*** As you may be aware, the Interpreter Foundation docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon will receive its premiere on Friday, 4 March, as part of the 2022 LDS Film Festival. (You can go here to obtain tickets, if they are still available.) As I’ve mentioned previously, the docudrama features interviews with historians and other experts, both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and nonmembers, and expands its coverage beyond the... Read more
*** Kerry Muhlestein and Lamar Newmayer have a podcast that they’ve entitled The Scriptures are Real, which they describe as follows: The Scriptures Are Real (TSAR) with Kerry Muhlestein is a podcast where we look at elements of the scriptures that have become real to us. We interview both experts (people with language, archaeological, historical backgrounds, etc.), and lay folks, and explore times when the scriptures became real to them. This is done from the viewpoint... Read more
*** More than a few of you are almost certainly familiar with the regular weekly followHIM Podcast that is hosted by Hank Smith and John Bytheway. (It’s very popular.) Unfortunately, their long run of excellent episodes hit something of a rough patch with the last two installments: Genesis 18-23 — Part 1 : Dr. Daniel C. Peterson (51 minutes) How do the ancient Near Eastern traditions regarding hospitality affect the story of Lot and Sodom and... Read more
*** You might not be completely blown away by astonishment to learn that I wrote a Hawaiian-themed column for Meridian Magazine during the vacation that my wife and I recently took in in the islands. Other things that I did there will seldom be so instantly apparent, but it was, shall we say, a working vacation: “The Surprising Latter-day Saint Connections in Hawaii” *** Two new pieces went up today in Interpreter: A Journal... Read more
*** A whole circle of freak-show demagogues once swirled around the professional anti-Mormon mountebank Ed Decker, who achieved somewhat more than merely his fifteen minutes of fame with the 1982 film The God Makers. (Decker is still reputed to be alive in some sense, up in Washington State.). One of Decker’s associates, Bill Schnoebelen, used to claim that the very architectural form of the Salt Lake Temple, particularly the “trapezoidal” form of its spires, was consciously designed... Read more
*** On the flight yesterday, I watched the three-part Hulu series McCartney 3, 2, 1, which I really, really enjoyed. The Beatles were, in my judgment, unambiguously the greatest rock band in history. By light years. *** I’m still slowly going through past blog entries in order to extract things from them that I want to use in future (non-blog) writing. I’m roughly half-way through a first quick pass. Here are three quotations that I... Read more
*** I have no idea whether or not any tickets are left for the 4 March 2021 premiere of the new Interpreter Foundation docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, or, if there are, how many of them might remain. So, if you’re interested in attending the premiere, which will take place as part of the LDS Film Festival, you shouldn’t delay any longer. Tickets are available, if they’re available, through this website: LDS Film... Read more
*** After a morning swim, we drove into Honolulu to take a look at a couple of historical sites — Iolani Palace and Washington Place — that were connected with the last queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, who was deposed in 1893 by a conspiracy of white businessmen and who died in 1917. She’s one of the foci of a column that I’ve just completed for Meridian Magazine and that I will submit shortly. Thereupon, we drove... Read more
*** I originally published this column in Provo’s Daily Herald, back around 14 April 2000, under the title “Faith of the Fatherless.” In the past two or three days, my blog’s most dogged resident atheist commenter has suggested that theistic belief originates in psychological defect and insinuates that, if I understood psychology, I would see things his way. So I thought that there might be some value in dusting it off and sharing it again: A widespread... Read more
*** If you would like to watch the two-hour video of a Witnesses-related event that occurred in Provo, Utah, back on 14 October 2021 without needing to get through Deseret Book’s paywall, you can do so here. The completion of the video and its full going-public were slowed by a nearly tragic external factor that has now, thankfully, been largely overcome: “Deseret Book’s “What is My Witness” Event” The Interpreter Foundation is pleased to share here... Read more
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