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
Our English word science derives, ultimately, from the Latin verb scire, which meant “to know.” In modern English, though, science doesn’t refer simply to knowledge in general. Rather, it denotes a certain kind of knowledge — or, even, to be really precise, a certain methodology (or bundle of methodologies; after all, cosmology and botany and geology and particle physics and genetics and astrophysics and ecology employ quite distinct methods and styles of reasoning) for attaining that certain kind... Read more
If you’re looking for a Christmas gift suitable for an academically-inclined Latter-day Saint, or for somebody who really wants to delve into the New Testament during this coming Church curriculum year (which, of course, will be focused on the New Testament, and for which, given recent developments, Latter-day Saint families and individuals will need to be a bit more self-reliant than we have heretofore tended to be), here’s a really interesting possibility: “Translating the New Testament for... Read more
I’m looking back through some of the articles that I’ve published in the Deseret News, and think it occasionally alright to share one or two of them. This particular column appeared on 15 April 2010: One of the great scientific achievements of recent decades was the mapping and sequencing of human DNA completed by the Human Genome Project (HGP). During roughly the same period that that vast effort began to bear fruit (a working draft of the... Read more
We had our annual Asian and Near Eastern Languages department Christmas party this evening at Provo’s Bombay House restaurant. Have I mentioned before that Bombay House is one of the very good things about life in Utah Valley? I’m in a good department, with good people who work in interesting areas — Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic. *** Unfortunately, though, not everything in this world is so pleasant: “Saudi crown prince ‘ordered, monitored’... Read more
Among other things in the remarkable Neal A. Maxwell Lecture (“The Maxwell Legacy in the 21st Century”) that he delivered on the Provo, Utah, campus of Brigham Young University on the evening of Saturday, 10 November 2018, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Council of the Twelve Apostles cited a passage from George MacDonald (1824-1905), a Scottish clergyman, author, and poet. The great English scholar, writer, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) ranked very high among Elder Neal A.... Read more
Here’s a Christmas-related column that I published in the Deseret News on 22 December 2011: “Knowest thou the condescension of God?” (1 Nephi 11:16) We miss the significance of the question posed to Nephi if we think that “to condescend” means to patronize, or to act in a smugly superior way. As documented in Noah Webster’s great 1828 American dictionary, Joseph Smith’s contemporaries understood “condescension” to mean “Voluntary descent from rank, dignity or just claims; relinquishment of... Read more
At Christmastime, we sing — and we dream — of peace on Earth and good will to all humankind. Unfortunately, we mortals aren’t very good at this. At Christmas, though, we aspire to do and to be better. At least briefly and transiently. And we hope that if we’re able to improve a bit during the Christmas season, we can perhaps retain at least a tiny little bit of that improvement during the following months, and ratchet ourselves... Read more
I’ve lately received several inquiries about Islam’s shari‘a (or, as it’s often somewhat misleadingly termed, “shari‘a law’). With that in mind, I think it not inappropriate to share this column that Bill Hamblin and I wrote and that appeared in the Deseret News on 1 December 2012. It’s dated in parts, but, overall, it contains some still-useful information and, perhaps, a helpful insight or two: The ongoing constitutional crisis in Egypt — provoked by President Mohammed Morsi’s... Read more
I published this column in the Deseret News on 8 December 2011: “In the beginning was the Word,” begins a Christmas story that we seldom read at Christmas, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). The Greek verb translated as “dwelt,” “skeneo,” means “to dwell in a tent” — which, in Greek, is a “skene.” So John 1:14 could... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In