Jimmy Carter, who served as the 39th president of the United States, has entered hospice care. As I understand the definition and requirements of hospice care, this means that he has, at most, six months left to live, and possibly significantly less time than that. I never voted for Mr. Carter. I did not and do not consider him an effective president. I think that he was probably, at least a bit, in over his head. (An anecdote... Read more
I should have said something earlier about the physical setting of the Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, about its location: “And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them.” (Matthew 5:1-2) First of all, readers should rid their minds in this context of anything even remotely resembling the mountains of the American West, let alone the... Read more
It seems to me that the term evolution has at least three quite distinct meanings in ordinary lay English conversation, and that these three need to be carefully distinguished during conversation, lest confusion result. One meaning is “change over time.” Nobody seriously disputes this. Or, at least nobody should dispute it. People today are taller than they used to be. (Look at King Henry VIII’s armor in the Tower of London if you want to try to dispute... Read more
Two new articles went up today at noon (Utah time) on the website of the Interpreter Foundation. We hope that you’ll enjoy them: “Toward a Greater Appreciation of the Word Adieu in Jacob 7:27,” written by Godfrey J. Ellis Abstract: The phrase “Brethren, adieu” (Jacob 7:27) has been criticized over the years as an obvious anachronism in the Book of Mormon. That criticism holds no validity whatsoever, as others have pointed out, since many English words have French origins. It’s... Read more
Over the past year — and the distribution of the dates below will demonstrate that beyond any reasonable question — I’ve been sporadically and unsystematically bookmarking articles related to the subject of transgenderism. I’m cleaning out my files, and I thought that at least a few of you might be interested in one or more of these links. Some, of course, will come at me like torrents of molten lava. This is not a topic that brings out... Read more
But, first, there’s been some recent activity on the website of the Interpreter Foundation, and I should call your attention to it. Here are three new links: “Conference Talks: “Let the Beauty of the Lord our God be Upon Us”: The Role of Visual Aesthetics in Ancient Israel’s Temple Worship,” presented by Dan Belnap This talk was given at the 2014 Temple on Mount Zion Conference, sponsored by the Interpreter Foundation. Come, Follow Me — New... Read more
If you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday — and there’s really no need to raise your hand or to identify yourself; you know who you are — you very likely saw one or two of the Christian ads that ran during the game from the “He gets us” campaign. The potential audience for the ads was, I’m told, more than one hundred million people. Important as it is, and as worthy of discussion as it is, I’m... Read more
There have been a couple of polls in the news over the past week or two that touch on Latter-day Saints, and they’ve been followed by some very animated conversations about what they portend. (A substantial proportion of American Latter-day Saints are Christian nationalists? And we’re really unpopular? Aieee!) Here are a trio of links concerning the pair of polls, two of which suggest that there’s more to the stories — or, perhaps better, less to the stories... Read more
Herewith, I post another brief set of preliminary notes for (this time) a couple of chapters in my projected book on the Beatitudes. The first two entries in this littler series are “Introducing a Blog Focus for the Sabbath” and ““Blessed are the poor in spirit.”” So here, for whatever it’s worth, is my third installment: In the King James Version of the Bible, Matthew 5:4 reads as follows: “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall... Read more
I carry on now with my appropriation, for my own undoubtedly wicked purposes, of material drawn largely (though not quite entirely) from the online “List of Fine-Tuning Parameters” compiled by Jay W. Richards. (My first entry taken from his list, and explicitly dependent upon it, was this one: “An initial survey of the “four fundamental forces” and the “cosmological constant.””). My second was ““Initial Conditions and ‘Brute Facts.’”) As I said in both of those blog posts, I... Read more
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