A friend sent to me the following quotation from the prominent conservative economist Thomas Sowell, for whom I have enormous admiration: “You can’t stop people from saying bad things about you. All you can do is make them liars.” I believe that he’s right. *** John W. Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: ‘Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,’” BYU Studies Quarterly 57/4 (2018): 10-50. As I said in... Read more
A passage that I’ve extracted from Gordon Darnell Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia: From Ancient Times to Their Eclipse under Islam (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 8-9: When we think of Arabia, we imagine natura maligna at its worst. Even the ancient geographers who called the southern cultivable portion of the peninsula Arabia Felix (Fortunate Arabia) did so with knowledge of the considerable irony of the name. Arabia is a land... Read more
John W. Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: ‘Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'” BYU Studies Quarterly 57/4 (2018): 10-50. From Richard Bushman’s jacket endorsement of Opening the Heavens: Laying open “all the crucial documents . . . for inspection, with enough commentary to put them in context[,]” provides great benefits to Book of Mormon readers: “nothing could be more helpful — and inspiring.” (16) The Book of Mormon was dictated over... Read more
I posted a blog entry a couple of days ago about the film Somewhere in Time, the actor Christopher Reeve, and the catastrophic accident that left him a quadriplegic. But there are some other things to say on the topic that some might find of interest: It seems that the character of “Elise McKenna,” who is played by Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time — and who originated in the 1975 novel Bid Time Return, by Richard... Read more
I published the article below in the Deseret News on 15 June 2017: Critics of religious faith often like to compare it, unfavorably, to science. Science, they say, has cured polio and malaria, sent humans to the moon, created powerful computers and plumbed the secrets of distant stars and galaxies. Religion has done none of these things. However, this is a profoundly misguided argument. For one thing, it suggests that only such accomplishments as these have value.... Read more
A new article — this one by Clifford P. Jones — has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “The Prophets Who Wrote the Book of Omni” Abstract: The brief accounts written by Omni, Amaron, Chemish, Abinadom, and Amaleki, taken alone, don’t always inspire confidence in their righteousness. Nevertheless, when the specific words used by these men and all relevant context are taken into consideration, it’s reasonable to conclude that each of these authors... Read more
I was pleased to learn a day or so ago that Nick Galieti and Jared Riddick, joined by Stephen Smoot, recently recorded an installment of their Rare Possessions Podcast in memory of William J. Hamblin that was devoted to a topic to which Bill made significant contributions. (One of his principal areas of academic focus was ancient and medieval military history.) The podcast runs slightly more than twenty-eight (28) minutes: In Honor of William J. Hamblin –... Read more
A brief article in the January/February 2015 issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review reported on an exhibit that had just concluded at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, entitled In Remembrance of Me: Feasting with the Dead in the Ancient Middle East. The artifact most prominently featured in the exhibit was the Katumuwa Stela, a basalt slab set up more than 2700 years ago in what is now southeastern Turkey, to memorialize a man named, unsurprisingly, Katumuwa. The Aramaic... Read more
Some of you may be at least vaguely familiar with the painfully sad story of the actor Christopher Reeve (1952-2004), a talented athlete who studied at Cornell University and at the Juilliard School, attained star status in the title role of the Superman films of 1978-1987, and then, in late May 1995, was severely injured in an equestrian accident that left him a quadriplegic at the age of not quite forty-three. (He responded with remarkable courage, but he was... Read more
I apparently should have given them a title, but I didn’t. So we ended up with this rather unwieldy thing: “Remembering co-author Bill Hamblin’s pursuit of sharing about the world’s religions” I’m pleased, though, that the online version of the article includes a baker’s dozen of the photographs that Bill furnished for prior columns. They were often very valuable. This is one of the respects in which my solo continuation of the Hamblin/Peterson column will... Read more
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