Every week, the Deseret News publishes a 736-to-739-word-long display of vicious ad hominem attacks, shameless lies, and mean-spirited personal insults from me. (With those descriptions, I summarize the work of a number of my anonymous online chroniclers.) Today’s iteration of this shameful series of columns has now appeared:
“King Mosiah and human equality”
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We had lunch with friends from Arizona at a nearby Mexican restaurant, and then returned for the afternoon sessions of today’s FairMormon conference.
This conference is a chance for me to meet with friends and with colleagues who attend, sometimes from relatively distant places, and certain important “business” matters need to be discussed. (There are some pretty big things on the horizon, and some important decisions that must be made.) So, unfortunately, I missed a substantial portion of Michael Ash’s “After the Manner of Their Language: The Key to Wisdom.” But the part that I did hear was, as Mike’s presentations typically are, insightful and thought-provoking.
I look forward to watching the video and reading the transcript, and I hope that it will reach a wide audience.
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While passing through the book display area after lunch, I was handed two copies of the new book Perspectives on Mormon Theology: Apologetics, edited by Blair G. Van Dyke and Loyd Isao Ericson:
I have a contribution in it, but I look forward to examining the rest of the volume. I’m pretty sure that there are things in it that I’ll like very much, and other things with which I’ll strongly disagree.
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It was fun to visit briefly (again) with Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Jr., a prominent Evangelical apologist, who is attending the conference.
(I flatly forgot to snarl at him.)
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Dr. Matthew Bowen, of Brigham Young University-Hawaii, has been a very valuable contributor to Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture.
So it was a pleasure to see him here, and to listen to his presentation — closely related to his work in Interpreter — on “Semitic Semiotics: The Symbolic, Prophetic, and Narratological Power of Names in Ancient Scripture.”
He offered a tour of Hebrew wordplays in the Hebrew Bible, the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, the Book of Moses, and the Book of Mormon.
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“If Christians could be trained to to provide solid evidence for what they believe and good answers to unbelievers’ questions and objections, then the perception of Christians would slowly change. Christians would be seen as thoughtful people to be taken seriously rather than as emotional fanatics or buffoons. The gospel would be a real alternative for people to embrace.” (William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision, 18)
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“A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.” (John Calvin)
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