I happen to feel passionately about the importance of reading old books and foreign books, and eating foreign foods, and traveling to unfamiliar places.  I think it’s essential to encounter different things and different ideas.   At Columbia University, though, some seem to feel that the most important thing is to keep students intellectually safe and unchallenged:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419025/columbia-students-triggered-old-books-are-ones-who-need-them-most-ian-tuttle   “The past,” L. P. Hartley famously wrote, “is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”   Plainly, some... Read more

    For better or for worse, today’s specimen of my weekly Deseret News column has now been published:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865630003/Six-evangelical-convictions-and-Latter-day-Saints.html   Posted from Darmstadt, Germany     Read more

    The morning session of the two-day FairMormon conference, which began today, featured presentations in English (with simultaneous German translation) by Terryl Givens, Fiona Givens, and Sharon Eubank, along with opening remarks by the stake president of Darmstadt and Elder Axel Leimer of the Seventy.  I’ve already posted a couple of short notes from it.   The afternoon session consisted of three presentations in German (with simultaneous English translation).   The first, by Rene Krywult of Vienna, focused on... Read more

    We’re listening to Sharon Eubank right now, talking about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being “a woman’s church.”   She’s a very good speaker.   I want to mention a simple remark from Elder Axel Leimer’s opening remarks this morning.  (He’s the local Area Authority Seventy.)   He told of a Church conference in which one of the speakers was asked what advice should be given to Latter-day Saints whose faith has been negatively impacted by... Read more

    A nice metaphor from the presentation given here this morning in Darmstadt by Terryl and Fiona Givens:   They actually used the rose window from Chartres Cathedral, as seen above.  Unfortunately, I haven’t come up with a useable photo of that window from the outside, so I’ll use a rose window from the cathedral at Strasbourg to relay their point (very summarily):     How beautiful that window looks from within the cathedral!   But look at it... Read more

    Jana Riess, a communicant Latter-day Saint who (for want of a more precise description; you’ll have at least some sense of what I mean) leans leftward and with whom, on several issues, I disagree, apparently receives comments from believing Latter-day Saints that she sometimes perceives as “nasty.”   http://janariess.religionnews.com/2015/06/02/mormon-nastygrams-and-the-abomination-of-homosexuality/   I regret this.   Our “communications” as Latter-day Saints — both in the modern sense and in the old King James sense — should be Christlike, should manifest our... Read more

    I’m grateful to A. Keith Thompson for bringing this blog, moderated by a colleague of his at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia, to my attention:   http://www.e-ir.info/category/blogs/religiongap/   Posted from Darmstadt, Germany         Read more

      There are souls in this world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere and of leaving it behind them when they go.  (“Jean Paul”)   Be one of them.   Posted from Darmstadt, Germany     Read more

    Meh.   Who cares?   Fairness shmairness.   http://dailysignal.com/2015/06/01/emails-raise-questions-of-bias-in-case-against-bakers-who-denied-service-for-same-sex-wedding/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=thffacebook   Government rules weren’t made to protect grossly evil people like these so-called bakers.   They deserve to be ruined, run out of business.  They should be grateful that that’s all that’s being done to them.   Right?   (Thanks to Cassandra Hedelius for bringing this item to my notice.)   And, while we’re at it, you might enjoy this little story, according to which an opponent of redefining... Read more

    Before leaving Nuremberg this morning, we spent a bit of time in the Nürnberger Altstadt, the “Old City.”  In particular, we devoted a couple of hours to the home of the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, who has long been among my favorite artists.  (I’m still grateful to my high school German teacher, Lenore Smith, who introduced me to him.)       Then we got on the road westward.  Apart from stopping off to see the... Read more