Yesterday, just prior to my lecture on the emperor Constantine the Great at BYU’s Education Week — today, I’ll be speaking on Eusebius of Caesarea — Stephen Wight kindly handed me several pages photocopied from William Shepard and H. Michael Marquardt, Lost Apostles: Forgotten Members of Mormonism’s Original Quorum of Twelve (2014). The copied passages refer to three accounts of Lyman Johnson’s claiming to have been visited by an angel testifying of the Book of Mormon. Two of... Read more
Professor Hubert P. Yockey (April 15, 1916 – January 31, 2016) was a physicist and an information theorist who worked under Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project as well as at the University of California at Berkeley. One of his areas of concentration was the application of information theory to problems in biology; from 1974 onward, he published his writings in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Yockey was very critical of the theory that life had originated in a kind of “primordial soup,” arguing instead that “the origin of life is unsolvable... Read more
Current estimates of the age of the earth put it at about 4.543 billion years So the dates suggested by this study are extremely early: “The ancestor of all organisms” “We find that the “last universal common ancestor” – a hypothetical very early single cell from which all life on Earth descended – existed prior to the “late heavy bombardment”. This was a period of intense meteor bombardment sustained by our planet about 3.9 billion... Read more
It’s an arresting headline: “Researchers identify the most sexist places in America — and Utah ranks pretty high on the list” (And, no, the headline doesn’t read “most sexiest,” even though, since the day that I moved to Utah from California, it could justly have read that way.) There’s a lot here that might be discussed — thus far, commentators are blaming Utah’s high ranking on Mormonism — but let me offer a couple of... Read more
I’ll be speaking at Brigham Young University’s annual Education Week this year, starting on Tuesday and continuing on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I’m speaking each of those days from 12:30 PM to 1:25 PM, in the ballroom of the Wilkinson Student Center. My theme is “Pivotal Figures in Religion and Politics in Early Christianity.” This is actually a series of lectures that I delivered at the 2012 BYU Education Week, but the Ed Week powers-that-be asked me... Read more
Unorganized notes from another as yet incomplete manuscript: C. S. Lewis: “Let us suppose a race of people whose peculiar mental limitation compels them to regard a painting as something made up of little coloured dots which have been put together like a mosaic. Studying the brushwork of a great painting, through their magnifying glasses, they discover more and more complicated relations between the dots, and sort these relations out, with great toil, into certain regularities. Their... Read more
From an uncompleted manuscript: The second president of the Church, Joseph Smith’s immediate successor, was Brigham Young. Recalling his own early experiences with Joseph Smith, he remarked, Who can say aught against Joseph Smith? I do not think that a man lives upon the earth that knew him any better than I did, and I am bold to say that, Jesus Christ excepted, no better man ever lived or does live upon this earth. I feel like... Read more
I’ve had a number of very interesting and quite unexpected experiences over my absurdly long life and, at some point, I need to write them up. Among those experiences, I’ve been privileged to meet a number of quite fascinating people, including such folks as the last shah of Iran, the radio operator for the failed first attempt (in 1931) to transit the North Pole under the ice in a submarine, the leader of the first successful American expedition... Read more
Many, many years ago, when I was still a graduate student at UCLA, my friend S. Kent Brown introduced me to Father Samir Khalil Samir SJ, an eminent authority on Christian Arabic literature, during some academic meetings in Claremont, California. Father Samir encouraged me — and that’s putting it rather mildly — to devote some attention to the writings of Arabic-speaking Christians, as well as to those of Muslims. Arabic Christianity, he lamented, fell between two stools among Western... Read more
Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.” Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties. Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge? Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy . . . precisely the opposite of what we now know to be... Read more
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