one of the Soggy Bottom Boys in… Read more

    Wikipedia defines “quantum entanglement” as “a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance—instead, a quantum state must be described for the system as a whole.”   Here’s the second paragraph of that Wikipedia article:   “Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization, performed on entangled particles, are found… Read more