“How Latter-day Saint Charities is helping during coronavirus crisis — in Utah and around the world”

Last updated on: March 25, 2020 at 1:31 am By Dan Peterson

This is a really juicy one for your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File. Isn’t it regrettable that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built up a substantial rainy-day fund during those sunny days before the epidemiological and economic rains began to fall? Don’t we wish that it hadn’t? Our indignation should be intense and unceasing! Even when we’re standing in the unemployment and food lines. “How Latter-day Saint Charities is helping during... Read more

If you take Pascal’s wager and it turns out to have been a good one

Last updated on: March 25, 2020 at 1:17 am By Dan Peterson

New, from the Interpreter Foundation: Come, Follow Me — Study and Teaching Helps: Lesson 14, March 30-April 12: Easter (from Jonn Claybaugh) Audio Roundtable: Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 14: “He Shall Rise … with Healing in His Wings”: Easter Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and Kevin Christensen were the discussants for the Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 14, “He Shall Rise … with Healing in His Wings,” which is keyed for Easter. This... Read more

Introducing Pascal and his “wager”

Last updated on: March 25, 2020 at 1:15 am By Dan Peterson

The Interpreter Foundation continues to post interesting material for you, even in this rather challenging time of “social distancing.” For instance, this item went up earlier today: In God’s Image and Likeness 2: Enoch, Noah, and the Tower of Babel: Moses 8:1-30; Genesis 6:14-22: Noah and the Ark 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... Read more

Mr. Trump, Senator Romney, and the Coronavirus

Last updated on: March 25, 2020 at 1:11 am By Dan Peterson

“President Trump after hearing of Mitt Romney’s isolation due to coronavirus exposure: ‘Gee, that’s too bad’” “Borger on Trump comment: He cannot get beyond himself” With his kind permission, I share this Facebook comment from Jim Bennett (who is, among other things, a son of the late Senator Bob Bennett [R-Utah]): Just a word of advice – after this, defending the ogre that is Donald Trump on my Facebook page will get you instantly blocked.... Read more

Yet, again: Has Richard Bushman declared the “dominant narrative” of Church history “false”?

Last updated on: March 25, 2020 at 1:08 am By Dan Peterson

I first posted this blog entry back on 31 July 2017. However, since a claim about Professor Richard Bushman and the alleged “falsehood” of “the dominant narrative” of Mormon history has come up yet again, I think I should probably post it yet again: There is a short YouTube video making the rounds — I don’t know whether or not it was recorded with his permission — in which Richard Bushman, whom I consider a friend, is shown saying... Read more

For Kenneth, Eight Years On

Last updated on: March 25, 2020 at 1:02 am By Dan Peterson

Eight years ago today, I received the completely unexpected and devastating news that my brother, Kenneth Dee Walters — strictly speaking, my half-brother — my only sibling, to whom I was exceptionally close, had died. I was stunned and immobilized. I still think of him, and I still miss him, every day. Literally every day. I’ve made it my practice, on this blog, to post something about him (typically my hastily composed and inadequate remarks at his... Read more

“Natural Theology” and the Natural Sciences: A Prologue

Last updated on: March 22, 2020 at 9:09 pm By Dan Peterson

Over the next few weeks, probably, I’m intending to read gradually through Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), by the astoundingly prolific Anglo-Irish theologian Alister McGrath, who holds Oxford doctorates in both divinity and intellectual history — which he earned after he had first received an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics. Darwinism and the Divine emerged from the 2009 Hulsean Lectures, which he delivered by invitation at the University of Cambridge. From time to time, I... Read more

House Churches, Restored

Last updated on: March 22, 2020 at 9:05 pm By Dan Peterson

For the first three centuries of the Christian era, until Constantine legalized the faith, persecution subsided, and congregations moved into larger buildings and began to build their own, Christian believers typically met in homes. Several biblical passages specifically mention Christian meetings in apparently private houses. The first “house church” on record, for example, is mentioned in Acts 1:12-14, where the disciples of Jesus are described as having met together in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem. House churches meeting... Read more

“Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep”

Last updated on: March 22, 2020 at 9:03 pm By Dan Peterson

Quite a number of years ago, I wrote the article on Allah for the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World. In 2015, I revised that article for the Encyclopedia‘s second edition. Among other things, I created a very short sidebar to accompany my main entry. This is how it reads, including my own translation from the Arabic of the Qur’an: The Throne Verse The Qur’an’s famous Throne Verse (2:255) offers a fine summary of basic Islamic teaching regarding God. “Allah! There... Read more

“Coronavirus: Church is helping Iran, Italy, China and 13 other countries”

Last updated on: March 22, 2020 at 9:01 pm By Dan Peterson

Anybody out there who is still zealously stuffing illustrative examples into his or her Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File is likely to feel himself or herself in proverbial “hog heaven” these days. And I’m happy to help. Consider this specimen, for example: “Coronavirus: Church is helping Iran, Italy, China and 13 other countries with medical supplies, ramps up food production” “Due to its global reach and long trajectory, this emergency situation is like no... Read more

What valley did David face Goliath in?