I think that you’ll enjoy this short video, if you can take just five minutes to watch it:   “New Church History Book ‘Saints’ the Focus of Broadcast With Elder Cook: Church historians also answer questions from Nauvoo, Illinois in live event”   On the same topic, I like this piece from Stephen Smoot, who blogs at Ploni Almoni and who originally posted what follows on his Facebook page.  I hope that he won’t mind my pilfering it here (with... Read more

    Celebrating Two New Books in the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project:  The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon On Tuesday, September 25, at 7 p.m., BYU Professor Royal Skousen will speak on the just-published The Nature of the Original Language, parts 3 and 4 of volume 3 of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. The lecture will include additional commentary by Stanford Carmack, Skousen’s collaborator in authoring and researching these two new books.... Read more

    Continuing with a few notes from Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006):   Writing already existed in Arabia when Islam first arose, and many Muslims of the first generations wrote, most often in the Arabic language.  However, for a number of reasons, writings from that earliest period of Islam have survived only sporadically and by accident.  (Here, as so often, the Quran constitutes the great exception.)  The compendious... Read more

    “Basically,” as the late historian Richard Lloyd Anderson noted, “the study of Mormon origins resolves itself into the credibility of the earliest Mormons. Once this question is stated, the difficulty of answering it lies in the terribly conflicting opinions about Joseph Smith from the beginning. But one seasoned in human experience is hardly shocked to find vigorous reformers at the heart of controversy.”[1]  In this first section, I shall attempt to show that the evidence against proposition (a),... Read more

    Taken together, these two passages from the prominent English mathematician G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology (1940) seem to me significant and worthy of reflection:   The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way.  Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.  (25) I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us,... Read more

    With lots of obligations, several ambitions, and a limited number of hours in the day, I have, as I acknowledged on Saturday, permitted my Mormon Scholars Testify site to slide for quite a while.  But the small backlog of submitted testimonies has grown large enough to impact even my lethargic conscience.  So another entry has now gone up:   Levente Hufnagel   If, however, you would prefer to read Dr. Hufnagel’s testimony in his native Hungarian — he... Read more

    I’m just back from helping with a broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show with Martin Tanner and John Gee and a new participant, Terry Hutchinson.  I think it went pretty well.   ***   One of my many bad habits is the fact that, although I read widely and typically mark up everything serious that I read, I seldom get around to actually extracting (and thus making useful) the passages that I’ve marked.  So I’m trying to use... Read more

    I first became really aware of the power of Latter-day Saint community when my wife and I were living in Cairo.  Or, more precisely, in Ma‘adi, to the south of Cairo.   We ended up spending four academic years there.  We hadn’t planned on that initially.  We simply kept on extending — and the Cairo Branch was a principal reason for our willingness to stay.   A resident American official then with the Center for Arabic Study Abroad... Read more

    I continue to extract and share notes from Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), by the Dutch cardiologist and researcher Pim van Lommel:   All science is empirical science, all theory is subordinate to perception; a single fact can overturn an entire system.  (Frederik van Eeden, cited on page v)   It is 1969.  At the coronary care unit the alarm suddenly goes off.  The monitor shows that the electrocardiogram of a patient... Read more

    A new podcast, available via the website of the Interpreter Foundation:   “Isaiah 2.0,” with Joseph M. Spencer   ***   The Latter-day Saint community of Cardston, Alberta, figures prominently in this article from the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail:   “In age of pot shops, a new kind of ‘dry’ community looms”   ***   “Church Joins National Weekend of Prayer for Faith, Hope, and Life: Prayer invitation coincides with Suicide Prevention Awareness Month”   ***... Read more