If you missed Sunday night’s Meridian Magazine interview with Mark Goodman, the director of the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming Witnesses theatrical film, and Caleb J. Spivak (who plays Oliver Cowdery), Mark Zuccola (the younger David Whitmer), and you don’t have Facebook, you can watch it on YouTube: The program begins and ends with the official Witnesses trailer. And, please, don’t forget to go to the Witnesses.com website and sign in at the button marked Bring Witnesses... Read more
But, first: The 45-minute interview last night with Mark Goodman (the director of the Interpreter Foundation’s forthcoming theatrical film, Witnesses), Lincoln Hoppe (who plays Martin Harris), Caleb J. Spivak (Oliver Cowdery), and Michael Zuccola (young David Whiter), came together somewhat the last moment, and the word got out rather late and, possibly in at least some cases, with an incorrect link. Which is to say that, if you missed it, that can be both understood and,... Read more
At least some of you, I think, will be interested in this, so I’m passing along pretty much all I know (and maybe more than I know). I’ve just heard about it within the past hour or so : Meridian Magazine plans to go live. 4h · Join us LIVE as we talk with 4 key players bringing the highly anticipated Witnesses Film to the big screen in Summer 2021. Learn more about David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery and Martin... Read more
Between the previous installment (Revision 8.10) and this one, considerable material is required to update and expand my capsule history of the Church in the Middle East and the Islamic world. I will get to that. In the meantime, I proceed with a glance forward, toward the future — which, since it remains future, requires less change in its coverage: At the beginning of this book, I said that we would treat the question of whether Orson... Read more
A new article appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. This one is by Alan Goff: “Working out Salvation History in the Book of Mormon Politeia with Fear and Trembling” Review of James E. Faulconer, Mosiah: A Brief Theological Introduction (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2020). 135 pages. $9.95 (paperback). Abstract: The Maxwell Institute for the Study of Religion has released another book in its series The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions. This book by James E. Faulconer more than ably engages five... Read more
The publicity campaign for the Interpreter Foundation’s Witnesses dramatic film is now underway. Pandemic willing, we anticipate a theatrical premiere for the film in the summer of 2021. We’re currently focusing our attention on the two-part, two-hour documentary — currently titled Undaunted: The Case of the Book of Mormon Witnesses — that we hope to have ready by the time of the Witnesses premiere and as an accompaniment to it. Witnesses will concentrate on the Three Witnesses... Read more
I hear that they held an election yesterday out in Georgia, and the results seem to be coming in just about as I expected. I’ve also heard rumors about some sort of gathering today at the United States Capitol. But I’m not going to say anything about either of those matters. I don’t publicly comment on partisan politics any more. (Privately, things are quite different.) I hope, however, that I will still be permitted to put in... Read more
I decided, this morning, to watch again the Interpreter Foundation’s first somewhat experimental venture into filmmaking, Robert Cundick: A Sacred Service of Music. I hadn’t seen it for a while. It’s just short of twenty-five minutes in length, and I was pleased to find that I still like it very much and that I still think it well done. (Incidentally, the same trio who were the principal figures in making it — Mark Goodman, James Jordan, and... Read more
Very nearly eight years ago, a sublimely self-confident pseudonymous critic on a small, extraordinarily nasty, and mostly atheist ex-Mormon message board took it upon himself to prophesy: “By Jan. 1, 2014 Interpreter will be dead. . . . Either totally dead or down to token ‘blog’ style postings.” (Bond James Bond, 25 January 2013) I hope that “Mr. Bond” kept his day job. (Actually, I haven’t seen anything at all from him in several years. Perhaps he’s totally dead. At the... Read more
The first of Alister McGrath’s three earned Oxford University doctorates was in molecular biophysics. The next two were in, first, theology and, second, intellectual history. On pages 38-39 of Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), McGrath offers an excellent example of how the same bare scientific facts can be interpreted and expanded upon in radically different ways, depending upon the presuppositions that interpreters bring to them: As his initial illustration,... Read more
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