Curiously, even  now I still haven’t read the entirety of Alexander Kinglake’s 1844 book Eothen; or Traces of travel brought home from the East.  But one particular passage — a fictional conversation between an English visitor and an Ottoman (Osmanli) pasha by means of a somewhat manic-depressive dragoman (an early form of travel guide and translator) — has always struck me as hilarious.  Maybe one has to have spent time in the Middle East to fully appreciate it, but... Read more

    One of the most enjoyable experiences of my early career was the chance to spend two months at a 1990 seminar for faculty members at the Graduate Theological Union, directly adjacent to the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  We came, about a dozen of us, from various campuses across the country.  A professor of classics, a Jesuit specialized in Buddhist studies, a “process theologian,” a... Read more

    You might enjoy this 28-minute Tabernacle Choir program, appropriate for the American holiday tomorrow:   “Fourth of July Special (Live at West Point) – Music & The Spoken Word”   ***   Here’s an interesting piece from the British newspaper The Guardian:   “Salt Lake City offers glimpse of socialism, Mormon-style: Utah has one of the nation’s lowest rates of income inequality in part because of the Church of Latter-day Saints’ welfare system, but it also ranks dead... Read more

    In a response to a question posed as a comment on my blog about the ideological baggage that sometimes accompanies presentations of the concept of organic evolution, I gave, as examples of such baggage, “the notions — strictly speaking, not entailed by biological evolution — that life is pointless, that there is no God, that the cosmos is ultimately mindless, that humans and other organisms are essentially gene-replicating machines, and so forth.”   Over at what I call... Read more

    One of my more curious (and fruitful) academic experiences occurred many years ago, when I delivered a paper at a scholarly conference in which I tried to demonstrate a conceptual link between several passages in the Qur’an and certain cosmological notions from ancient Canaanite mythology.   The keynote speaker at that conference was Professor David Noel Freedman (1922-2008), who had spent many years at the University of Michigan and who then finished his career in the sunnier weather at the... Read more

    I was really pleased to see this:   “Gospel Literacy Program Launched in Sierra Leone to Strengthen Families: Sister Bingham says ‘learners become leaders’”   Feel free, if you’re so inclined, to add it to your Christopher Hitchens Memorial “Religion Poisons Everything” File, which, by the point, should long since have been bursting at the seams.   If you’re interested in learning more about the many crimes and offenses committed specifically by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day... Read more

    I’m pleased to learn that my 2007 biography of the Prophet Muhammad will shortly appear in Turkish, published in Turkey.  I don’t yet know the exact publication date, but will share the news for all of the many Turkish readers here when I receive my copy.   And I’ve just been invited this morning to update my article on the “Zaydiyya” (a relatively moderate sect of Shi‘a Islam) for the Oxford Bibliographies series.  Of course, it’s not as... Read more