The spirit of Joseph Smith’s private letters, which were never intended to be published, seems to manifest his sincerity.   For example, detained at an inn in Greenville, Indiana, in June 1832, while his traveling companion, Newel Whitney, recovered from a badly broken leg, depressed at news that his brother Hyrum had lost a child and also by the fact that he had received no recent letter from his wife, the Prophet wrote a note to Emma in... Read more

    The critics’ responses to my weekly column are pretty predictable, on the whole, but the attacks today offer something fresh:   Although I’m accustomed to being criticized every week by members of the League of the Militant Godless, the comments this morning opened with an attack from a Heartlander!   http://www.deseretnews.com/user/comments/865636937/Western-Missouri-as-a-holy-land.html     Read more

    Rather disappointing news out of Israel, regarding a site that all LDS tour groups and students visit, to say nothing of the many other Christian tourists who come to the Holy Land.   It seems that the Israeli Tax Authority insists on specific political motivation in its definition of terrorism.  But that seems to me not entirely sustainable.   I hope that the Catholic appeal of this decision is heard and granted.  I rather expect that it will... Read more

      Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783), a native of my beloved Switzerland, is widely considered to have been the foremost mathematician of the eighteenth century.   Euler’s identity or Euler’s equation, shown above, has been identified in at least one survey of mathematicians as the most beautiful of all equations, because of the simple elegance of the way in which it relates the constants e (for Euler’s number, the base of natural logarithms), i (the imaginary unit, which satisfies the equation i2 = −1)... Read more

    Joseph Smith’s honesty and sincerity shines in his personal writings.  Judgments on such a matter must necessarily remain subjective, but a few passages taken almost randomly from documents in Joseph Smith’s own handwriting, documents never intended for publication, should give a glimpse of his personality and character.  For instance, the very first entry in his diary reads, in its entirety, as follows: Joseph Smith Jrs Book for Record Baught on the 27th of November 1832 for the purpose... Read more

    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