Out to dinner tonight with several of our neighbors, and the over to Orem Hale Center Theater to see a play of which none of us had ever heard. It was Man with the Pointed Toes, a romantic comedy, quite funny, and the cast did an excellent job. As it is every time we attend the local Hale Center Theater, it was essentially if not entirely sold out tonight. I hope that there will be more seating... Read more
First, a lengthy quotation from Haggai 1:1-11, in the New English Translation of the Bible, with one three-word explanatory interpolation from me: On the first day of the sixth month of [the Persian Achaemenid] King Darius’ second year, the Lord’s message came through the prophet Haggai to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to the high priest Joshua son of Jehozadak: 2 This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies has said: “These people have said, ‘The time for rebuilding the Lord’s temple has... Read more
Continuing with some notes taken from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 23-26, regarding the case of “Vicki,” blind from birth, and her out-of-body or near-death experience following a serious automobile accident: Dr. van Lommel cites a summary from K. Ring and S. Cooper (Mindsight, 1999), about a portion of Vicki’s experience in which she meets — and sees — some prior acquaintances: There are five of them.... Read more
The other night, I read Elder Bruce C. Hafen’s review, in BYU Studies 54/3 of Blaine M. Yorgason, Richard A. Schmutz, and Douglas D. Alder, All That Was Promised: The St. George Temple and the Unfolding of the Restoration (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2013). At one point, Elder Hafen mentions the early “Dixie” (St. George) settler Charles Pulsipher, who was assigned by the leader of the St. George settlement, Elder Erastus Snow of the Council of the Twelve, to travel throughout the... Read more
Notes taken from, and/or inspired by, a reading of 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), 10-11: The Via Odorifera (the Fragrant Highway) brought not only the Arabian aromatics; it was the conduit for trade goods from Asia and Africa. At times, as during the period of Hellenistic ascendancy, for example, these goods were borne on ships up the Red Sea,... Read more
Some notes taken from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 23-25: Vicki was born very prematurely in 1951, with eyeballs and optic nerves damaged by an extremely high concentration of oxygen in a primitive incubator and, as a result very soon thereafter, an atrophied visual cortex in her occipital lobe. I’ve never seen anything, no light, no shadows, no nothing. A lot of people ask me if I... Read more
With friends, we enjoyed a good dinner tonight at the Golden Thai in Orem. Good food. A family-owned restaurant. Really friendly service. Then we all headed over to The Noorda Center for the Performing Arts, on the campus of Utah Valley University, where we attended a sold out show by Bernadette Peters. The music wasn’t my favorite — she did a lot of Stephen Sondheim, for example, and, for some reason, I am almost completely impervious to Mr.... Read more
I share here a few passages drawn from Roger Trigg, Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2015), which I read and marked up some time back. Dr. Trigg, the founding president of the British Philosophical Association, was a student of the late A. J. Ayer, one of the principal thinkers of the school of “logical positivism.” He was, at the time the book was published, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Warwick... Read more
Here’s something that you might find interesting and helpful. It’s freshly up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation with the approval of Royal Skousen and the kind permission of my friend Scott Miller, dean of the BYU College of Humanities: “A Critical Text: An Interview with Royal Skousen” [An interview of Royal Skousen by his friend and colleague Dan Peterson regarding the Book of Mormon critical text project to which Skousen has dedicated his career. This interview... Read more
I published this column in Provo’s Daily Herald all the way back in 2007: For as long as I can remember, people who disagree with my fairly libertarian economic views have told me how much more they care about the poor than I do. Non-religious people have assured me that, while I’m focused on some sort of illusory “pie in the sky when I die” and on “saving” others from mythical sufferings in a fairy-tale afterlife, they... Read more
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