A new article — or, anyway, an article that’s still relatively new (I’ve been traveling) — in the pages of Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture: “Orson Scott Card’s ‘Artifact or Artifice’: Where It Stands After Twenty-five Years” The article is by the indefatigible Jeff Lindsay, who also has a short related article on his blog: “The Evolution of Language and the Book of Mormon” *** From the Australian newsroom of the Church of Jesus... Read more
Here’s a column that Bill Hamblin and I published in the Deseret News back on 15 December 2012: Many Western Christians observe a season called “Advent” (from the Latin “adventus” or “coming”) during the month before they celebrate Jesus Christ’s Nativity at Christmas. Advent begins on the fourth Sunday prior to Dec. 25 and opens the liturgical year in the Moravian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Anglican and Roman Catholic calendars. (Eastern Christian communions celebrate a rough equivalent of... Read more
I’ve previously mentioned my Malevolent Stalker, a curious fellow who, for roughly the past fifteen years, has sought to portray me as among the very worst people alive. To that end, he’s combed through IRS records, found forty-year-old anecdotes about me on websites of which I had never heard, scrutinized (and critiqued) the Amazon.com Christmas wish list of my then eight-year-old son, and so forth. His commitment to his life’s mission is really, in its remarkably odd way,... Read more
Elder Robert Dudfield kindly took us to the airport in Melbourne very early this morning; he himself was heading up to Cairns a bit later, for the kickoff there of the Church’s 2018 “Light the World” campaign. We were picked up at the Sydney airport by Keith Thompson, who then generously drove us up to stay at a house that he and his wife own in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Because he needed to... Read more
Having appeared in the print edition of the Deseret News and online at LDS Living, this is the latest iteration of my biweekly “Defending the Faith” column: “What J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works Can Teach Us About the Book of Mormon: New Study Reveals” *** I was involved in meetings last night at the stake center adjacent to the Melbourne Australia Temple. The first was an early-evening interfaith reception, with food, at which I spoke for a... Read more
Here’s a special column that I published in the Deseret News, at the editors’ invitation, back on 16 December 2010: LDS Church history sites that dot the eastern half of the United States all prepare for Christmas with lights, Nativity displays and other decorations. This week Mormon Times highlights Christmas at LDS Church historic sites from Sharon, Vt., to Nauvoo, Ill. Also, BYU professor Dan Peterson helps give insight to what the holiday season is like in the... Read more
I published a Deseret News column back in 2015 entitled “The Mystery of the Orderliness of the Universe.” It drew considerable mockery from certain atheists. One in particular, a dogmatic fellow with scientific pretensions who’s based in Florida (from which he’s been periodically spewing contempt for me for about eight or nine years now), pronounced what I wrote to be “childish.” He reserved his particular scorn, though, for the penultimate sentence of my column, which concluded by expressing the... Read more
This morning, Elder and Sister Lloyd, public affairs missionaries here in Melbourne whose permanent home is up in Utah’s Heber Valley, in Midway, kindly picked us up and drove us into the serenely beautiful wine and dairy country of the Yarra Valley. Apart from the gorgeous drive itself, we spent the bulk of our time at the Healesville Sanctuary, a part of Zoos Victoria. Walking about in the Sanctuary, we saw koalas, echidnas, a dingo, brush-tailed rock... Read more
During the 25 November 2018 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show, Steve Densley and Matt Bowen discussed some recent Interpreter articles as well as the movie A Case for Christ. The program is now archived online for your listening convenience and enjoyment: https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-november-25-2018/ *** My wife and I met Jake Mangakahia at Church in Sydney last weekend, where we had a nice and fairly long conversation with him. He’s an impressive fellow, and we didn’t even... Read more
Several years ago, I published a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God. It was essentially my section from David Noel Freedman and Michael J. McClymond, eds., The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad as Religious Founders, a hefty (and heftily-priced) volume that featured a foreword by the celebrated/controversial Swiss theologian Hans Küng. It’s a simple narrative biography, a pretty straightforward and non-theoretical one, that doesn’t pretend to break significant new historical ground but seeks to tell... Read more
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