We spent the bulk of the day today sailing to and from Santa Catalina Island and on the island itself.  I began coming to Catalina when I was a little boy — I honestly can’t remember my first time over on the old “Great White Steamship” (now long since retired) — but, prior to today, I hadn’t been back for at least a couple of decades.  So it was fun to see familiar sights again.     We... Read more

    We’re just back from my traditional stop at the Shake Shack overlooking Crystal Cove, just off the Pacific Coast Highway.  I’ve been stopping off at this little landmark since I was a child, when we would travel between our home in the San Gabriel Valley and the homes of a paternal aunt and a paternal uncle in San Diego and Chula Vista.  We always stopped and ordered date shakes, and that’s what I order now.  The various burgers... Read more

    Rather like the giant Antaeus of classical Greek mythology, I feel the need to touch my native soil, California, fairly frequently. It’s good to be back home. It will always feel like home to me.   Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand! If... Read more

    Helen Keller: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.   1 Corinthians 13 (English Standard Version [ESV]: 1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but... Read more

    Three new pieces appeared today in the pages of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship:   Matthew J. Grow and Matthew C. Godfrey, “The Joseph Smith Papers and the Book of Abraham: A Response to Recent Reviews” Abstract: The Joseph Smith Papers welcomes engagement with its work and gratefully acknowledges the important work of various scholars on the Book of Abraham. Recent reviews in the Interpreter of Revelations and Translations, Volume 4, however, significantly misunderstand the purposes and conventions of the... Read more

    Here are some factoids – by the way, what is a “factoid,” as opposed to a “fact”? how are they to be distinguished from each other? – that may may surprise and/or interest one or two people out there:   The majority of the Arabs living in the United States are Christians.  Approximately 42 percent of Arab Americans are Catholic, while 23 percent are Eastern Orthodox Christians of one kind or another, 23 percent are Muslim, and 12... Read more

    Some militant atheists like to contrast the fruitful and self-corrective nature of science with what they see as the whimsical, completely arbitrary, and fact-free character of religion.  (“Why not believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” they jeer, “or in Russell’s teapot, or in leprechauns?”)  And, of course, such things as the genetics of fruit flies and pea plants, the chemical composition of oxygen, and the variant temperatures of the earth’s atmosphere can in fact be measured rather clearly and fairly clearly... Read more

    I published this column on Thanksgiving Day 2014 in the Deseret News:   Many years ago, a friend (now deceased) told me about a very high-ranking Church leader (also now deceased) who had been asked to address a group of local senior service missionaries and their wives at their annual Christmas dinner. As the program proceeded, various stories were related to illustrate the great things that this group of devoted volunteers had accomplished during the year then nearing... Read more

    A passage from Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), by the Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, who holds Oxford doctorates in both divinity and intellectual history — which he earned after he had first received an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics:   Yet it is not simply the origins of the universe that seem to show evidence of fine-tuning.  A good case can be made for the same patterns emerging at... Read more

    I spent a significant portion of the forenoon in a small meeting with Rabbi Dr. Alon Goshen-Gottstein, the founder and director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Jerusalem:   http://elijah-interfaith.org   Rabbi Goshen-Gottstein is a distinguished scholar and an extremely prominent participant in interfaith dialogue, and it was a very interesting conversation.  He has some interesting plans and goals, and I’m happy to be considered for inclusion in them.   In that context, I want to mention an extraordinary... Read more