If you get the chance, watch BYU Television’s film about the creation of G. F. Händel’s great oratorio Messiah:   http://byu.imodules.com/redirect.aspx?linkID=60353&eid=1273091   You’ll never hear the aria “He was despised” quite the same way again.   Even the New York Times gave the documentary a reasonably positive review:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/arts/television/the-making-of-handels-messiah-on-byutv.html?_r=1.     Read more

    The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins     Read more

    A new book, from a non-Mormon with no obvious prior connection to Mormon studies, about a one-time Mormon and long-time Mormon dissident in the mid-nineteenth century:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428154/john-miller-polygamist-king-excerpt     Read more

    Over the years, I’ve enjoyed seeing much of Los Angeles destroyed in Earthquake, drowned in lava from Mount Wilshire in Volcano, and collapsing into the sea in 2012.   Now, in this map from the future, you can see the results of a more gentle catastrophe, after all of the world’s ice sheets have melted and Al Gore has long been unable to fly into LAX in his private jet to warn the world of the perils of global warming.... Read more

    Luke 23:6-12 Compare Matthew 27:12; Mark 15:3-4; John 19:9   1.   Jesus in these accounts is a bit like the proverbial hot potato.  Each official is trying to pass him off to the next one, hoping that the other will handle the situation.   2.   There is real irony in the statement, at Luke 6:12, that Herod and Pilate were reconciled after a period of bad relations by their shared involvement in a gross — and,... Read more

    Academia, alas, can be a virtual zoo of absurdity:   http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/12/a-college-s-war-on-christmas-parties.html         Read more

    The first recording of Do You Hear What I Hear? was made by the Harry Simeone Chorale shortly after Thanksgiving 1962, and sold so well during that Christmas season that Bing Crosby eventually recorded it also — making it, by means of his star power, a mega-hit.   Here is that very first choral recording:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmYIbKqH45A   The song had been composed only a month or so before, during the thirteen days of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when — and... Read more

    The thirteenth and last installment in the “Social” portion of the 2015 Christmas campaign “A Savior is Born”:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxZ2sScEPWE&feature=youtu.be?mdcid=10000     Read more

    I’m pleased and proud that the Church is so deeply involved in matters of religious liberty, worldwide:   http://www.mormonnewsroom.org.uk/article/freedom-of-religion-european-union     Read more

    ““No atheist that I know,” an atheist commentator on my blog writes, “would blow himself up in a crowded marketplace for some blithering nonsense about an afterlife.”   Atheist, meet facts:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865632373/Is-suicide-bombing-in-the-Middle-East-really-motivated-by-religion.html?pg=all     Read more