I’m quite fond of the Huntington Library, as we called it when I was a boy. It wasn’t far from my home, and I visited its art museum and its botanical gardens in San Marino often — including many times as an unappreciative elementary school kid on field trips, chiefly happy just to be out of class. Rather later, I proposed to my wife on the Library grounds. (For whatever it’s worth, too, my late brother served as... Read more
Lately, in my informal little series of blog posts on the theme of “LDS Inc.,” I’ve included photographs of the relatively humble homes of recent Church presidents. Some critics have claimed that such photographs are irrelevant, but I regard them as highly relevant: They visibly support the important proposition that, unlike certain Renaissance cardinals and popes and evidently unlike some television evangelists, the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not becoming wealthy off... Read more
Today, our 2019 Interpreter Foundation Christmas article appeared. It was written by Kristine Frederickson: “Musings on the Birth of the Savior Jesus Christ” Our very first Christmas message was written for us by Orson Scott Card, under the title of “Christmas Is About a Baby” *** Urgent: There was an error in the address given for Bill Hamblin’s funeral in his obituary. Funeral services will be held tomorrow, on Saturday, 21 December, at... Read more
Bill Hamblin and I published the column below in the Deseret News during Christmastime 2013: Many Western Christians observe a season called “Advent” (from the Latin “adventus,” or “coming”) during the month before they celebrate Christ’s Nativity at Christmas. Advent begins on the fourth Sunday prior to 25 December, and opens the liturgical year in the Moravian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Anglican, and Roman Catholic calendars. (Eastern Christian communions celebrate a rough equivalent of Advent called the “Nativity... Read more
Urgent: There was an error in the address given for Bill Hamblin’s funeral in his obituary. Funeral services will be held tomorrow, on Saturday, 21 December, at the Edgewood Ward building (3511 North 180 East) in Provo, with a viewing from 9:00 to 10:00 and the funeral service proper from 11:00-12:00. *** Kristine Wardle Frederickson has written the Interpreter Foundation’s 2019 essay: “Musings on the Birth of the Savior Jesus Christ” Abstract: In this essay,... Read more
We’re just back from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — the Kennedy Center — where we attended a really fine performance of Handel’s Messiah with the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington Chorus, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. The soloists were Andriana Chuchman (soprano), Daniela Mack (mezzo-soprano), Alek Shrader (lyric tenor), and Sidney Outlaw (baritone). I thought the final chorus especially powerful, truly magnificent, in this performance: Worthy is the Lamb that was... Read more
This would have been a Hamblin/Peterson column — Bill read through it and approved it before his death — but now I’m on my own. When I wrote it, my wife was actually over in Europe with her friends at the Christmas markets in Krakow, Dresden, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam: “The birth of a baby — any baby — is a moment of hope and the inauguration of virtually boundless possibilities, and Christmas powerfully reminds us of these... Read more
Alfred W. McCune, a prominent Utah financier, railroad builder, mine operator, and industrialist, built what came to be known as the McCune Mansion in 1900. Just north of downtown Salt Lake City, the mansion was given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1920 as a proposed private residence for the president of the Church. However, President Heber J. Grant felt that the building, with its elaborate interior, sculpture, and art, was too opulent for... Read more
In 1944, C. S. Lewis delivered an address to the Oxford Socratic Club. Here are two related passages from it: “The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought-laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory—in other words, unless Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those... Read more
I published this article at Christmastime back in 2016. As it happens, had I still been in Utah I would have been participating in a funeral again this year, on Saturday. So the thoughts expressed in this little piece have a renewed relevance for me: As I write, I’ve just returned from a funeral. Snow covers the ground; the trees are barren, seemingly dead. It’s the season described by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “When yellow leaves, or... Read more
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