New temples: Syracuse, Utah Bahia Blanca, Argentina Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Tallahassee, Florida Benin City, Nigeria! Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo!! Shanghai!!! DUBAI!!!! By the time those last two temples had been announced, I confess that I was in tears. When the multinational choir came together for “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet,” I could not join in. I was simply unable to sing. *** From Lee Nelson, Visions from Beyond the Veil... Read more
I offer another note taken from Andrew Sims, Is Faith Delusion? Why Religion is Good for Your Health (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). But, first, I need to point out that his use of the name Joseph Smith here is probably not significant. For one thing, of course, the Prophet Joseph Smith most definitely did not imagination himself to be Jesus Christ and was never a resident of a mental hospital, and the passage below makes... Read more
The late Bill Hamblin and I — how it still surprises and grieves me to write that phrase, “the late Bill Hamblin”! — published the article below in the 19 April 2014 issue of the Deseret News: Historically, Easter has been the most important Christian holy day, as well as the oldest. Since the Reformation, many Protestant groups have simplified their Easter celebrations, focusing only on brief services on Easter Sunday itself. For Roman Catholics and eastern... Read more
Some while ago, I read Andrew Sims, Is Faith Delusion? Why Religion is Good for Your Health (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). Dr. Sims, who taught for many years as a professor of psychiatry in the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, was founder-editor of Developing Mental Health and, for ten years, the founding editor of Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. He is also a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Here are a few... Read more
From Lee Nelson, Visions from Beyond the Veil (Springville, UT: Council Press, 2014): In doing research for a biographical novel on Walkara, a Ute Indian chief, I uncovered what appeared to be a classic out-of-body experience. Walkara told the story to early trappers and later to the pioneers who settled in his homeland. As a young man, Walkara went high into the Uinta Mountains in search of the Great Spirit, Towatts. The chief said his soul was... Read more
I share some further notes from Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, translated by Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2002). The first simply makes a point that I too want to remember to make, and to expand upon, in a book that I’m writing: The year that began in Tehran with the victory of the Islamic Revolution to the battle cry of “Down with America!” [an alternate rendering of... Read more
I’ll be working my way through John D. Barrow, The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2011). At the time he wrote the book, Dr. Barrow was a professor of mathematical sciences and the director of the Millennium Mathematics Project at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. When I was a school kid, we all knew that there was absolutely nothing remarkable about... Read more
“Interpreter Radio Show — March 29, 2020” You can now listen to the 29 March 2020 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show at your convenience and free of charge, shorn of commercial and other breaks. The participants on Sunday, 29 March 2020, were Martin Tanner and . . . well, I guess I might as well just blurt it out: Martin Tanner and Daniel Peterson. During the first hour of this particular episode, they discussed near-death experiences with... Read more
Still working my way into Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, 2d ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): The relevance of quantum mechanics is, in a sense, more immediate than Copernican or Darwinian ideas, which deal with the far away or long ago. Quantum theory is about the here and now. It even encounters the essence of our humanity, our consciousness. Why, then, hasn’t quantum mechanics had the intellectual and... Read more
From Susan Easton Black and Larry C. Porter, Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Studies, 2018), 252-253: While the principal target of Painesville [Ohio] Telegraph editor Eber D. Howe’s 1834 book Mormonism Unvailed — the father of all anti-Mormon books — was plainly Joseph Smith, Martin Harris was a “close second.” Mentioning Martin Harris by name fully sixty-six times over the course of his book, Howe singled Harris out as “the next personage [after Joseph Smith]... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In