*** I’m pleased to announce that the first portion of the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming two-part docudrama, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, has been selected for screening at the 21st annual LDS Film Festival, which is scheduled for early March. This year’s festival will be held at the SCERA Center in Orem, Utah, with a keynote and film on opening night, which will be Wednesday, 2 March 2022. The festival continues thereafter through Saturday, 5... Read more
*** For something that I’m writing, I read a 2016 article today entitled “Living and Traveling in the Arab and Moslem Worlds” that was written by my longtime BYU colleague Professor Chad F. Emmett, of the Department of Geography at Brigham Young University: Chad F. Emmett, “Living and Traveling in the Arab and Moslem Worlds,” The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe 19: 3-4 (2016). Professor Emmett begins his article with a quite... Read more
*** During a relatively recent conversation, the question of modern revelation came up. At one point, the discussion turned to the 1978 revelation on priesthood that was received by President Spencer W. Kimball in conjunction with his two counselors and almost all of the then Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. And that reminded me of (among other things) the two relevant recollections that I share here below. The first comes from Elder David B. Haight (1906-2004),... Read more
*** Over in the largely atheist angry ex-Mormon compound that I sometimes call the Peterson Obsession Board, one commenter has demanded that he be shown an atheist suicide bomber. (Plainly, he assumes that there are none.) I’m happy to suggest some reading for him: “Polemical atheist crusader, meet the facts about suicide bombing!” *** I was recently struck by an article that I ran across online: “NASA Has Enlisted Theologians To Prepare for... Read more
*** Several times each year, some atheist or other triumphantly flings in my face the fact that most members of the elite National Academy of Sciences aren’t religious. In this context, I was interested some time back to learn a bit about Richard Smalley, formerly the Hackerman Professor of Chemistry as well as a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Houston’s Rice University. Smalley, who died in 2005 of leukemia at the relatively young age of... Read more
*** I don’t know whether this makes me peculiar or not — in any case, other facets of my character and personality are probably more than sufficient to do that without the need of adding anything else into the mix — but I often enjoy funerals. At the same time, especially when I’ve enjoyed them, I often leave them feeling deeply challenged and more than a little bit inferior. Of course, I’m well aware of the tendency... Read more
*** A new article appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “A Comparison of the Book of Mormon’s Subordinate That Usage,” by Stanford Carmack Abstract: This paper compares the Book of Mormon’s subordinate that usage with what is found in the King James Bible, pseudo-archaic writings, and the greater textual record. In this linguistic domain, the Book of Mormon manifests as thoroughly archaic, and it surpasses all known pseudo-archaic writings in breadth and depth of... Read more
*** Exactly a year ago today, a group of patriotic tourists who hoped only to make America great again decided to visit the seat of our federal government, the Capitol of the United States, in order to look around and, in some cases, to express their concern about the massive election fraud that was about to hand the White House over to one Joseph R. Biden, a Communist who had actually lost by a landslide to the... Read more
*** I’m really excited to see the brand new book by Aaron P. Schade and Matthew L. Bowen, The Book of Moses: From the Ancient of Days to the Latter Days. Keep your eye out for it. Aaron, who earned his doctorate in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto, taught at the Hawaii campus of Brigham Young University for a number of years before joining the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young... Read more
*** As I was watching the CBS 60 Minutes special about the “Ritchie Boys” — please see my previous post — my attention was caught at about the 11:30 mark by a photograph of a former professional wrestler whose name was given as Frank Leavitt (1891-1953). He was a veteran of World War II and apparently an instructor at Camp Ritchie. (He was already fifty years old by the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,... Read more
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