I’m not at all sure why, but, although I’ve visited Scotland on several previous occasions (including that wonderful week in my early twenties at St. Andrews) and although I have an unaccountable affection for the Celtic cross, last year was the first time that I had really felt the pull of my Scots ancestral line. I’ve long had a deep attachment to Norway, and I’m an Anglophile already, without regard to family heritage — though happily I have... Read more
I have an anthology back home of the worst poems in the English language. It’s one of my most treasured possessions. Like Peter Schickele’s Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach, and Kehlog Albran’s The Profit, it has brought tears of laughter to my eyes whenever I’ve opened it to sup from its pages. So it was an unexpected thrill today, while visiting Grayfriars Kirkyard during our walking tour of Edinburgh, to be shown the grave — or, anyway, a... Read more
Here’s a nice piece by Jeff Lindsay that I commend to your attention: “Cherishing the Book of Mormon’s Teachings on the Fairness of God” *** I’ve posted several items recently on what is sometimes called “the hard problem of consciousness,” on the question of what subjective awareness is and how consciousness arises (if it does) from the physical brain. Some reductionists, faced with what seems to be an intractable problem, perhaps an insoluble one, have taken... Read more
We drove through Aberdeen today — we’ve been in Aberdeenshire pretty much the whole time that we’ve been in Scotland — and it got me to thinking about the great James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who was a Scot — born in Edinburgh — and who was affiliated for a few years with the University of Aberdeen. I make no claim of originality for what follows. I’ve simply culled some things from the Wikipedia article on Maxwell that interested... Read more
We’re now well into “Pride Month,” so it’s perhaps appropriate to register a trio of recent dissents from the now-dominant orthodoxy. Here’s one that comes from the great Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and, incidentally, a good friend to Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “A Return to Fidelity: Princeton Professor’s Brilliant Move to Flip ‘Pride Month’ on... Read more
I published this column early this morning in Meridian Magazine: “Prominent Lutheran Leader has “Holy Envy“ for Baptisms for the Dead” And two new articles went up at noon today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “The Dance of Reader and Text: Salomé, the Daughter of Jared, and the Regal Dance of Death,” written by Alan Goff Abstract: Modern readers too often and easily misread modern assumptions into ancient texts. One such notion is that when the... Read more
With very slight modification, the lines below were originally published in the Deseret News on 25 June 2016 as a column by William Hamblin and Daniel Peterson, based on materials that I had just read during a visit to the Cathedral of St. Giles and the house of John Knox in Edinburgh, Scotland: The name and legacy of John Knox are inseparably connected with Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh, although important events in his very dramatic life... Read more
But, first: It almost never happens anymore, but, well, something has gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation — Conference Talks: “A theory! A theory! We have already got a theory, and there cannot be any more theories!” This presentation was originally given by Royal Skousen on Saturday, 14 March 2015, at the Interpreter Foundation’s conference on “Exploring the Complexities in the English Language of the Book of Mormon”: Three common views regarding the translation of... Read more
I’ve had little time during the past few days to write or to blog, which will likely continue. And, for the moment, jet lag has left me even less mentally capable than I usually am. So I’m intending to occasionally reuse a few prior entries over the next while. This one, for example, is a modified and somewhat expanded version of something that I wrote in September 2022 while sailing on the North Sea toward Edinburgh: We spent... Read more
I have, I’m happy to say, finally developed a rudimentary ability to sleep on airplanes over the last few years — if conditions are precisely optimal. So I logged a solid forty-five minutes of slumber, accompanied by several incursions into selected country and classical music, a couple of movies, and, of course, reading. My reading focus was on Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Barbara Jones Brown, Vengeance is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York:... Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In