Many years ago, back during the relatively moderate Iranian presidency of Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, I was invited to participate as an all-expense-paid guest in a conference in Tehran that focused on the thought of the early seventeenth-century Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra. Then as now, going to Iran as an American was slightly unusual, and it remains one of the most interesting experiences I have ever had. I think, accordingly, that I’ll jot down a few reminiscinces of... Read more
Please share this with anybody who might be interested: Saturday, November 10, 2018, 9:00 am–5:00 pm 251 TNRB (N. Eldon Tanner Building), Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah Sponsored by: BYU College of Humanities, Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages The Interpreter Foundation The conference will focus on LDS conceptions of ancient and modern Temple theology as reflected in the Bible and LDS scripture. It is free and open to the public, with no RSVP or entrance fee.... Read more
Here are five more passages that I’ve extracted from John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007), which I believe to be a quite important book: [L]ike other religious and ethnic groups, Europe’s Muslims are not homogenous. . . . [M]any do not even practice their religion. They are at best cultural Muslims. Indeed, most of those who rioted and torched France’s banlieues (suburbs) in 2005... Read more
As I think I’ve made very clear over the past three years or so, I have profound reservations about President Donald J. Trump. He was not my first choice for president. Nor would he have been, in an ideal world, my tenth choice or my twentieth, or my hundredth. And, in fact, I didn’t vote for him in 2016. My initial and principal reservations concerned Mr. Trump as a potential (and now current) head of state. His... Read more
I grew up fairly near to Pasadena’s California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and typically drove by it, with my parents and then on my own, at least once or twice a month and probably, on average, just about every week. There was, in my mind, a sense of almost mystical awe around the place. Not terribly much further, though it wasn’t part of my neighborhood the way Caltech was, was the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La... Read more
In a very recent blog entry here (“Finally, I returned to my body”), I commented on the remarkable frequency with which “out-of-body experiences involve reports of being up near the ceiling.” I’ve seen that phenomenon described literally scores and scores of times, in recollections from a wide variety of people. Here’s another instance of the claim. Its similarity to many other more modern accounts — coupled with the fact that neither the person claiming the experience nor the person... Read more
Yawn. More notes from another incomplete manuscript. I wrote this up several years ago. Eventually, in sha’a Allah, it will be incorporated (probably in substantially modified form) into a more finished text and submitted for publication: It is not obvious that reason as reason can survive on a naturalistic view of the universe. Let us suppose, for example, that the universe did indeed commence with the Big Bang—as, to this point, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it... Read more
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