For the last three of the four years that my wife and I resided in Ma‘adi, south of Cairo, we lived in a multi-level apartment building directly adjacent to Cairo American College. The apartments above us occupied entire floors, and were rented by people with relatively cushy corporate or diplomatic positions. By contrast, ours shared the ground floor with another relatively small apartment (a bit larger than ours) and with a rather large entryway. Thus, it was too... Read more
Should you watch your intake of caffeinated drinks? Perhaps so. “Caffeine Update: Prenatal Risks” *** I’m neither a climatologist nor a meteorologist, but I share these items for your consideration: “11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’ caused by climate change” (I confess that I could have done without the seemingly obligatory mention of Greta Thunberg.) “I’m a Climate Scientist Who Believes in God. Hear Me Out. Global warming will strike hardest against... Read more
Way back in 1952, Hugh Nibley published this little gem . . . umm, this little parable about the Book of Mormon in his book Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites. It still seems to me to fit a great many responses to the Book of Mormon (and, for that matter, to the Book of Abraham): A young man once long ago claimed he had found a large diamond in his field as he was... Read more
Newly posted on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: Science & Mormonism Series 1: Cosmos, Earth, and Man: “Science vs. Religion: Can this Marriage Be Saved?” Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article by David H. Bailey originally appeared in Science & Mormonism Series 1: Cosmos, Earth, and Man (2016). Abstract: This chapter examines the details of ongoing wars between science and religion and shows why they are not only futile and senseless, but also unnecessary. Sometimes... Read more
One of the misconceptions that many Westerners have is that all Arabs are Muslims, and that Muslims are all Arabs. In fact, of course, many of the major Islamic countries in the world (e.g., Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the most populous of them all, Indonesia) are not Arab, and large minorities in some Arab countries are not Muslim. Christianity is a Near Eastern religion, not a European one, and it is has been in the Near East... Read more
My wife and I are just back from the monthly meeting of a reading group to which we’ve belonged for something approaching three decades. Tonight, it was at the home of the brother-in-law and sister of Richard Bushman — like her brother, by the way, she earned a doctorate at Harvard; her husband had to settle for schooling at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tonight’s book for discussion was Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye’s eminently discussable Crossings: A Bald... Read more
The “Great Hymn to the Aten” is a poem, composed during the middle of the fourteenth century before Christ, that is attributed to the henotheistic or monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten [Amenhotep IV]. The “Aten” or “Aton” was the deified solar disk, believed by Akhenaten — “”Effective for Aten” — to be the sole monotheistic deity. Here is a quotation from the middle of the text, as published by James B. Pritchard: How manifold it is, what thou hast... Read more
Some of you are probably already famliar with a website, Mormon Scholars Testify, that I launched roughly a decade ago. If you aren’t, I hope that you’ll take a look at it: https://www.fairmormon.org/testimonies/scholars I probably need to modify the website’s title in the wake of President Russell M. Nelson’s admonitions regarding the nickname Mormon, but I haven’t gotten around to doing so. Truth be told, I’ve let the project pretty much glide for the past several... Read more
Back in 2015, a controversy erupted at Wheaton College in Illinois, a very good evangelical school. It raised the question whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Responding to the controversy, David French said “No”: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428763/christians-muslims-same-god-wheaton-college Now, David French is a Harvard-trained attorney and longtime contributor to National Review who has just become a senior editor for a new conservative website called The Dispatch. I have great respect for him. Probably because I typically... Read more
You are, I hope, aware of the lists of resources that the Interpreter Foundation regularly compiles for students and teachers who are involved in the Gospel Doctrine classes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Here’s the latest such list: “Come, Follow Me New Testament Lesson 42: October 28–November 3: 1 and 2 Timothy; Titus; Philemon“ Be Thou an Example of the Believers”” *** And here is some additional new material from the Interpreter Foundation: “Interpreter Radio Show... Read more
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