Christmas shopping and Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations, yes.   But we’re also drawing near the end of the year, when many people consider whether and where to make tax-exempt charitable donations.   There are lots and lots of worthy causes.   My wife and I have a few favorites, including the Liahona Children’s Foundation and Operation Underground Railroad.   But I hope that a few out there will also remember the Interpreter Foundation.   The Interpreter Foundation continues... Read more

    I think this article has a point, though I don’t think that the case is quite as clear as the author tries to make it:   http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/11/16/4352803.htm   ISIS and other such groups have, for example, claimed explicitly Islamic legitimation for what they do far more consistently and intensely than the Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar have clothed themselves in Buddhist doctrine.   I think they’re wrong, and that they’re abusing and defaming their own claimed religious faith, but... Read more

    Incidentally, please note the Christian gesture of prayer in the image (from a sixth-century Egyptian ivory box) accompanying the article to which I linked here.   What does it have in common with the third-century image above?   Posted from Istanbul, Turkey Read more

    I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.  (Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)   Posted from Istanbul (formerly Constantinople or “New Rome”), in Turkey     Read more

    One of my favorite writers, Victor Davis Hanson, offers a rather sharp critique of contemporary higher education in the United States:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427152/university-protestors-demands   For what it’s worth, incidentally, he’s hardly opposed to universities and colleges in principle, let alone to the life of the mind; he holds a doctorate in classics from Stanford and has published extensively on ancient Greek history and other topics.   Posted from Istanbul, Turkey     Read more

    After the conference meetings today, we went out to dinner at the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Arcadia Blue with some of the Latter-day Saints here, including senior missionaries (among them Kent and Gayle Brown) and Sharon Eubank, who dropped in to speak at the conference here on her way back from refugee camps in Syria and Iraq.   The food — Turkish cuisine — was okay.  (Last night’s was much better, at the Develi Restaurant.  But then,... Read more

    An interesting article by Ben Spackman about Ben Carson and the history of “creation science”:   http://religionandpolitics.org/2015/11/17/ben-carson-science-and-seventh-day-adventists/   Posted from Istanbul, Turkey     Read more

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11995928/What-Daniel-meant-to-the-persecuted-Egyptians.html   Posted from Istanbul, Turkey     Read more

      The story behind one of the most popular painkillers now available without a prescription:   http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34798438   Posted from Istanbul, Turkey     Read more

    The Mormons are deeply concerned only with what they accept as scripture.  Non-Mormons, raised in the tradition of the infallible Bible, are unable to conceive of a man’s being a prophet and at the same time a fallible mortal. They persist in thinking  .  .  .  that the discovery of any slightest flaw in Joseph Smith’s character or his work must necessarily bring the whole structure of Mormonism down in ruins. It isn’t that way at all. Hugh... Read more