Back in January 2018, David Grandy, now an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University and the author, previously, of books on such topics as Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization (2003), The Speed of Light: Constancy and Cosmos (2009), and Everyday Quantum Reality (2010), dropped off at my office a new, self-published book of his entitled Worlds Without Number: An LDS Perspective on Infinity.   I’ll be down in the San Diego area for several days in April, in connection with… Read more

    While reorganizing books in a part of my library — and, truth be told, while looking for a particular book, though thus far in vain — I came across my copy of F. F. Bruce’s classic New Testament History (New York: Doubleday-Galilee, 1980), and, on a whim, decided to re-read it.  It’s been years and years since I read it and, this being a New Testament year for the curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day… Read more

    This blog’s resident atheist commentator likes to link theists to horrific world-historical violence, as if all or most war and genocide were driven by religion and as if irreligious people and militant atheists had never soiled their hands with such misbehavior and as if even most so-called “wars of religion” weren’t motivated largely or at least to a significant degree by quite this-worldly factors.  The stance is historically ridiculous, of course, and that fact has been pointed out… Read more

    Matthew 9:18-26 Mark 5:21-43 Luke 8:40-56   These passages are interesting, structurally, because of the way in which they enclose an account of the healing of a woman with a hemorrhage (which I’ve already briefly discussed here) within the story of the healing of the daughter of Jairus.   Quite a few years ago, I published a column in the Deseret News on Carl Bloch’s wonderful painting of the moment just before Jesus raised the little girl from the… Read more

    Seven years ago, this blog was still new.  On 23 March 2012, perhaps the worst single day of my life — in what would go on to be the worst year of my life, thus far — I posted the following words:   My dear brother — my only sibling, but, strictly speaking, my half-brother (we didn’t even share last names), though we never thought of ourselves as half-brothers — died of a sudden heart attack just a couple of… Read more

    I don’t know whether I’ve told this story here before.  Probably.  But I occasionally use this blog — sorry! — as a depository for autobiographical fragments, so I’m going to record the episode:   Once, many years ago, when we were visiting Upper Egypt — which, in local parlance, means the southern part of the country, because it’s upstream on the Nile (which flows northward toward the Mediterranean) and also, accordingly, somewhat higher than the northern area of… Read more

    The other day, I posted a blog entry about my own very occasional and very amateur (and very armchair or, perhaps better, very car-seat) interest in geology:   Plainly, one of the readers of this blog — although, like me, he isn’t a trained or professional geologist — is a much more serious amateur geologist than I am.  Here is a blog that he maintains:   Wanderlusting the Jemez: Geological adventures in the Jemez Mountains and surrounding areas… Read more

    Hot off the metaphorical press, two articles have appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:   “An Approach to History”   Abstract: When researching and evaluating historical information, it is easy to come across things that may lead to a crisis of faith. Some of those crises may lead individuals to leave the Church and actively proselytize against it. It is much better when dealing with historical issues to approach them from a standpoint of charity,… Read more

    Luke 8:19-21 Compare Matthew 12:46-50;Mark 3:31-35; John 15:14   The take-away here, I suppose, isn’t some supposed denigration of his family, or of the family generally, but the indication that Jesus had brothers.  (Presumably half-brothers.)   This quite clearly seems to work against the idea of Mary’s perpetual virginity, which has become dogma among Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.   We had a speaker on campus several years back, George Zervos, an Eastern Orthodox priest (I think) who… Read more