Late last night, I came across a passage in which someone I once knew, a person who was once (to all appearances, anyway) an active and committed Latter-day Saint but who is now long and very vocally out of the Church, observes (with no evident demurral) that the word Mormon often evokes thoughts of bigotry, exclusion, narrowness, and sectarianism.   Latter-day Saints are seen — and, here, he quotes the late John Gardner’s 1982 novel Mickelsson’s Ghosts, in which they... Read more

    We’re just back from a Friday evening concert of the Utah Symphony at Symphony Hall in Salt Lake City.  It was a great program.  In the first half, the orchestra played the Brandenburg Concertos 3 and 4, by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), with Mémoriale, by Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), sandwiched in between.  The second half of the program was entirely Nordic, beginning with the Concerto in D minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 47, by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957).  The Latvian violinist... Read more

    BYU’s Departments of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and of Philosophy had an informal lunch today with the University’s president (Kevin Worthen) and its academic vice president (James Rasband, who contributed the foreword to the Interpreter Foundation’s 2017 festschrift volume in honor of John W. Welch).  My faculty appointment is in Asian and Near Eastern Languages, which is why I participated in the lunch, although I’ve also taught courses in Philosophy (and, in fact, will be doing so... Read more

    New today, in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture:  “Let There Be a Famine in the Land”.   Here is the abstract of the longer article:   The drought recorded in Helaman 11 is probably the only dated, climate-related event in the entire Book of Mormon that could have left a “signature” detectable over 2,000 years after it occurred. Typical methods to detect this kind of event using dendrochronology (the study of tree rings) or sediment cores from lake... Read more

    Before our actual tour begins in Egypt later this month , my wife and I will accompany another couple to Alexandria for two or three days.  (I always like to be at least a little bit less jet-lagged than the tour group that I’m accompanying.  They can fall asleep; I can’t.)   Oddly, this will be only our second visit to Alexandria — which, for a time, was (after Rome) the second most important, influential, and powerful metropolis... Read more

    Brigham Young University and its sponsor, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, are taking heavy fire right now for their alleged lack of care for members and students who suffer from mental illness or emotional problems.  As I said in an earlier post on this topic, it’s being alleged, in at least some quarters, that the Church (and, therefore, its flagship university) are concerned only about money, not about people, which lack of concern has allegedly... Read more

    Back on 22 November 2018 — roughly two weeks ago — I posted a blog entry entitled “In praise of excommunication.”   Some time after that, an online article appeared under the title “High-profile excommunications may harm Mormon retention rates in the long run.”   It summarizes a survey that I haven’t yet examined directly but that seems worth a careful look.  Permit me, though, to offer two preliminary observations reacting to the summary alone.   Even if... Read more

    By now, many of you will have heard the very sad story of the suicide of a nineteen-year-old BYU student who jumped from high in the Tanner Building.  Some — and they’re getting a fair amount of media coverage for it — are blaming the student’s death on inadequate campus counseling resources:   New York Post: “College student’s suicide blamed on ‘overbooked’ counseling center”   I don’t know if the complaints cited in that article have any merit.  I... Read more

    I’ll be accompanying a tour to Egypt later this month.  For this occasion, I thought that I would put together a chronology of basic Egyptian history that I might give out to participants in the group. I make absolutely no claim to originality here; I’ve consulted three other timelines, thus far.  And this is a work in progress.  I’ll probably include just a bit of biblical and other external history in order to put Egyptian events in context.... Read more

    Just in case you haven’t already heard the story, here’s an item from the Daily Mail, in the United Kingdom:   “‘Everyone will die’: Blood-soaked man is arrested for stabbing four during Sunday service at LDS church in Brazil”   Not a pleasant event, obviously.  But the news items in this blog entry will get better.  To some extent, anyway.   ***   Some traditional attitudes among conservative Protestants have been eroding at the very time that the... Read more