
We’re just back from a fine production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at Utah Valley University’s Noorda Center for the Performing Arts. The theater is wonderful, and we’re really, really, really pleased to have it so close to home.
On the other hand, I’ve never been a Stephen Sondheim fan, and I’m still not.
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Here are two new items on the Interpreter Foundation website from Hales Swift that are intended for students and teachers in the Gospel Doctrine classes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
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I know. I know. It’s been several days since I’ve given you any suggestions at all for your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File. I know that you’re suffering from withdrawal. That you’re miserable. I feel your pain.
So here’s a really good one that will renew your faith in the proposition that religion is an evil that should be eradicated from human society:
“#LightTheWorld Giving Machines Expand to 10 Locations During Christmas Season”
And you may need to have your faith renewed. After all, it can really shake one’s convictions of the irredeemable evil of religious belief to learn that even Richard Dawkins — Richard Dawkins! one of Christopher Hitchens’s few peers among the “New Atheists”! — is rethinking his dogma that society would be bettter off if theism were to disappear:
“Atheists sound the alarm: Decline of Christianity is seriously hurting society”
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I’ve been traveling back and forth between Utah and southern California since I was a baby. I’ve driven I-15 and its predecessors many more times than I could ever begin to count. Which means that I’ve driven past the mighty metropolis of Scipio on innumerable occasions. To the best of my recollection, though, I’ve never exited the freeway there. But, now, I might just have to do so. This headline in the Brigham Young University student newspaper really caught me by surprise:
“Scipio Petting Zoo a popular stop for tourists in Southern Utah”