We’re just back from a “patriotic service” held over at Utah Valley University under the auspices of the Provo Freedom Festival.  It was thoroughly enjoyable, with good music from the One Voice Children’s Choir and a band from the Utah National Guard, and with a very well thought-out and well-delivered speech on the First Amendment from a high school student whose name, unfortunately, I didn’t get down.   The dignitaries were out in force.  Governor Gary Herbert was... Read more

    Oliver B. Huntington (1823-1907), who was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1836, doesn’t always strike me as a completely reliable source.  I know of other accounts, however, that parallel the Oliver Huntington reminiscences below, which are included in Hyrum L. Andrus and Helen Mae Andrus, Personal Glimpses of the Prophet Joseph Smith (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2009):   I conversed with one old lady, 88 years old, who had lived with David... Read more

    From an uncompleted manuscript on which I was working a few years ago:   The eighteenth century English poet Thomas Gray is remembered largely for one melancholy composition, entitled “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”  He wrote it as a meditation on the church cemetery at Stoke Poges, a village in Buckinghamshire.  Looking over the graves there, he allowed himself to reflect on the people who occupied them, but who had once been as full of life as... Read more

    Gee, but it’s great to be back home: Home is where I want to be. I’ve been on the road so long, my friend, And if you came along I know you couldn’t disagree.   Of course, while I’ve been out and about since the last of April, others have been busy as well.  Including the good folks on what I call the Peterson Obsession Board.  And it doesn’t matter in the slightest degree where I am:  ... Read more

    My father died sixteen years ago today.   I still miss him very much.  I think about him every day.  Certain sights always, invariably, remind me of him.  There are many things that I would like to tell him, many questions that I would like to ask of him.   Virtually all, if not absolutely all, of the people I’ve known and loved, the people who formed me and to whom I looked up, are now gone.  The collection... Read more

    We’re just back from seeing The Other Side of Heaven 2: Fire of Faith.  It’s not without flaws, but it’s beautiful.  I liked it and I recommend it.  Latter-day Saint filmmaking is progressing very healthily, I think.   I was interested to see this new movie both for itself and for the fact that Mitch Davis, who directed both it and the original 2001 Other Side of Heaven to which it is a sequel, wrote the initial script... Read more

    I’ve been reading a relatively short book by the distinguished British conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, whom I greatly admire, entitled On Human Nature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).  The book is the somewhat revised result of his having delivered three Charles E. Test memorial lectures at Princeton University under the auspices of the James Madison Program there in the fall of 2013.  (The director of the Madison Program is the distinguished American conservative philosopher and... Read more

      The lidless, unsleeping, malignant eye of my Malevolent Stalker, always on the hunt for material that he might be able to abuse and twist in order to portray me as mean-spirited, corrupt, and depraved to the core, recently discovered a personal essay that I published in a 1996 anthology that was edited by Susan Easton Black under the title Expressions of Faith: Testimonies of Latter-day Saint Scholars.   My entry includes the following passage:   The building up... Read more

    I’ve just sent in the title for my remarks at the 2019 FairMormon conference, which will be held 7-9 August in the Utah Valley Convention Center, which is located in downtown Provo, not far from the Provo City Center Temple.  (It’s about time that I choose a topic, right?)   “Idle Tales”?  The Witness of Women   Here are the speakers and the topics as they are currently known to me:   Don Bradley, Joseph Smith’s First Vision... Read more

    I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the prolific evangelical Christian philosopher William Lane Craig.  (Among other things, his German is very, very good.)  Armed with two doctorates — a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham (1977), where his doctoral director was the prominent Anglo-American philosopher of religion John Hick, and a D. Theol. from the University of Munich (1984), where his director was the great Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, he is a formidable thinker... Read more