If you haven’t yet watched this eighteen-minute video from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I encourage you to do so between now and the end of Christmas day. If you already have, but not recently, it would probably be worth seeing it again. And it would be very good if you were to share it with family and friends, in and out of the Church. I think that it’s one of the best official Latter-day... Read more
For the past several years, Jeri Covey and her husband, Stephen M. R. Covey, have invited us to the annual Christmas dinner and musical event that they put on at their home. We were there again last night. For this year, along with a wonderful spread of food, they had a BYU faculty/staff male quartet that performed together and individually, along with superb pianists, a violin soloist, a chamber orchestra of (I think) BYU students, and at least... Read more
We held our quarterly Interpreter Foundation Board meeting this morning. It was very pleasant to welcome two new members — Matt Bowen and Jim Graham — to the Foundation’s Board of Trustees. There are really interesting things on the horizon. (See here for biographies of the current members of the Interpreter Board.) *** It seems that a former student of mine — Dan McClellan, who was an impressive participant in a seminar on “celestial ascents” that... Read more
A new article went up today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “The Words of Gad the Seer: An Apparently Ancient Text With Intriguing Origins and Content,” written by Jeff Lindsay Review of Meir Bar-Ilan, Words of Gad the Seer (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Publishing, 2016); Christian Israel, The Words of Gad the Seer: Bible Cross-Reference Edition (self-published, 2020); and Ken Johnson, Ancient Book of Gad the Seer: Referenced in 1 Chronicles 29:29 and Alluded to in 1 Corinthians 12:12... Read more
© On Saturday, 17 September 2022, we held a special tenth-birthday party for the Interpreter Foundation at the Riverside Country Club in Provo. (Our tenth birthday had actually occurred the previous month.) Invited guests included Foundation volunteers and major donors. Unfortunately, limitations of space and budget precluded us from inviting everybody who has stepped forward to support and advance the work of the Foundation. So we’re now making video recordings of the event freely accessible to all who might... Read more
Newly posted today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Conference Talks: “Science, Religion, and Agency,” originally delivered by Richard N. Williams in 2013 Almost all conceptions of human agency are rooted in libertarianism and grounded in a set of assumptions about the nature of the non-human world, the nature of causality, and the nature of determinism. The effect of this is that agency is always understood around two mutually exclusive positions, compatibilism and incompatibilism. Within this... Read more
Three new items went up today on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Nibley Lectures: Time Vindicates the Prophets — The Book of Mormon as a Witness” Between 7 March 1954 and 17 October 1954, Hugh Nibley delivered a series of thirty weekly lectures on KSL Radio that were also published as pamphlets. The series, which was called “Time Vindicates the Prophets,” was given in answer to those who were challenging the right of members of the Church... Read more
A new article has appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Interpreting Interpreter: Inheriting a Curse,” written by Kyler Rasmussen This post is a summary of the article ““Being of that Lineage”: Generational Curses and Inheritance in the Book of Abraham,” written by John S. Thompson, in Volume 54 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. An introduction to the “Interpreting Interpreter” series is available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/. The Takeaway: Thompson argues that historical justifications... Read more
I wrote two newspaper columns for Christmas 2013. Here they are: The first verse of the popular late-nineteenth-century Christmas carol “Away in a Manger” (often mistakenly attributed to Martin Luther) ends peacefully with “the little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.” Unfortunately, though, “The cattle are lowing; the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” Richard Mouw, the prominent Calvinist theologian who just completed two decades as president of California’s Fuller Theological Seminary,... Read more
Here’s some potentially interesting reading for you: “The Dangers of Redefining Chastity: Even the best of motives do not allow us to change the commandments or remove the crosses of others.” “A Key Book to Understand Nahom and Bountiful is Now Free Online: Warren Aston’s Lehi and Sariah in Arabia” “From Catholic to Mormon: Why Latinos are joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” Here’s something that, I think, merits very serious consideration: “Salt Lake... Read more
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