*** Cody Quirk has kindly brought to my attention a report in the Salt Lake Tribune indicating that the professional ex-Latter-day Saint podcaster John Dehlin makes at least $236,000 per year for his efforts. Clearly, I chose the wrong line of work. *** I was very surprised and even moved at Saturday Night Live‘s opening segment this past weekend: Ukraine Cold Open – SNL And I was also surprised and moved to... Read more
*** From The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, by the British intensive-care nurse and researcher Dr. Penny Sartori: An account related to Dr. Sartori by Lyon White, of Sussex: “My mother Peggy, whilst in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s disease was no longer able to converse with any coherency at all. Her conversation consisted of what could only be described as ‘gobble-de-gook’. She had a spell in hospital. On one particular visit she was lying on the... Read more
*** Some time back, I read Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Here are just a few of the passages from the book that I marked for future use: Consider gravity. Newton described gravity with his famous ‘inverse square’ law: any two masses attract each other, with a force that decreases with the square of the distance. Einstein’s General Theory of... Read more
*** “Ukrainian prayers of faith: Watch CNN footage of citizens praying in public square” Over the past couple of days, I’ve posted blog entries here that, among other things, have alluded to religious dimensions of the struggle between Russia and Ukraine. I’m grateful to certain readers of this blog for calling my attention to a precedent for what Latter-day Saints, in particular, might expect if the Russians gain complete control over Ukraine. Here are a... Read more
*** This just in: “First Presidency Statement on Armed Conflict: Church leaders plead that “peace will prevail among nations and within our own hearts”” *** National Review: “Mitt Romney Is Entitled to His ‘I Told You So’” *** Now seems an appropriate time for me to mention, and to recommend, one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, by the late... Read more
*** A new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Overwriting Ether: Moroni’s Transfiguration of Jaredite Scripture,” by David J. Larsen Review of Rosalynde Frandsen Welch, Ether: A Brief Theological Introduction (Provo, UT: The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2020). 128 pages. $9.95 (paperback). Abstract: The Book of Ether is a sometimes-overlooked gem of a text within the Book of Mormon, a history within a history that deserves careful and innovative investigation. Rosalynde Frandsen Welch offers such with a novel perspective... Read more
*** Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should be aware that they are about to be front and center yet again in a not-insignificant pop-cultural event, a seven-part Hulu television mini-series entitled Under the Banner of Heaven that will air this coming spring. It’s scarcely the first such event — think, among many others, of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), which marked the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and... Read more
*** Back in the first half of 1993, I led a small contingent of fairly advanced undergraduate students of Arabic to East Jerusalem for an intensive five-month language program there. (We also visited Egypt and Jordan.) One of those students, who has been teaching at Cornell University for quite a few years now, contacted me a few days ago, saying that he and his wife and kids would be in Utah for a few days and... Read more
*** First of all, I hope that you’re having a happy 22/02/22. However, I’m going to leave the festive celebrations of the day for a moment and move on to other pressing matters. I’m a bit late in mentioning it, but my latest article for Meridian Magazine went up yesterday: “There is More to Know About Isaac” It was inspired by a General Conference address that was given by the late Elder A. Theodore... Read more
*** The invaluable Jeff Lindsay has posted an interesting item on his blog regarding the portion of the Book of Mormon that is set in ancient Arabia: “An Update on Maps of the Arabian Peninsula Showing Nahom-related Names” *** Some time back, I was deleting some old computer files when I came across a curious item. I’m not quite sure where it came from, nor who wrote it nor when, but it’s addressed to... Read more
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