(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
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Here are some new items that have recently gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
Nibley Lectures: Time Vindicates the Prophets — Introduction
From 7 March 1954 to 17 October in 1954, Hugh Nibley delivered a series of thirty weekly lectures on KSL Radio that were also published as pamphlets. The series, called “Time Vindicates the Prophets,” was given in answer to those who were challenging the right of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to call themselves Christians.
All thirty recordings are available immediately in the Complete Bibliography for Hugh Nibley (CBHN) at https://interpreterfoundation.org/bibliographies/hugh-w-nibley/lectures/
I’m really excited about having these lectures up online. They are superb, thought-provoking, and, I think, important. Nibley at his best. I once listened to all of them on cassette tapes while doing a solo drive from our home in Orem to a destination in Berkeley, California. I finished the last of them mere minutes before reaching the end of my drive.
The Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Old Testament Lesson 26, “Thy Kingdom Shall Be Established for Ever,” on 2 Samuel 5–7; 11–12; 1 Kings 3; 8; 11, features Bruce Webster, Mike Parker, and Kris Frederickson. It was extracted from the 15 May 2022 broadcast of Interpreter Radio, but the complete show may be heard at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-May-15-2022/. In fact, now that you’ve mentioned it, the Interpreter Radio Show can be heard live each week on Sunday evenings, from 7 to 9 PM (MDT) on K-TALK, AM 1640. If that fails, or if, for some reason, that option is repugnant to you, you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.
Jonn Claybaugh has kindly contributed another of his concise notes for the students and teachers and families who are following the Sunday curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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My ongoing angry obsession with the FX/Hulu miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven has manifested itself most recently in the fact that McKay Coppins has just published a very good essay in The Atlantic about that recent production by Dustin Lance Black and Andrew Garfield. I must be extremely upset:
“Under the Banner of Hulu: A buzzy new true-crime series advances an old, insidious idea—that Mormons are a threat to the American project.”
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And I’ll probably be incensed and obsessed with this one, too!
“Ex-FLDS Women Describe Horrific Loss Of Freedom, Eventual Escape In ‘Keep Sweet’”
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These articles represent a thoroughly lamentable trend:
“Pro-Abortion Rights Protesters Interrupt Joel Osteen Church Service”
“As We Await SCOTUS Decision On Abortion, Press Avoids News About Church Vandalism”
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)
I first visited the glorious Wieskirche, a pilgrimage church that stands essentially by itself out in a lush green meadow surrounded by forest, in 1970. (The German word Wies means “meadow.”) I’ve been back at least half a dozen times since then. So we took our group there today, as well.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)
This time, though, was different. I’ve never had a local guide or lecturer at the Wieskirche; apart from that very first time, I’ve never visited the Wieskirche with a group. But, this time, a local woman who identified herself as the music director for the Wieskirche gave a lecture about the church (auf Deutsch; our German guide translated it into English for our group) and then, wonderfully, sang and played the church’s pipe organ. Her first piece was Johann Sebastian Bach’s peerless Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which has been one of my absolute favorite pieces of music since I first encountered it as a high school student (possibly in my German class but most memorably in Disney’s Fantasia). It was, by the way, interesting to hear the music of Bach, who is surely one of the very most Protestant of German composers, played in what is certainly one of the most exuberantly Catholic of all German churches.
Amusingly, after she finished her presentation and as we were getting up and preparing to exit the church, the organ began to play a very powerful and well-executed version of “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” I look up trying to see who was playing. I looked around to see who was missing from our group. (We have a retired Utah State University professor of music history along with us, to name one potential suspect. I made some remarks today on the bus about Richard Wagner, his operas, and his relationship with King Ludwig II of Bavaria, and he kindly supplemented them with some very insightful music-historical additions.) It turned out that another Latter-day Saint group had entered the church, and it was a woman of their number. I talked to her afterward. She had simply asked whether she might be allowed to play the organ, and, astoundingly, the church’s music director had said “Yes!” The Latter-day Saint woman had, her husband told me, played the Tabernacle organ, the Conference Center organ, and the organ in Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine. Her level of experience on big pipe organs was pretty obvious. Then, a few minutes later, a man from that same Latter-day Saint group played “As I Have Loved You.” Really nice.
After enjoying lunch about fifty feet from the entrance to the Wieskirche, we took our group past the castles of Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau into the town of Füssen, where we gave them about two and a half or three hours to walk around the old pedestrian area in its heart. Some went to the town’s medieval fortress. We spent almost all of our time, along with a number of others, in Füssen’s surprisingly interesting museum, which occupies the site of the formerly very rich and powerful monastery of St. Mang or St. Magnus.
Posted from Buching, Halblech, Bavaria, Germany
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