This article of mine appeared in the print edition of the Deseret News a couple of weeks ago and went online at LDS Living more recently: “What Joseph Smith’s Neighbors Thought of Him, Even When They Disagreed with His Religion” And here’s an article of mine — the first of a pair that I’ve written for the American Thanksgiving Day holiday this year — that appeared yesterday in both the print and online editions of the... Read more
I have some bad news and some good news. First, the bad: “California landfills are belching high levels of climate-warming methane: Airborne remote sensing spots the Golden State’s biggest emitters of the gas from the sky” “New CDC Report on Superbugs Is Full of Bad News” But here’s some (potentially) good news: “How to Cut U.S. Carbon Pollution by Nearly 40 Percent in 10 Years: A bill in Congress could slash American greenhouse-gas emissions. It’s... Read more
My wife and I are just back from the Brigham Young University campus, where we enjoyed a concert by the Utah Symphony entitled “Rhapsody in Blue.” As you might guess from that title, it was an (almost) all-Gershwin program. It started out with Gershwin’s familiar Cuban Overture, featuring (as three of the other numbers on the program did) the pianist Kevin Cole, and that was followed by Sacred Geometry, by the Los Angeles-based composer Andrew Norman (b.... Read more
“Did you miss seeing Mercury transit the sun? Don’t worry, it’ll happen again in May 2049” “What’s the Best Way to Sail From World to World? Electric Sails or Solar Sails?” “This Stingray-Shaped Spacecraft Could Be Perfect For Exploring Venus’ Dark Side: Could a stingray-shaped spacecraft get to the dark side of Venus by flapping its wings?” “Proposed Interstellar Mission Reaches for the Stars, One Generation at a Time: Starting in the early 2030s, the project could... Read more
Here’s a pretty succinct paragraph from W. Montgomery Watt — Scottish historian, orientalist, Anglican priest, premiere biographer of Muhammad, prolific Islamicist, and Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh — on the founder of Islam: “His readiness to undergo persecutions for his beliefs, the high moral character of the men who believed in him and looked up to him as leader, and the greatness of his ultimate achievement – all argue his fundamental integrity. To... Read more
This is really quite astonishing. Mind-boggling, in fact: “There’s Growing Evidence That the Universe Is Connected by Giant Structures: Scientists are finding that galaxies can move with each other across huge distances, and against the predictions of basic cosmological models. The reason why could change everything we think we know about the universe.” “One of the great things about science is that you can have a model built with thousands of pieces of data but if one... Read more
People write to me from time to time insisting that Islam isn’t actually a religion at all. It’s really, they say, a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion. Accordingly, it doesn’t really deserve protection under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. When I’m told such things, I immediately think of those who deny that my church — my “so-called church,” they would say — is really a religion. Rather, they... Read more
For some reason, my little post on “Running with the golden plates” has inflamed a certain tiny sector of the web that I like to watch, and they’ve been pulling out the big guns (e.g., even the eminent American philosopher and historian Mark Twain; who ever saw that coming?) to demolish the testimony of the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. They also don’t like the Interpreter Foundation’s Witnesses film at all, having (of course) never seen it... Read more
Having grown up in southern California; having attended high school across the street from one of the most important of the old Spanish missions; having spent time in places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, I reflect fairly often on how very Arab the American Southwest sometimes feels. My high school was part of the Alhambra School District, and it sat right on the border of the city of Alhambra — which was obviously named after the famous... Read more
We’re just back from a strong performance of the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie at the Hale Center Theater in Orem. Curiously, it got me to thinking about a passage in the Philosophical Fragments (1844) of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard uses a parable about a king and a maiden to make the point that, if God were to reveal himself fully and with unmistakable, irresistible clarity, that revelation would overwhelm and destroy our freedom. ... Read more
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