I hope to see you at the annual FAIR conference this week. It begins tomorrow (Wednesday) and will continue through my sorry performance late on Friday afternoon or relatively early on Friday evening. *** Last night, my wife and I shared a meal with sixteen of our closest friends in a restaurant in Draper and then attended a performance of Silent Sky at the Hale Centre Theatre in Sandy. As far as I could tell, all... Read more
Yesterday was a day that will live in infamy. (In my little personal history, anyway.) I needed to be in Irvine, California, for a Sunday fireside at 4:30 PM, Pacific time. My usual practice, if I need to be somewhere for a lecture or something, is to travel to the location at least the day before. I don’t want to risk having everything overturned by a flight delay. However, because of my long-scheduled (and multiply rescheduled) interview... Read more
The latest in the Interpreter Foundation’s series of short-video features relating to the witnesses of the Book of Mormon has now gone up: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon — Insights Episode 15: Are Prophets Perfect? God uses human beings as his leaders on the earth. Do these people need to be perfect to be prophets, seers, and revelators? This is the fifteenth in a series compiled from from the many interviews conducted during the course of the... Read more
A trio of new articles went up today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. We hope that you’ll both enjoy them and find them helpful. They are: “Witnessing to the New Witness,” written by Brant A. Gardner Review of Robert A. Rees, A New Witness to the World (Salt Lake City: By Common Consent Press, 2020). 244 pages. $9.95 (paperback). Abstract: Robert A. Rees has written about the Book of Mormon for over sixty years. In... Read more
We’re just back from attending a performance, with friends, of Singing in the Rain at the Hale Centre Theatre in Sandy, Utah. It was extremely well done. The whole cast was good. The leads were strong. David Paul Smith did remarkably well with both the singing and the dancing of Gene Kelly’s famous “Singing in the Rain” number, which he performed under a real shower falling from the theater ceiling above him. And we were all absolutely smitten... Read more
For what it’s worth, I’m scheduled to speak at the 2022 Orange Country LDS Singles Conference this coming Sunday, 31 July 2022, at 4:30 PM. I believe that I’ll be holding forth in the Irvine Stake Center at 23 Lake Road in Irvine, California. *** Several times, I’ve been confronted with an interesting question: “Can there be any valid criticisms of the Church?” I’ve posted a response to the challenge at least twice, and I’ve been... Read more
Nibley Lectures: Time Vindicates the Prophets — Easter and the Prophets Between 7 March 1954 and 17 October 1954, Hugh Nibley delivered a series of thirty weekly lectures on KSL Radio that were also published as pamphlets. The series, called Time Vindicates the Prophets, was given in answer to those who were challenging the right of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to call themselves Christians. This lecture was reprinted in Immortality: Famed Discourses on Eternal... Read more
These new items went up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation earlier today: Interpreter Radio Show — June 26, 2022 For the first half of this episode of the storied Interpreter Radio Show which has now (shorn of commercial and other interruptions) been processed and archived for your enjoyment, regular monthly hosts Steve Densley, Matthew Bowen, and Mark Johnson are joined by Spencer Kraus for a discussion of Spencer’s recent Interpreter review of two books by... Read more
I wonder if you noticed this item from a little while back: Haaretz: “Archaeologists Reveal Oldest Inscription in Jerusalem: A Canaanite Curse: Brought to you by the letter representing the discovery of the earliest word, ‘the’: Somebody among the Jebusites really wanted the governor of Jerusalem to die” It doesn’t, alas, speak especially well of human nature that the oldest inscription recovered from Jerusalem thus far is a (pre-Israelite) curse. And it’s not only in Jerusalem... Read more
You’ve probably already seen the news regarding the discovery of what may be an authentic daguerreotype image of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Here’s a basic article about the find that includes an official response on the matter from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “Does an image of Joseph Smith exist? What one descendant found in a forgotten family heirloom” And here’s a short piece about the finding that contains a few details that... Read more
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