A reader of this blog has chosen to spend at least a portion of his Easter weekend trying to share the good news that Jesus is merely a fictional character. He reminds me of this column that I published in the Deseret News for 12 July 2012: Bart Ehrman is a respected New Testament scholar who holds a professorial chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Furthermore, in addition to his academic works, he’s... Read more
This was my 2019 Easter column for the Deseret News: Some dismiss belief in the resurrection of Jesus as reflecting merely “the faded credulity of earlier ages” (for the phrase, see John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter”; https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2019/04/once-more-john-updikes-seven-stanzas-at-easter.html). The idea, they say, emerges from a pre-scientific era, long before modern medicine, to say nothing of quantum physics and the theory of evolution. As such, modern people can no longer accept it. Even some purported Christians have reinterpreted the... Read more
For Easter 2017, I published this column in the Deseret News: A decade ago, in February 2007, came the dramatic announcement that Jesus’s ossuary or “bone box” (and perhaps even his bones) had been found in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhood of East Talpiot. Scholars overwhelmingly rejected the claim, and it’s largely forgotten today. Briefly, though, it enjoyed a flurry of media attention—including an interview with Larry King, then a major television celebrity. “Is this the end of the... Read more
I published this Easter 2016 column in the Deseret News: Since the appearance of the Father and the Son to Joseph Smith in the spring of 1820 and its formal organization in April 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has resounded with testimonies of the risen Savior. Notable among these is the joint declaration of Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon following their February 1832 vision of the three degrees of glory: “And now, after... Read more
I published this column in the Deseret News at Easter season in 2013. And, yes, the book to which the column refers remains still unfinished: Modern people commonly assume that pre-modern people were stupid, inhabiting a primitive fantasy world detached from reality, unenlightened by science, and awash in superstition. Such gullible minds, some modern “realists” claim, merely imagined the resurrection of Christ. This is a largely baseless prejudice. Pre-modern people knew death intimately, in a way that... Read more
The Interpreter Foundation’s 2020 Easter message, written by Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, has just appeared: “Christ and the Work of Suffering” Abstract: Christ’s voluntary subjection to the horrible realities of this world transformed him forever. His vulnerability became his capacity to save and heal all humankind. Our own suffering develops our capacity for love, which is the power that makes us useful to others, and humility, which is the root of wisdom. *** Here’s an important announcement... Read more
Below, I offer some notes from Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017), mingled with some comments of my own. Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who has worked in both Italy and the United States and who, at least at the time the book was published, was the director of the quantum gravity research group at the Centre de physique... Read more
The announcement of a new temple to be built in the United Arab Emirates is still reverberating magnificently among the small community of Latter-day Saint Arabists and Islamicists. We were, to put it mildly, both stunned and exuberant. With his kind permission, I reproduce here a Facebook entry recently posted by my friend and fellow Latter-day Saint Jamal Qureshi: One of my favorite examples of Islamic architecture and design anywhere in the world. The dome of... Read more
My latest column for the Deseret News: “Easter’s answer to the ‘terrible question’: One of the most obvious facts facing human beings is the inevitability of death” *** New, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Audio Roundtable: Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 15 “Filled with Love towards God and All Men” Mosiah 1-3 The discussants in the Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 15, “Filled with Love towards God... Read more
My wife and I continue to read a passage every night from a volume that we acquired just before Christmas — back in those nearly forgotten days when we humans used to gather together physically in order to socialize — at a book exchange party: A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Here’s the passage, from C. S. Lewis’s famous book The Screwtape Letters, that we read last night. In it, Screwtape, a... Read more
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