From Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 32-33.   1.   The South American “glass knifefish” has been called “basically a computer with fins.”   Why?   It uses a kind of biological technology, something like radar, to navigate the rivers and streams in which it lives.  Gary Rose and Walter Heiligenberg, who have studied the glass knifefish, explain that “signals bouncing off an object are received by... Read more

    “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Edith Wharton (1862-1937) Read more

    Terrible things are happening in Europe right now, and there’s a lot of desperate human need.   My instincts, like those of most decent people, make me very strongly inclined to help, and to support government actions that will help — and perhaps all the more so because I’ve spent a large chunk of my life either in or reading, thinking, and writing about some of the areas concerned.  Not merely in the Middle East but in Europe.  ... Read more

    “No, sir!  I was not under any hallucination, nor was I deceived!  I saw with these eyes and I heard with these ears!  I know whereof I speak!’   Thus David Whitmer, when a group that included Joseph Smith III interviewed him at Richmond, Missouri, in July 1884.  One of them, a non-believer named “Col. Giles,” asked him if it were possible that he “had been mistaken and had simply been moved upon by some mental disturbance, or... Read more

    http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2015/09/14/should-mormons-be-considered-fellow-christians/37755     Read more

    An interesting little item from Neal Rappleye:   http://www.studioetquoquefide.com/2015/09/facts-are-stubborn-things-mesoamerican.html     Read more

    “Whoever is happy will make others happy too.” “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!” “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” “I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”   “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned... Read more

    One of the distinctives of the constitutional government of the United States is that the functions of head of state and head of government are combined in the American presidency.  The president of the United States is, in a sense, the equivalent of both the United Kingdom’s monarch and the United Kingdom’s prime minister, or of the president and prime minister of France or Germany or Israel.  That is, he is both the ceremonial personal symbol of the... Read more

    William Smith, the younger brother of the Prophet Joseph Smith, led an occasionally tempestuous life and, although he had served in the Twelve and as patriarch to the Church, was excommunicated late in 1845.  He never returned, although he affiliated himself from time to time with various offshoots of the Restoration movement.   Roughly two weeks before his death in Iowa in 1893, William, then eighty-two, was asked by an interviewer, “Did not you doubt Joseph’s testimony [about the... Read more

    http://www.ldsliving.com/20-Things-You-Didn-t-Know-About-Church-History/s/79974?utm_source=ldsliving&utm_medium=email     Read more