Just as a reminder, these are the subjects on which I’ll be holding forth at BYU Education Week over the next few days — in my typically vicious, ad hominem, and dishonest way:   Daniel C. Peterson Traces of the Gospel in Four Great Islamic Classics Assembly Hall, Hinckley Center (HC), 1:50–2:45 p.m. T Omar Khayyam and a World without Hope W Al-Ghazali on Gaining a Testimony Th Jalal al-Din Rumi on Premortality and Our Yearning for God F Farid al-Din Attar,... Read more

    The magnificent Cassandra Hedelius, on certain recent phenomena that she calls “Mormon gnosticism”:   http://ldsmag.com/a-house-of-order-a-house-of-god-recycled-challenges-to-the-legitimacy-of-the-church/     Read more

    By now, you may be aware of the videos showing senior officials of Planned Parenthood as, over lunch with wine, they matter-of-factly discuss the dismemberment of unborn babies and the selling of their retrieved body parts — while light-heartedly referring to the “crunching” of little human bones and skulls, to adequate personal compensation for their services, and, in one case, to wanting a Lamborghini.   There’s been considerable outrage on both the Right and the Left.   On the Right, commentators... Read more

    John 7:14-39 Compare Matthew 13:54; 11:27; Mark 6:2; Luke 4:22; 10:22   Jesus revered and venerated the temple, and, when he was in Jerusalem, he did some of his most important teaching there.   Some types of Christianity claim that he rejected the temple, but this is plainly mistaken.   Several things to note in this passage.  Among them:   *  His audience notices that he manifests wisdom and insight far beyond his human education.  (7:15) *  Jesus... Read more

    Science is a wonderful thing.  Fascinating.  It’s made spectacular advances.   But it’s not practiced by hyper-rational demigods who’ve left human passions entirely behind.   See, for instance, the very human story told in Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Mariner Books, 2011).   Nor does science exist on some transcendent plane, completely divorced from the society, fashions, and culture that surround... Read more

    “As a child of God, I am greater than anything that can happen to me.”  (A. P. J. Abdul Kalam)   Read more

    “The thing that I find most inscrutable about all of the recent books and essays that have sought to give mechanistic explanations for consciousness, personality, emotions, creativity, the whole human sensorium, is how happy the authors seem about it.  They’re nearly giddy with the excitement, and so, for some reason, are many of their readers. “But for me, as Dylan sang, they’re just ‘selling postcards of the hanging.'” Curtis White, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in... Read more

    The article’s a bit of a mixed bag, but it was also a bit of a surprise:   http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/14/someone-once-tried-ben-carsons-biblical-tax-plan/   Thanks to Eric Lopez for bringing it to my notice.   Posted from Cedar City, Utah     Read more

    I couldn’t possibly agree more strongly with this article from the Australian Broadcasting Network:   http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/religionandethicsreport/the-need-for-faith-literacy-in-an-increasingly-religious-world/6685616   I’ve devoted much of my career to the cause of increasing interreligious understanding — including my conception and founding of BYU’s Islamic Translation Series and the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative as a whole, with which I was affiliated until I was ousted from it about three years ago; my teaching at BYU; two of three lecture CDs; many of my Education... Read more

    Kristine Frederickson, Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw, Benjamin McGuire, and Martin Tanner join, in the Interpreter Foundation’s 135th scripture roundtable, for a conversation about Hebrews 1-11 (corresponding to 2015 Gospel Doctrine curriculum lesson 37):   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/scripture-roundtable-135-new-testament-gospel-doctrine-lesson-37-jesus-christ-the-author-and-finisher-of-our-faith/   Posted from Cedar City, Utah   Read more