It’s public knowledge now that Elder L. Tom Perry of the Council of the Twelve is terminally ill:   http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/elder-l-tom-perry-thanks-members-and-friends-as-health-worsens   I won’t pretend to have been closer to Elder Perry and his wife than I really am.  We weren’t regular companions or close friends.   But my wife and I have come to know them a bit over the past few years in, for us, a special way, and we’ve been deeply, personally, saddened at his illness.... Read more

    I’ve never participated in one of these, nor even attended one.  But it does sound very, very good:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419032/best-conference-world-john-fund   In the meantime, of course, I’m quite partial to this conference, closer to home:   http://freedomfest.com   I’ve spoken at it twice before, I think — maybe three times, but don’t think so — and will be speaking there again this year.   Posted from Berlin, Germany     Read more

    There’s a great deal in this article that strikes me as absolutely true and insightful:   http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150528-how-to-learn-30-languages   I don’t profess to be a hyperglot, but I’ve noticed that my personality does indeed change a bit when, for example, I’m speaking German or Arabic.  I can’t become fully Arab.  That would be a bridge too far for me under the best of circumstances, and, anyway, by reason of appearance alone, I could never pass for an Arab.  But... Read more

    It’s not, I have to candidly admit, at the top of my priority list — not even my priority list for interreligious dialogue — but I, personally, would enjoy engaging in serious conversation with serious and informed Episcopalians/Anglicans.   I could learn a lot from it, and, I suspect, so could they.   Anyway, here’s an Episcopalian who’s calling for such dialogue:   http://livingchurch.org/covenant/?p=5895   Posted from Berlin, Germany   Read more

    Did you notice that it’s Friday today?   If you didn’t, the appearance of a new article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture should remind you:   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/the-great-and-terrible-judgments-of-the-lord-destruction-and-disaster-in-3-nephi-and-the-geology-of-mesoamerica/   Regular as clockwork.   Posted from Berlin, Germany   Read more

    Somebody has gone about town putting highly literate graffiti on the stones of Berlin — at least along one branch of the River Spree near the Museumsinsel.  There are quotes from Brecht, Yeats, Goethe, and many others.   I like the one above, by an author that I didn’t recognize:  “The people who make the world worse never take a day off.”   And some of them, it seems to me, are especially active online.   Posted from... Read more

    I learned yesterday that Berliners refer to the Bundeskanzleramt, the office of the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, as “Angela’s Waschmaschine.”   This is plainly a demeaning and sexist allusion to the gender of the current occupant of that office, Angela Merkel.   And that’s not all.  They call the headquarters of her political party “Angela’s Bügeleisen” (her “iron”).   I can imagine the howls of radical feminists in America.  Are such nicknames an attempt to... Read more

    We spent some of today simply riding around Berlin on a bus, having a look at the city as a whole.  We passed by such places as “Checkpoint Charlie,” the former headquarters of Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the enormous “Tiergarten,” and so forth.   We paid a visit to the Friedrichstadtkirche, the church built on the Gendarmenmarkt for the exiled French Huguenots, and were pleased to hear a performance of an organ piece by Dietrich... Read more

    “My own suspicion,” wrote the British geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane (d. 1964), “is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”   “If you think you understand quantum mechanics,” the late Nobel Physics laureate Richard Feynman is said to have quipped, “you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”   Have a go at this one:   http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/may/26/do-atoms-going-through-a-double-slit-know-if-they-are-being-observed   Posted from Berlin, Germany     Read more

    “Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.”  (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)   Posted from Berlin, Germany     Read more