Well, I’m very close to posting my last notes from Paul McFate, 52 Good Reasons to Go to Church, Besides the Obvious Ones (Chicago: ACTA Publications, 2004). But I’m not quite there yet. Happily, though, I can report that the two items listed below, like those that have gone before them from Paul McFate’s excellent little booklet, are more than appropriate for inclusion in your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File: Fewer Criminals (page 60) — One... Read more
Another article has appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation. It was authored by David J. Larsen, and I expect that many will find it of interest: “Ascending into the Hill of the Lord: What the Psalms Can Tell Us About the Rituals of the First Temple” Abstract: In this article, the author attempts to shed light on practices alluded to in the Psalms that may have formed part of the ritual system and theology of Solomon’s original... Read more
I offer two more items from Paul McFate, 52 Good Reasons to Go to Church, Besides the Obvious Ones (Chicago: ACTA Publications, 2004). Both of them have been officially board-certified as appropriate for inclusion in your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File: Fewer School Shootings (page 58) — In his book Lost Boys, psychologist J. Garbarino found that one of the common denominators for child criminal behavior is a lack of moral development. Delinquent children fail... Read more
It was in June 2012 — eight years ago — while I was traveling in Israel, that I was drop-kicked (via an email from the organization’s still fairly-recently appointed executive director) from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. The Institute, he told me, was going to make a “change in course,” and I was essentially the last remaining of those who had led the organization (previously known as FARMS, or the Foundation... Read more
Casual readers can surely be pardoned for understandably imagining that “secret works, oaths, and murders” is the working title of my biography, as my life is conceived by several of my anonymous online critics. However, it’s not. Rather, it’s the partial title of something new that has been posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Book of Moses Insights #009: Enoch’s Teaching Mission: Secret Works, Oaths, and Murders (Moses 6:15) Also newly available on the Interpreter Foundation’s... Read more
Three testimonials that I marked during my reading of Hyrum L. Andrus and Helen Mae Andrus, Personal Glimpses of the Prophet Joseph Smith (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2009): S. L. Partridge was nearly seven years old when Joseph Smith was murdered at Carthage, Illinois, on 27 June 1844: Joseph’s love for children would be shown by him placing his hand on my head, or lovingly drawing me towards him, or taking me upon his knee and kissing me.... Read more
Below is a four-page statement that Royal Skousen has shared with me regarding the publication last week of part 6 of volume 3 of the critical text, Spelling in the Manuscripts and Editions. It should soon be available from BYU Studies at $49.95, if it isn’t already available. In posting it here, I’ve unfortunately (and, so far as I can tell, pretty much unavoidably) ruined much of his formatting. But the content remains unimpaired. And I expect that a... Read more
John Taylor (1808-1887), a British-born Methodist preacher, was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Toronto, Canada, to which he had emigrated in 1830. He rose to become a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, and he was present (and severely wounded) at Carthage Jail on 27 June 1844, during the mob attack that claimed the lives of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. (In the C. C. A. Christensen painting above,... Read more
Driving up here today, we paused to visit (and to take the sacrament) with my wife’s father in Bountiful and then, for the first time, to pay our respects at the graves of my great grandparents, my great great grandparents, and others of my maternal family in a small cemetery located somewhat north of Brigham City. Given the family historical orientation of our day, it seems entirely appropriate to share now a couple of passages from another of... Read more
“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind’s deliverer.” (John... Read more
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