He was more than a decade older than I, and we’re only half-brothers. (His father left our mother a widow, and then, years later, she married my father.) Yet we were exceptionally close. At least, I think we were; I have no other siblings with which to compare him. He would have been seventy-seven years old today. That’s hard for me to imagine. Of course, for that matter, it’s difficult for me to imagine him as a... Read more
Important Message: I’ll be speaking this coming Sunday, 13 October 2019, in Cedar City, Utah. So I’m extending an invitation or, depending upon your point of view, giving a timely warning in case anybody out there expects be in the vicinity on the evening: The fireside will be at 7 PM on Sunday evening at the South Mountain Ward. That building is at 800 South Laurie Lane (800 South and Westview Rd). Although this will be a... Read more
Let me just say that I loved — absolutely loved — President Russell M. Nelson’s remarks in the Sunday morning session of the October 2019 semiannual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I loved his brief allusion to his experience with imams and other Muslim leaders in Christchurch, New Zealand during a visit earlier in the year. I’m not sure, but I rather suspect that this may have been the first time that a... Read more
A passage that I gathered for one of my manuscripts-in-progress and that I thought some might perhaps enjoy on this Sabbath day: “To find out if apparitions occur independently of the patient’s desires and expectations,” write Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, we asked our respondents to identify whom the patients had desired to see the day before the visions occurred. Sometimes there had been a very strong desire to see a loved one who lived far away,... Read more
Tonight, in the women’s session of the 2019 semi-annual General Conference of the Church — and I think that the place and time of the announcement is not insignificant — President Russell M. Nelson announced new temples for Bacolod, Philippines Cobán, Guatemala Freetown, Sierra Leone Port Moresby, Papua, New Guinea Bentonville, Arkansas McAllen, Texas Taylorsville, Utah And Orem, Utah! I confess that that last one really caught me by surprise. Moreover, a friend suggests... Read more
I was struck by the beginning of President Dallin H. Oaks’s remarks in this morning’s opening sesson of the semi-annual conference of the Church of Jesus Chirst of Latter-day Saints. As he has, I’ve had people — almost all of them women — come to me, once or twice in considerable anguish of soul, asking about life in the world to come. Are women doomed to everlastingly subordinate status? Is eternity always to be about men? What... Read more
“Why just being in the habitable zone doesn’t make exoplanets livable: Debate over what makes a planet habitable highlights the trickiness in searching for alien life” “The Raw Materials for Amino Acids – Which are the Raw Materials for Life – Were Found in the Geysers Coming out of Enceladus” This new volume looks very worthwhile: “A new book explores how the concept of the multiverse has evolved: Science journalist Tom Siegfried discusses The Number of the Heavens”... Read more
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
It’s Friday, so — I hope, to nobody’s very great surprise by now — a new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Could Joseph Smith Have Drawn on Ancient Manuscripts When He Translated the Story of Enoch?: Recent Updates on a Persistent Question” Abstract: In this article, we offer a general critique of scholarship that has argued for Joseph Smith’s reliance on 1 Enoch or other ancient pseudepigrapha for the Enoch chapters... Read more
A short article by Matthew Hutson in the October 2019 issue of Scientific American (“Beautiful Truths: Nonmathematicians agree on what makes proofs pleasing,” on pages 14-15) revisits the interesting issue of the relationship between mathematical truth and what is often called not just “beauty” but “elegance”: “Scientists and mathematicians,” Hutson writes, “often describe facts, theories and proofs as ‘beautiful,’ even using aesthetics to guide their work. Their criteria might seem opaque to nonexperts, but new research finds... Read more
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