I failed to announce it yesterday, but a new “chapter reprint” — not, mind you, a piece pretending to be one of our new journal articles, which go up on Fridays — appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation on Wednesday: “Proper Names and Foreign Words in the Book of Abraham,” written by Stephen D. Ricks:
Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, John S. Thompson, Matthew L. Bowen, and David R. Seely. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/abraham-and-his-family.
“When Abraham sent his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac, he told him to “go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac” (Genesis 24:4). Until the latter part of the nineteenth century “Ur of the Chaldees” was understood to be an ancient city in northern Mesopotamia. But in 1862 Sir Henry Rawlinson identified Ur of the Chaldees with Tell el-Muqayyar, west of Nasiriyah in what is now Iraq. In 1927 Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the site and identified it as an ancient Sumerian site where Chaldaeans settled in the ninth century BC. Despite the discovery of tablets from Ebla that mention a city of Ur in northern Mesopotamia, the balance of scholarly opinion tends to favor an ancient site in southern Mesopotamia as the location of Ur of the Chaldees. Still, whether Abraham’s native country was in northern Mesopotamia, a region where Amorite or other archaic West Semitic languages were spoken, or near the Persian Gulf, where Akkadian or some other ancient Semitic dialect would have been spoken, Abraham’s father, Terah, moved with his family to the area in northern Mesopotamia close to Haran, where Abraham’s family (including nephews, nieces, and their descendants) lived for generations thereafter. In summary, whether northern Mesopotamia was his native land or adopted land, it became—and remained—his homeland.”
Here are some recent articles on the image, in elite media and popular culture, of my faith and church. That image leaves much to be desired:
Meridian Magazine: “Broadway’s Last Acceptable Bigotry”
In a very good January/February 2021 article for The Atlantic, where he works — “The Most American Religion: Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis. What will the third century of the faith look like?” — McKay Coppins, a Latter-day Saint, recalls an encounter connected with the musical The Book of Mormon that I’ve never forgotten: “I remember being delighted by the Church’s response. Such savvy PR! Such a good-natured gesture! See, everyone? We can take a joke! But then I met a theater critic in New York who had recently seen the musical. He marveled at how the show got away with being so ruthless toward a minority religion without any meaningful backlash. I tried to cast this as a testament to Mormon niceness. But the critic was unconvinced. “No,” he replied. “It’s because your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”” Sadly, I think that this is precisely correct.
This is from ABC New York Eyewitness News, and I couldn’t possibly be more excited: “‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County’ coming later this year: The series will follow a new group of young mothers in the OC trying to form their own answer to the #MomTok phenomenon”
“Are We Just Obsessed with Mormonism?”
Honestly, I find it difficult to fathom the apparently widespread public interest in such low and pointless dreck as The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. But then, I’m obviously not the kind of person that the people who produce it are targeting.
And now for a report on today’s activity and, more importantly, today’s fine dining and its extravagant accommodations:
As the place where we were staying in Escalante didn’t offer a complimentary breakfast, four of us headed out in one of our vehicles to find some food for the morning. We settled on Escalante Mercantile & Natural Grocery, where I had a spinach/blueberry/strawberry/banana smoothie. I liked it, partially because it wasn’t overly sweet.
We headed out of Escalante, through Bryce National Park and Panguitch, to the southbound I-15. Nearing Parowan, we noticed a sign alerting us to “the best cinnamon rolls in the West.” The passengers in the car voted to exit into Parowan and try them. Alas, though, they didn’t live up to their billing — though, conceivably, had we been able to eat them perhaps five or six days earlier, they might have.
Eventually arriving in St. George but too early to get into our motel, we scouted the St. George Tabernacle for a possible future shoot there (and were given some very helpful information by Elder Hansen in response to a question that I posed to him for this evening’s filming) and visited Brigham Young’s winter home, where we were scheduled to film in the evening after the site closed to the general public.
After a few minutes in our motel — the famously luxurious St. George Inn and Suites (which, unlike last night’s lodgings, features actual en suite showers and and toilets!) — we went for a late lunch or early dinner at the Rib & Chop House, where I enjoyed a Diet Dr. Pepper, a bowl of bison chili, and a carrot soufflé. I thought it my best meal of this entire epicurean gastronomy tour.
We filmed outside of the Brigham Young Winter Home and Office and in the home’s parlor, recording a special installment of Becoming Brigham. President Gil Gardner, who directs the Southwest Utah Historical Sites Mission, kindly kept the site open for us and stood by as we worked. We’ll release this particular episode on Monday, 1 June 2026 — Monday is our regular day for posting installments of the series — to observe Brigham Young’s 225th birthday. According to his daughter Clarissa, doughnuts and maple syrup were a favorite treat of his, so, in honor of the day, we enjoyed some doughnuts with maple syrup on camera and wished him a Happy Birthday. (For the zealous cub reporters over at the Peterson Obsession Board, who profess to be deeply concerned about my diet and my health: I myself skipped the maple syrup and I actually ate only about a quarter of one of the doughnuts.)
By the way, this interesting article recently appeared about one of the principal scholars that we’ve interviewed for the episodes on Brigham Young and race that we’ve been working on down here in Southern Utah this week: “‘An Axe for the Frozen Sea Within Us’: U Historian W. Paul Reeve Named as Presidential Societal Impact Scholar”
Finally, though, I alert you to a dreadful discovery from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: “Relief Society member champions literacy in her California community: Patience Christenson helps as Porterville Celebrates Reading event marks 25 years” Just think of all of the good that this woman might have done had she not been a religious believer!
Posted from St. George, Utah
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