Just flew in from Salt Lake City.  Less than four hours.   I spent the time reading a book by the philosopher Alvin Plantinga and, mainly, listening to a recording of Bach’s Partitas.   What would the pioneers have made of that?   Gotta run now, too.  Plane to catch.   Posted from New York City, New York     Read more

    More Americans would be willing to elect a Mormon president than an Evangelical.   Governor Romney may have had an impact, after all.   In a new “Human Freedom Index,” the United States ranks . . . twentieth.   We beat North Korea, though!   European statistics indicate that larger families are happier families.   Mormons tend  to have larger families, though, so the study must be wrong.   Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah     Read more

      Nobody seems able or willing to interfere with their barbarism and their destruction of irreplaceable cultural treasures.   “ISIS demolishes ancient monastery in central Syria with bulldozers”   And here’s a potentially nice new development:   “Military official: Early tests show traces of mustard gas agent in ISIS attack”   Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah     Read more

    This is a weird one:   https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28077-ant-knows-how-to-self-medicate-to-fight-off-fungal-infection/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2015-GLOBAL-twitter   Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah     Read more

    This weekend’s Hamblin-Peterson column in the Deseret News:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865635077/The-natural-temples-of-the-Grand-Canyon.html   It’s already irritated a pair of irritable atheists.   Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah     Read more

    http://lds.net/blog/faith/video-tour-gives-first-look-inside-newly-renovated-mexico-city-temple/?utm_source=lds.net+users&utm_campaign=aff0da6f38-Week_37_Newsletter_Aug_20_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_608611419d-aff0da6f38-86348953   Posted from Salt Lake City, Utah     Read more

    After four days of BYU Education Week lectures on Omar Khayyam, al-Ghazali, Jalal al-Din Rumi, and Farid al-Din Attar, I had another fun experience tonight:   At the kind invitation of Elder Marlin K. Jensen, formerly of the First Quorum of the Seventy and former Church Historian and Recorder, I spoke to the annual dinner for emeritus members of the Seventy here in Salt Lake City.  (They had me talk about Islam.)  It was a privilege to interact with men... Read more

    The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own. Benjamin Disraeli Salt Lake City, Utah     Read more

      This won’t end the organization.  It probably won’t even break its stride very much.  Not for now, anyway.  Still, it’s a fairly big deal:   http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/21/middleeast/isis-no2-believed-killed/index.html     Read more

    John 8:37-47   This is very forceful teaching.   Jesus is again saying that biological parentage means virtually nothing if one has the wrong spiritual “parentage.”   For people who took their special status as the “chosen people” so seriously, to be told that their real father — in this sense, the only father who actually counts — was Satan would be extraordinarily jarring and offensive.   It was meant to get their attention, and it did.  ... Read more