The Ottomans had yet another military asset that served them well. That was the so-called Janissary Corps. (The name is from the Turkish yeni cheri, meaning “new troops.”) These were soldiers very much on the old mamluk model, but instead of being conscripted from central Asia, the janissaries were taken from the Christian villages of Anatolia and the Balkans. They converted to Islam and, like the mamluks, were personally loyal to the sultan himself, who was their owner.... Read more
Newly posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Book of Moses Essays #24: Enoch, the Prophet and Seer: The End of the Wicked and the Beginnings of Zion (Moses 7:12–18) *** A passage from Edward L. Hart, Mormon in Motion: The Life and Journals of James H. Hart (1825-1906) in England, France, and America (Windsor Books, 1978): An account of his interview with David Whitmer was sent by James H. Hart from New York... Read more
Here’s a passage from the text of one of the lectures contained in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Life after Death (Berkeley and Toronto: Celestial Arts, 2008). Dr. Kübler-Ross, who died herself some years ago, was a Swiss-born physician and psychiatrist who became very famous for her revolutionary work with dying patients: At the moment of this transition, you are never, ever alone. You are never alone now, but you don’t know it. But at the time of transition, your guides,... Read more
The Period of the Gunpowder Empires (1500-1800) As might be guessed from Hodgson’s title for this period, the important fact about the time was gunpowder. This new technology, borrowed from the West (but, ultimately, from China), allowed the existence of greater states and thus permitted greater centralization of power. Putting it less abstractly, the states that adopted the new military technology gobbled up the states that did not. What marks the period, then, is a partial recovery... Read more
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), the famous Swiss-American physician and psychiatrist, the author of (among many other things) the pioneering 1969 book On Death and Dying, was very well-known and quite influential during her lifetime — not for her views on life after death but for her study of the dying process, which led to new thinking in the health care profession about how to treat terminally ill patients. Among other things, she and her team had, she said, examined... Read more
As the Arabs declined, however, new Islamic powers were on the rise. Prominent among these was the Ottoman Turkish Empire. In 1453, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II conquered the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Importantly, he used gunpowder and artillery to do so—an omen of things to come. The Turks renamed Constantinople “Istanbul,” and it became the most prosperous city in Europe. For, although we don’t often think of Istanbul in this way, it... Read more
No, I’m not announcing the publication of my autobiography. *** I’m a bit slow in noting this, but the latest installment of my bi-weekly column in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News appeared yesterday: “What does ‘a wall of separation between Church and State’ mean exactly?” *** Written by Professor Matthew L. Bowen, a new article appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: ““I of Myself Am a Wicked... Read more
On Tuesday, 6 October, Roger Penrose was awarded one half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. The other half-share went to the German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel (co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley), and to the American astronomer Andrea Ghez (of my own University of California... Read more
In time, the Turkish overlords of the Arab world lost their grip on power. In 1220, the Mongols poured out of the steppes of central Asia and began the process of substantially destroying the central lands of Islam. The irrigation canals of the Iranian plateau, on which the rulers of Persia had lavished attention and money for centuries, were severely damaged if not utterly destroyed. The area received a blow from which it never fully recovered. These Mongol... Read more
I was unaware, I think, that this had been posted. If I knew, I had forgotten. But it seems that it may only have gone up recently. Anyway, some of you may perhaps find it of interest: “‘Idle Tales’? The Witness of Women” It’s my presentation to the 2019 FairMormon symposium, and it begins with some video material — including several snippets from interviews with scholars (including Ann Taves and John Turner, who are not Latter-day... Read more
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