I’m one of the two Gospel Doctrine teachers in my ward, and today it was my privilege to teach Lesson 35, which treats the “minor” prophets Amos and Joel.  It gave me a chance to dust off a column that Bill Hamblin and I wrote for the Deseret News back in January 2013:   “Old Testament divine council called a ‘sod'”   (The Hebrew word sod is pronounced somewhere between the English words sod and sewed.)   For... Read more

    I’m still working my way through the passages that I’ve marked in Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).   Here are two partial first-person acccounts of near-death experiences:   All of a sudden I knew that I was dead.  This realization struck me as odd.  I hovered about twenty feet above my body, which was still on the operating table.  I was surrounded by doctors who were talking to... Read more

    A virulently anti-Islamic reader of this blog — I hadn’t noticed his hostility to Islam until the past day or two — has now posted several comments taking issue with my views on the subject.  I’ve decided to post my response to him as a free-standing blog entry, here:   GK: “I see. It requires nuance to understand how brutality in the name of religion 600 years AD is a good thing.” I haven’t said — ever —... Read more

    Royal Skousen came by just now and dropped off our copies of the two massive books that make up Part Three (The Nature of the Original Language) of Volume Three (The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon) of his venerable project devoted to the “Critical Text of the Book of Mormon.”  They are very impressive publications, physically speaking, but — much more importantly — they lay out a fascinating and potentially rather revolutionary argument.  ... Read more

    If you have any Jewish friends, you might perhaps find this seasonally-appropriate article — the latest installment of the biweekly Hamblin-Peterson newspaper column — of particular interest:   “Yom Kippur and the quest for forgiveness”   Incidentally, you’ll notice that the article appeared in both the print and the online editions of the Deseret News.  (For context, see my earlier blog entry “On my supposed expulsion from the “Deseret News.””)   ***   Don’t forget the Interpreter Radio... Read more

    Further notes from Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006):   Meanwhile [in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries], thinkers in several countries began to take a new look at the jihad, as they contemplated the place of Islam, and especially of Islamic law, within their societies.  In India under British rule, where Muslims constituted a large minority, several reformers, of whom the most famous was Sayyid Ahmad Khan, revised... Read more

    A couple more items drawn from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010):   I felt that I was sliding deep down into another state of consciousness.  That’s to say, my consciousness traveled while my body remained motionless on the bed.  I could see my body, but I couldn’t feel it.  I was being sucked away, as it were.  I entered an extremely dark, long, and spiral-shaped tunnel, which struck... Read more

    I just came across this passage from my friend Richard Bushman, whom I last saw when we spent several hours interviewing him a few weeks ago in Manhattan for the Interpreter Foundation’s film project on the Book of Mormon Witnesses.  What he says here ties in nicely with my recent blog entry titled “Elder William E. McLellin and the Qur’an”:   Not long after this attempt, the issue arose again. A conference on November 8 instructed Joseph Smith... Read more

    Yesterday, in a blog entry titled “Needing help with a memory,” I mentioned a story that I had heard very nearly half a century ago — I’m that old! — and that impressed me so deeply that I’ve remembered it and often thought about it ever since.  The trouble is that I don’t recall the name of the man who told it, and I would like to solidify it in my mind and to nail down the details.   I... Read more

    My father was born 105 years ago, today.   He came relatively late to marriage and to fatherhood.  The Great Depression, working with Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, enlistment in the peacetime United States Army, the outbreak of World War Two, and then time spent trying to earn a living and eventually to establish a construction business in booming postwar southern California — these all interfered with any sort of romantic life.   He once told me that... Read more