I first met Elder Boyd K. Packer when he came to Switzerland during a time that I was serving in the office of the Switzerland Zürich Mission. One of the first things that he did was to take a tour of the mission headquarters. When he came into my office, he was standing, with my mission president, between me and the large bulletin board that covered most of one of the walls of my personal office. It... Read more
Not long after I had joined the faculty at Brigham Young University, I was asked to meet with Bruce Hafen, who had previously served as the president of Ricks College and as dean of BYU’s law school and who would later serve as a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy and as president of the St. George Utah Temple but who was, at the time, serving as the University’s provost — essentially its second in command... Read more
For all the talk of a land “flowing with milk and honey,” Palestine is a relatively difficult place to eke out a living. Tahiti might have been nice, with fruit just waiting to be picked. Switzerland is far prettier. Even in the Near East, there are places where it would have been much easier to live a peaceful life. Take Egypt, for instance. With a regular and predictable river running gently through it, separated from would-be enemies by... Read more
In the previous passage from my forthcoming book, I wrote briefly about the scandal of what we in the West have often called “world history.” Now I focus a bit more: Post-Biblical Judaism There is a similar gap—not scandalous, but still more than a bit unfortunate—in our knowledge of the history of religion. For most Latter-day Saints, and for most Christians generally, the history of Israel ends with Malachi. He is followed by a blank space of... Read more
The Fourth of July holiday isn’t about quasi-military parades and fireworks, spectacular and enjoyable as those can be, nor even about flag-waving. Other nations have powerful military organizations and weaponry. Other nations have flags. Independence Day isn’t about nationalism, which, in itself, can be (and often has been) quite toxic. Spanish and Italian Fascism and the National Socialists (the Nationalsozialisten or Nazis) of Hitler’s Third Reich are, by a very long distance, not the only examples of poisonous nationalism.... Read more
Notes based upon Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010) [originally published in Dutch as Eindeloos Bewustzijn], 125-127, where Dr. Van Lommel discusses possible effects of the fear of death: It has been suggested that, in situations where their lives are threatened, human minds will fabricate an experience, either consciously or subconsciously, that permits them an escape from the fear of imminent death. In other words, stress triggers a defense... Read more
With his permission, I again share a thought-provoking Facebook entry posted by a friend, neighbor, and fellow Interpreter Foundation volunteer: “Please Keep the Name Redskins” by Tom Pittman I am Native American. I am a member of the Tlingit tribe of Southeast Alaska. I am of the Raven moiety, and of the T’akdeintaan (Sea Pigeon) clan. My Tlingit name is Koohook. My mother raised me in the ways of our people: I harvested herring eggs, fished, hunted,... Read more
Two excerpts from Susan Easton Black and Larry C. Porter, Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Studies, 2018), on Edward Stevenson and Martin Harris: Stevenson recalled, “While I was living in Michigan, then a Territory, in 1833, near the town of Pontiac, Oakland Co., Martin Harris came there and in a meeting where I was present bore testimony of the appearance of an angel exhibiting the golden plates and commanding him to bear a... Read more
I’m going to resume rewriting and expanding a book here. I begin with something of an “apology” (in the classical sense) for the volume: I have a little book in my home library that I treasure. I love it for its impressive title: The History of the World in Two Hundred and Forty Pages.[1] In many ways, although I’m about to use it as a bad example, it isn’t really a bad book. But I confess that... Read more
Over the next while, I intend to share notes from a very significant book: Jerry D. Grover, Jr., Geology of the Book of Mormon (2014). Brother Grover — who, incidentally, served from 1995 to 2007 as a member of the Utah County Commission — is a licensed Professional Structural and Civil Engineer and a license Professional Geologist, with an undergraduate degree in Geological Engineering from Brigham Young University and a master’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University... Read more
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