http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/religious-freedom-is-fairness-for-all       Read more

    Actually, that wasn’t the most horrifying thing to me.  The most horrifying thing was the questioner’s suggestion that Muslims ought all to be deported from the United States followed by Mr. Trump’s failure to take a stand against such a bigoted and essentially fascistic proposal:   http://time.com/4039658/trump-obama-muslim/   It compares very poorly to Senator McCain’s response, in a somewhat similar case, back in 2008.   But that’s neither here nor there:  The question was appalling, and Mr. Trump’s... Read more

    “Nevertheless, just as I believe that the Book of Scripture illumines the pathway to God, so I believe that the Book of Nature, with its astonishing details – the blade of grass, the Conus cedonulli, or the resonance levels of the carbon atom – also suggest a God of purpose and a God of design. And I think my belief makes me no less a scientist.” — Owen Gingerich, former Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of... Read more

    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