This new piece went up today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Interpreting Interpreter: (Non-)Anachronisms – Writing,” written by Kyler Rasmussen:
This post is a summary of the article “Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms — Chapter 7: Records, Writing, and Language” by Matthew Roper in Volume 65 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. All of the Interpreting Interpreter articles may be seen at https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/summaries/. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https:/interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.
A video introduction to this Interpreter article is now available on all of our social media channels, including on YouTube at https://youtube.com/shorts/goEdwNmVEVw.
The Takeaway: Roper continues his examination of claimed Book of Mormon anachronisms, looking at 19 items related to records, writing, and language presented in the text. He concludes that 58% of these purported anachronisms have received subsequent confirmation in the archaeological record, with 5 items that are yet to trend toward confirmation (New World evidence of metal plates, inscriptions of Book of Mormon names and texts, and Hebrew and Egyptian inscriptions).
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
My wife and I first heard of Brent Ward when his parents were serving in Egypt as representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and he was, or was about to become, the United States Attorney for Utah. I might be mistaken, but I believe that he came through Cairo to visit his parents there. Anyway, I noticed that he had written an article for the Deseret News and, after having read it, decided to call attention to it here: “Opinion: Will we stand idly by as a son is torn from his Utah family and deported to one of the world’s most inhumane prisons? Illegal deportations can never in good conscience be brushed off as mere administrative errors or excusable violations of law. They are matters of life and death.”
I’ve been deeply disheartened by a few of the responses to the article that I’ve seen over at the Deseret News. They have reacted by saying that the government is simply enforcing the law, and that the Venezuelan family in question should have obeyed the law. I hope that I will receive no such comments in answer to my posting of Brent Ward’s article here. I know nothing of the case beyond what Brother Ward writes but, if his account of the matter is accurate, the family did obey the relevant law and in this case, the government is neither enforcing the law nor obeying it. That’s pretty much the basic point. If anybody writes to me declaring that the government is merely applying the law and that Uriel David and his family are simply criminals, I will instantly know that that person didn’t trouble himself or herself to read the article before disagreeing with it. Which is, by the way, very bad form.
Uriel David should not be forgotten.
I’m not a particular fan of Kristi Noem, who is currently serving as the United States Secretary of Homeland Security. That said, I think that the outrage over the forcible removal of Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) from a press conference that she was holding in Los Angeles is somewhat overblown.
Obviously, tackling a United States Senator, forcing him to the ground, and placing him in handcuffs for merely asking a question would seem reminiscent of a fascist dictatorship. And recent crazy suggestions that California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ought to be arrested provide an appropriately suggestive background for such reminiscences. But the actual situation doesn’t appear to be so simple.
Senator Padilla didn’t merely ask a question in his turn. He interrupted a press conference. Rather aggressively. And, although he did apparently identify himself as a member of the United States Senate, it’s possible, even likely, that, in the chaos of the moment, that his self-identification wasn’t heard by everybody. Did he really lunge toward Secretary Noem? Apparently not. But, while it’s pretty easy to reach that judgment on the basis of repeated careful viewings of multiple video recordings from various angles, arriving at a snap judgment on the matter within a split second is rather more difficult.
I’m willing to cut security personnel a little bit of slack — not an infinite amount, but some — when they’re trying to protect a cabinet secretary against somebody whom they don’t recognize but who has just shown up rather suddenly and is making a disturbance. And (let’s be honest here), the controversy that has given rise to the protests and the unrest in Los Angeles mostly centers on federal treatment of Latin Americans and their resentment of what they see as mistreatment, and here was a Latin American male coming in hot who probably seemed to be angry.
I think that both sides need to apologize for what appears to me to have been an unfortunate but not wholly mysterious misunderstanding. There are, I think, genuine grounds for concern about the centralization of power in the hands of the federal executive. There are even legitimate reasons to be worried about elements of the execution of MAGA priorities that genuinely seem (not only to others, but to me) to come uncomfortably close, in appearance if not (thus far) quite so much in substance, to the fascism of the 1930s. But the unfortunate recent incident involving Senator Alex Padilla doesn’t appear to me to rank very high among those concerns.
Here, for reference now and in the future and for those who may not be familiar with them, are the standard lyrics to “God Save the King.” They are sung to the same tune as “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”:
God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!Thy choicest gifts in store,
On him be pleased to pour;
Long may he reign.
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King!
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