The 7 July 2019 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show featured Neal Rappleye, Jasmin Rappleye, Spencer Marsh, Stephen Smoot, and Hales Swift, who held a conversation about such topics as the 4th of July, the physical nature of God, and Philistine DNA.  In the second hour of the broadcast, they discussed the upcoming Come, Follow Me lesson #29. You can now listen to a recording of the 7 July 2019 episode of the Interpreter Radio Show online, at your convenience, shorn... Read more

    The first manmade object to reach the surface of the Moon from Earth was the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 mission, which arrived on lunar soil on 13 September 1959.  This year will mark the sixtieth anniversary of that still quite remarkable achievement.   But a much more memorable landing occurred when the Lunar Landing Module of Apollo 11 settled down on the Moon on 20 July 1969, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard.  We are very nearly five decades from that... Read more

    Matthew Wheeler has kindly brought to my notice a new seven-minute video by Dr. Juan Cole, who serves as the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan:   “Muhammad: A Prophet of War?”   I commend the video to you, as well.   Matthew Wheeler has also alerted me to this interesting item:   “These Are The Muslim Scientists Who Are Breaking New Ground In STEM”   ***   Helen Condon alerted me to... Read more

    I published the article below in the Deseret News on 8 June 2018.  Next year, I will be leading a tour for the Cruise Lady company next year to Oberammergau and adjacent sites — as will Jack Welch, Brad Wilcox, and Roger Minert.  Mine will be the longest of the tours, but also (alas!) the most expensive:   http://www.cruiselady.com   Without treatment, the bubonic plague — which is spread mainly by infected fleas carried by small rodents —... Read more

    If you’re tempted to avert your eyes, please don’t:   “Inside China’s ‘thought transformation’ camps – BBC News”:  The BBC has been given rare access to the vast system of highly secure facilities thought to be holding more than a million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang.   “‘Unmatched wickedness’: Reports allege child separation, organ harvesting against China’s Muslims”   From “China bans religion for communists,” The Times (20 July 2017):   China’s estimated 85 million members... Read more

    It’s now confirmed that I’ll be speaking — a late addition, in response to a quite last-minute request — at FreedomFest 2019 in Las Vegas in a few days.  Unfortunately, I’ll just be able to spend part of a day there, flying down in the morning and returning to Utah that evening.  Here’s how I’m now listed in the program:   1 – 1:50 pm.  Wednesday, July 17. Champagne 1: “Building Zion:  Mormons and the American West,” with BYU Professor... Read more

    I found this 2016 Scientific American article by the science journalist John Horgan extremely interesting:   “The Mind–Body Problem, Scientific Regress and ‘Woo’: The science of consciousness, far from converging on a sensible paradigm, is going backward”   Horgan, it seems fairly obvious, is a naturalistic materialist.  Such reductionism is the overwhelmingly preferred general model for contemporary studies of mind.  But his unhappiness with the direction in which the “science of consciousness” or the study of the “mind-body problem”... Read more

    As we fairly often do, we rode up to Salt Lake Valley with friends this evening for dinner and a play.   Tonight, meeting with still other friends from the neighborhood — twelve or fourteen, altogether — we ate at the Tin Roof Grill in Sandy, which none of us had ever visited before.  Everybody seemed to enjoy their meals, and those who had desserts sang their praises.  My wife and I ordered (and shared) the White Bean and... Read more

    In the seventies, eighties, and nineties of the last century of the previous millennium — putting it that way, quite accurate though the formulation is, makes it seem even longer ago than it actually was! — the most pressing and urgent challenges to the claims of the Restoration seemed to me to be coming from aggressive Protestant anti-Mormonism.  Accordingly, especially in its first years, the FARMS Review, which I founded and edited until its 2012 demise, devoted considerable... Read more

    For another purpose, I spent a while this morning updating the list of main publications produced by the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, or METI, which I conceived and founded, and which I led (under various official titles, including “director” and “editor-in-chief,” through various administrative restructurings) until 2013, when I was forced by the then-new regime at the Maxwell Institute to resign.   I thought that I might share it here in order to illustrate something of what was (and... Read more