I share with you here another item culled from Susan Easton Black and Larry C. Porter, Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Studies, 2018). It is a statement from Theodore Farley, who, as a young boy, often greeted Martin Harris when, between his emigration to Utah in 1870 and his death in 1875, the elderly witness would come from Cache Valley to Ogden to visit his nephew, Joseph Mormon Harris. During those visits, Martin Harris... Read more
I have tried, by means of this rather lengthy digression into word origins and word borrowings, to give some idea of the variety and richness of Islamic civilization at its peak. It was a remarkable human achievement. Yet, like other human creations, the great Abbasid Arab empire was fated to perish. In AD 945, a clan of rather barbaric Shiite converts from the mountainous areas south of the Caspian Sea conquered all of the central Islamic lands, including... Read more
But we return to our investigation of words that the West has borrowed from Arabic. Several common items of Western furniture bear Arab names. The “mattress” that we sleep on, for example, was at first merely a matrah, a place where something is “thrown down.” (I suppose, then, that it is perfectly appropriate for us to “throw” ourselves on our beds.) And our “sofa,” a long, upholstered seat with raised arms at each end, is simply a softer,... Read more
Back on 21 November 2006, the astoundingly productive Anglo-Irish theologian Alister McGrath delivered a speech in New York City under the perhaps rather cheeky title “The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.” Armed with Oxford University doctorates in both divinity and intellectual history and — even prior to those — in molecular biophysics, Dr. McGrath is exceptionally well positioned to comment upon matters at the interface of religion and science. The text of... Read more
I’ve often had occasion here and elsewhere to mention the prolific Alister McGrath, an Anglo-Irish theologian who earned his doctorate in divinity from Oxford before earning an Oxford doctorate in intellectual history but after earning an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics. Between pages 235 and 267 of Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011) there is a transcript of a New York City speech by Dr.... Read more
Changing gears, it is worth noting that many terms connected with warfare have entered our Western languages from the Arabs. (Perhaps this says something of the state of war that has existed between Christendom and the world of Islam through much of their shared history.) Some of these words have amusing histories in themselves. Our navy rank of “admiral,” for instance, seems to have arisen out of a misunderstanding of the original Arabic word. The most likely explanation... Read more
I’ve been contacted by two or three people who are incensed at my newly-revealed role in constructing a coercive police state at Brigham Young University. Here is the article that triggered their indignation: Enoch Moore, “BYU Censorship: Corona Virus Tyranny on Campus” If you read down a bit, you’ll find the brief paragraph in which my villainy is revealed. It is said to have originally been written by one Maddie Mehr: ““I called them and... Read more
Two important reviews appeared today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. The first is from Richard E. Bennett: A Uni-Dimensional Picture of a Multi-Faceted Nauvoo Community Review of Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York City: Liveright Publishing, 2020). 336 pages. $28.95 (hardback). Abstract: Benjamin Park recently wrote a substantive revisionist history of Nauvoo, Illinois, the one-time Church capital under the leadership of Joseph Smith, Jr. This article... Read more
We’ve just entered the month of October — the month of Halloween, during which, in America at least, tiny vampires, ballerinas, ghouls, superheroes, goblins, ninjas, and witches typically descend upon us, demanding candy. (One of my granddaughters has announced that she will be a dragon-squirrel, and we’re all eager to find out exactly what a “dragon-squirrel” might be.) This year, of course, things will be rather different. Health officials are recommending that children not go from door... Read more
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“Turning Gems Into Dirt”
Up today, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Book of Moses Insights #23: Enoch, the Prophet and Seer: Enoch’s Prophecy of the Tribes (Moses 7:5–11, 22) *** Two recent items from Jeff Lindsay: “Turning Gems into Dirt: The Case for Adam Clarke as a Source for the “Inspired Translation” of the Bible” “No, B.H. Roberts Did Not Abandon Belief in the Book of Mormon” *** Last weekend, my wife and... Read more