Jet lag is a real beast and, at the moment, I’m having to struggle not to do face plants on my laptop. When I’m not typing gibberish. (Covfefe, anyone?) Accordingly, I think that I’ll re-use something that I originally posted here roughly four years back: More than three decades ago now, I spent a summer in Berkeley, California, participating in a small seminar led by the preeminent student of comparative religions Huston Smith (1919-2016) and sponsored by the... Read more
More than a few of you, I think, will find this interview of interest. Kurt Manwaring posed questions to my longtime friend and colleague in BYU’s Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, Professor Stephen D. Ricks — who was also one of my companions in the Switzerland Zürich Mission — about the new book that he and three collaborators have just published through the Interpreter Foundation: “Do Book of Mormon Names Have Ancient Origins? This dictionary... Read more
Well, my positive recent impressions of airlines and airports continue to accumulate: Last night, trying to fly out of New York City’s JFK Airport, we sat on the plane for roughly an hour and forty-five minutes before take-off. Most of that time was spent sitting at the gate. I wouldn’t have cared quite so much except that we were trying to meet up with members of our family in Zürich, and I didn’t want them waiting for us... Read more
Last night, while I was aboard a transcontinental flight to New York City, the Interpreter Foundation published yet another in our series of short video features: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon — Insights Episode 16: Why Witnesses? Why were witnesses to the Book of Mormon, and to the Gold Plates, necessary? What makes these claims different from others throughout history who have claimed divine visions? This is the sixteenth in a series compiled from from the many... Read more
We had a very productive meeting of the Interpreter Foundation board of trustees this morning and early afternoon. Happily, among many other good things, we were able to see the first delivered print copies of the Foundation’s newest book: Stephen D. Ricks, Paul Y. Hoskisson, Robert F. Smith and John Gee, eds., Dictionary of Proper Names and Foreign Words in the Book of Mormon. This is an important new contribution to Book of Mormon studies. At least some... Read more
The Interpreter Foundation’s docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, already available on DVD, is now streaming via Living Scriptures. *** The 2022 FAIR Conference is now over. I think it was a strong one. Here’s a run-down of the Thursday presentations, since I’ve already provided a quick summary for the Wednesday session: Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to listen to all of Jed Woodworth’s remarks — always a recurring problem for me at the... Read more
Two new articles appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Lehi’s Dream, Nephi’s Blueprint: How Nephi Uses the Vision of the Tree of Life as an Outline for 1 and 2 Nephi,” written by Noel B. Reynolds Abstract: This essay harnesses the late twentieth-century discovery of Hebrew rhetoric by Bible scholars to identify Lehi’s dream as the foundation of the carefully constructed unity in Nephi’s writings and to identify previously unrecognized elements of... Read more
Please mark your calendars for the 2022 Temple on Mount Zion Conference, which is coming up on 5 November 2022. My understanding, by the way, is that the new book by Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw, Freemasonry and the Origins of Latter-day Saint Temple Ordinances, is now available, as of today: The topic of this book has been of interest to me for decades. Over the years, many researchers have asked me about similarities between the endowment introduced... Read more
Today’s session of the 2022 FAIR Conference was extremely good. Kerry Muhlestein presented some very helpful and informed keys to making sense of the biblical book of Isaiah. Bruce Young, who returned just two weeks ago from a mission with his wife, Margaret Blair Young, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, presented a nicely illustrated report on their mission. Included among his illustrations were video excerpts from an interview with a very impressive young Congolese man... Read more
I’m sitting right now at the Experience Event Center in Provo, where the 2022 FAIR Conference is underway. So far, it’s been very, very good. There is a numerous crowd in attendance at the conference venue, but apparently also a quite large audience watching remotely. It is, Scott Gordon says, the largest audience ever for a FAIR conference. On a very different note, though, I hope that you’ll be able to access this short note: “R.I.P.... Read more
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