At noon today, we had an hour-long closed Zoom call for BYU Middle East Studies faculty and students with Matthew H. Tueller, the ambassador of the United States of America to the Republic of Iraq, and previously, among other assignments, deputy chief of mission in Egypt and ambassador to Kuwait and Yemen. Matt is an old friend, a fellow Latter-day Saint and a fellow graduate of Brigham Young University. We first met as students at the Center for... Read more
John C. Whitmer was the son of Jacob Whitmer, one of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. He was also the nephew of David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses, and likewise the nephew of Oliver Cowdery, another of the Three Witnesses. (Oliver had married Elizabeth Ann Whitmer, David and Jacob’s sister.) He was, furthermore, the nephew of four others among the Eight Witnesses: Christian Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., and John Whitmer, and Hiram Page (who... Read more
Note: For at least a while, based upon discussion with folks at Patheos, I’ll be experimenting with a new approach to my blogging: Fewer posts, but longer. We’ll see how it works. What follows here is inspired by and indebted to Chapter 5, “Spacetime is Quantum,” in Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017), 125-137: Physics made enormous progress, almost literally unthinkable strides,... Read more
Note: For at least a while, based upon discussion with folks at Patheos, I’ll be experimenting with a new approach to my blogging: Fewer posts, but longer. We’ll see how it works. When leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fell to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles after the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, they faced one crisis after another. The Prophet was dead. Many of the Saints wondered what this meant and what... Read more
Fake news! “New Covid-19 cases reported Friday in the US are the second highest since the pandemic began” “Another smashed record of positive COVID-19 tests pushes Utah over 101,000 cases: University of Utah Health officials plead for residents to help stem the spread as ICU at 99% capacity” “Daily coronavirus case numbers in the US are at levels not seen since the summer, and 14 states recently have set hospitalization records” “Coronavirus pandemic is... Read more
There were serious clashes between Arabs and Jewish settlers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, until the point in 1939 when, hoping to gain Arab support against the Axis powers in World War II, the British began to restrict Jewish immigration to the Holy Land. This, in turn, brought an angry and often violent response from the Jews of Palestine. Fed up with the situation, Great Britain submitted the problem to the United Nations after the close of the... Read more
A new item — this one by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Matthew L. Bowen, and Ryan Dahle — appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Where Did the Names Mahaway and Mahujah Come From? A Response to Colby Townsend’s “Returning to the Sources,” Part 2 of 2 Review of Colby Townsend, “Returning to the Sources: Integrating Textual Criticism in the Study of Early Mormon Texts and History,” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 10, no. 1 (2019): 55–85, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/imwjournal/vol10/iss1/6/. Abstract: In... Read more
An important new academic discussion has now appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Pre-print of ‘Revisions in the Analysis of Archaic Language in the Book of Mormon,'” by Stanford Carmack and Royal Skousen This is the introductory note that I wrote for it: In The Nature of the Original Language [of the Book of Mormon] (hereafter, NOL), Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack indicated that additional research into the language of the Book of Mormon might... Read more
Sic et Non‘s resident epidemiologist, Sam LeFevre, today posted the comment that appears below. I thought it so important that I asked his permission to incorporate it into the main portion of this blog so that it could be more widely seen, and he kindly agreed. So here it is, with the necessary proviso that he speaks here for himself and that he is not an official spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health, where he works: ... Read more
But, first, the latest installment of my bi-weekly column for the Deseret News has now appeared: “The irony of St. Simeon the Stylite, who lived atop a 60-foot column: St. Simeon, a monk who lived in ancient Syria, wanted time to meditate and pray, but was pursued but those interested in his hermit lifestyle and others seeking advice or help supplicating God” *** My admiration for Terryl Givens, already considerable, has soared with the publication... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In