I was elected student body president at my high school.  Here’s a note about that:   I had never, I think, held (or run for) an office in student government.  (My memory is actually a bit fuzzy on this point:  It’s possible that I once served on a class council.  I really don’t remember.)   But there was somebody — let’s call him SB (for “somebody,” not his initials) — who had been class president at least once... Read more

    Continued from “On Gospel Doctrine Teaching (2)”:   The dynamic (or, perhaps even better, the demographic) in the old Mar Vista Ward was interesting.  For a long time, I found it baffling, but eventually I figured it out (I think).   The building was the second-oldest Latter-day Saint chapel in southern California.  I think it had been constructed by volunteers from the congregation itself in the 1920s.  (My wife’s maternal grandfather and grandmother, who spent almost all of... Read more

    The most recent column in my Deseret News series “Defending the Faith” has appeared.  It deals with the language — odd and perhaps rather obscure to modern speakers of English — of a famous prophecy of the ancient apostasy as that prophecy is rendered in the 1611 King James translation of the Bible:   “What does it mean that ‘only he who now letteth will let’?”   ***   Our friends and colleagues at Book of Mormon Central... Read more

    Five years ago today, on 13 June 2014, our first grandchild was born in Orlando, Florida.   She was born in a wing of a local Orlando hospital that had been built with generous Disney donations, and the hospital’s public spaces were decorated everywhere with characters from Disney cartoons.  As it rapidly became obvious that Lena would not, and could not, survive, I became acutely aware of how much I had looked forward to one day introducing her to those... Read more

    Jonathan Neville, a prominent and extremely vocal advocate of the “Heartland model” of Book of Mormon geography, has taken aim at the Interpreter Foundation, of which I’m the president, and against those involved with it in a new entry on his blog.   “[T]he very name,” he says, “reflects the arrogance of the intellectuals behind the Interpreter.”   And he puts us in our religious-historical context, too:   “In Jesus’ day, the scribes and pharisees [sic] claimed the... Read more

    One day, when I was teaching the Gospel Doctrine (adult Sunday School) class in the old Mar Vista Ward of the Santa Monica California Stake, the bishop asked me to come to his office after church.   When I walked in and sat down, he told me that a small delegation of older sisters — two, or possibly three — had come to him to complain that I was teaching “secular humanism.”   At first, I was puzzled... Read more

    For reasons that will shortly be obvious, I’m amassing a few notes for myself about various Peruvian subjects.  I make no claim whatever to any scholarly originality; they’re entirely derivative from online sources.  But I thought that I would share what I’ve learned:   The simple and familiar potato has a fascinating history.   It seems to have been initially domesticated somewhere in the area of modern southern Peru and the very far northwest of Bolivia—in other words,... Read more

    Just this morning, I received the latest quarterly AmazonSmile donation notification for the Interpreter Foundation. I’m happy to say that Interpreter recently received a quarterly donation — for, I believe, the period January-March 2019 —  of $270.08 from AmazonSmile, all of it owing to customers shopping at smile.amazon.com.   Now, obviously, this isn’t a huge amount.  We’re plainly not in the same league as the Red Cross, the Sierra Club, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the American Cancer Society.  Our... Read more

    An announcement and a link on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:   “DNA Helps Solve a Historical Question about Joseph Smith”   ***   I liked the short videos that accompany these stories:   From Japan:  “At Global Faith Forum, Apostle Shares Seven Ways Religions Can Help Society Prosper: Elder Gong and Sister Eubank share Latter-day Saint perspectives on promoting peace, strengthening human dignity and caring for the planet”   This one may prove to be quite significant:... Read more

    I think it appropriate to share, again, a column that I first published in the 9 February 2012 edition of the Deseret News:   Decades ago, I attended a gathering where the late Stanley Kimball, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University and president of the Mormon History Association, spoke. His remarks have stuck in my mind ever since. (If anybody out there knows where a written version of the speech can be found, I would be... Read more