I base these notes upon John W. Welch, Neal Rappleye, Stephen O. Smoot, David J. Larsen, and Taylor Halverson, eds., Knowing Why: 137 Evidences That the Book of Mormon Is True (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2017), 180-181: It’s striking that, according to Joseph Smith, the title page of the Book of Mormon as it currently appears in English is “a literal translation taken from the last leaf of the plates” (emphasis mine). This seems to be... Read more
I hope that he and “Prager University” won’t mind my stealing the image above and the text below, but I thought that some of my readers might be interested in watching this tonight (Wednesday night) or even in joining in. I myself have led several Passover Seders for family and friends and ward members over the years, and I find considerable meaning in it. I wouldn’t be terribly upset if it became something of a common practice for... Read more
I’ve been involved in an exchange over the past couple of days that makes me think it advisable, even urgently necessary, to repost this previous blog entry: Many people in the West quite confidently discuss Muslim attitudes on the basis of no real acquaintance with either the Islamic world or actual Muslims. So I’m going to recommend a book: Several years ago, the Gallup organization undertook an enormous, multi-country survey of the Islamic world, the largest ever... Read more
One of the tasks that I’ve set myself for my COVID-19 house arrest (and, I hope, beyond) is to extract notes from John W. Welch, Neal Rappleye, Stephen O. Smoot, David J. Larsen, and Taylor Halverson, eds., Knowing Why: 137 Evidences That the Book of Mormon Is True (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2017). I’ve been delinquent in doing this, but no longer. Knowing Why is a product of the Interpreter Foundation’s esteemed sister organization, Book of Mormon... Read more
A couple of quotations extracted from Michael Augros, The Immortal in You: How Human Nature is More Than Science Can Say (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017): I appreciate it when atheists forthrightly declare the implications of their worldview, without sentimentality. Here, for example, is the late Cornell historian of science William Provine (1942-2015), a specialist in the development of population genetics and evolutionary theory: Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance... Read more
Another trio of extracts from Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2010): The West, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques... Read more
Another passage from one of my rough-cut manuscripts: We’ll first look at various explanations holding that, yes, there was an objective reality [to the plates, etc.], but it was an artifact of fraud. This is perhaps the most common explanation advanced by skeptics. As one recent book from a prestigious academic publisher remarks in passing, with regard to the Book of Mormon, “Exactly how this work was composed remains a matter of debate, but most non-Mormons would... Read more
“United Arab Emirates leaders welcome Latter-day Saint temple in series of tweets” *** Most books really don’t change the way I think about things. Most non-fiction books simply give me some new facts or understandings that fit fairly well with what I already think. Some, though, redirect my reflections in a fundamental way. One that did that for me was Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company,... Read more
Newly published on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: In God’s Image and Likeness 2: Enoch, Noah, and the Tower of Babel: Genesis 8: A New Creation, A New Covenant Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in In God’s Image and Likeness 2: Enoch, Noah, and the Tower of Babel (2014) by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw and David J. Larsen. Abstract:The story of Genesis 6-9 is structured into a grand chiasm illustrating the themes of... Read more
The item below, from Bob and Gloria Rees, was passed on to me yesterday and, with Bob’s kind permission, I’m sharing it here. Brother Rees is a retired member of the faculty at UCLA, as well as a former editor of Dialogue and the co-founder and vice president of the wonderful Bountiful Children’s Foundation (formerly the Liahona Children’s Foundation), whose website, for some reason, I cannot currently access. I commend the following note to your attention. Thanks... Read more
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