On 12 October 2020, nearly a full century ago, Elder John A. Widtsoe delivered a justly famous talk on “Temple Worship” at a meeting of the Genealogical Society of Utah in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah. At the beginning of his lecture last night, Dr. Van Evans cited this passage from Elder Widtsoe’s remarks, with which I completely agree: All people of all ages have had temples in one form or another.... Read more
My wife and I had a very pleasant evening. First, we had dinner with Royal Skousen and his wife, Sirkku, at La Jolla Groves. Royal presented us with a copy of The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon: Part Five, The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon, which is still relatively hot off the press. He will be speaking on the subject on 15 January, next week, under the sponsorship of BYU... Read more
Another newly accessible item has gone up — no charge! — on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Science & Mormonism Series 1: Cosmos, Earth, and Man “From All Eternity to All Eternity: Deep Time and the Gospel” Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article by Bart J. Kowallis originally appeared in Science & Mormonism Series 1: Cosmos, Earth, and Man (2016). Abstract: Geology professor Bart J. Kowallis takes readers to the realm of “deep time,” referring to... Read more
In the wake of the recent Washington Post “exposé” on the finances of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, some critics have brought up a speech given by President Russell M. Nelson in Nairobi, Kenya, in April 2018 as an illustration of a despicable, deceitful, greedy “Mormon gangster” seeking to hustle, exploit, and prey upon poor Africans. (It was in response to assumptions that Church leaders are “greedy” and feathering their own nests that I’ve shared photographs... 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 Arabian Peninsula was and remains a stark and forbidding place. But it was also, and continues to be, wealthy. Today, its wealth is petrochemical. In ancient times, its wealth came in the form of incense — and specifically the two types... Read more
The 29 December 2019 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show is now available online, accessible at no charge and shorn of all commercial and other interruptions. The host for the show was Martin Tanner. In this episode, Martin discussed the Second Coming of the Savior and the Millennium for the first half of the two-hour program. The second hour was devoted to the upcoming Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson #4, on 1 Nephi 11-15: Interpreter Radio Show —... Read more
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
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