This is marvelous news for Brigham Young University’s Arabic program and its Arabic students, and a spectacular tribute to those who have brought the program to its current level of national and international prominence — among whom I emphatically do not include myself: “Arabic Flagship to take students to the next level” *** This news is very much less positive: Approximately one million Uighur (or Uyghur) Turks have been forced into Chinese “reeducation” camps.... Read more
I’ve been having a little bit of fun with some very silly and unreasonable pseudonymous critics of the Church (and of me) over the question of “Stalinist art” and Mormonism. See, for example: “The Latter-day Saints and “Stalinist Art” Revisited (Part One?)” Since my, umm, seething anger over this issue continues to boil completely out of control — in much the same manner that my never-ending rage on scores of other subjects burns dangerously and perpetually... Read more
Elder Orson Hyde said of our life in the premortal world, “We understood things better there than we do in this lower world.” Elder Hyde also surmised as to the agreements we made there as follows: “It is not impossible that we signed the articles thereof with our own hands,–which articles may be retained in the archives above, to be presented to us when we rise from the dead, and be judged out of our own mouths, according... Read more
I wrote, a couple of days ago, about my father’s childhood confrontation with the challenge posed to the concept of divine justice by the process of milking cows (“One Perspective on the Theological Problem of Evil”). Yesterday, though, we revisited the famous creamery southward in Tillamook, where it seems that that challenge has been eliminated by robotics. My father would have been delighted and relieved. Driving out with friends to the lighthouse on Cape Meares, though,... Read more
In the classes that I teach on Islam, Islamic history, and Islamicate civilization and culture, I typically use the divisions proposed by Marshall Hodgson in his great (uncompleted) three-volume work, The Venture of Islam. He objected to the “great man” method of periodizing Islamicate history (or, for that matter, any other history), and sought more fundamental turning points. So do I. For your (lack of) interest, his divisions (and, derivatively, mine) are as follows: (Pre-Islamic Period, or,... Read more
Here are four partial descriptions of near-death experiences, taken from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010): 1. What I saw was too beautiful for words: I was looking at a magnificent landscape full of flowers and plants that I couldn’t actually name. It all looked hundreds of miles away. And yet I could see everything in detail — even without glasses, although in real life I have bad eyesight. It... Read more
A few days ago, I posted some comments (“The Parthenon of the South Pacific?”) about a Time journalist’s passing comparison of the Hamilton New Zealand Temple to “Stalinist” architecture. It’s a silly comparison. However, for a few critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints no negative characterization of the Church is too silly to be defended as true and damning. And, for a tiny clique of online sufferers from Peterson Derangement Syndrome,... Read more
My father grew up on an isolated farm outside the tiny, unincorporated town of Garske, Ramsey County, North Dakota, in the upper right hand corner of the state. When the time came for him to attend high school, he was obliged to board with relatives in the comparatively large town of Devils Lake, the county seat, which was located roughly fifteen or twenty miles away. (In the late 1920s, in a remote and rural area very few cars... Read more
One of the recurrent themes in the Qur’an is a kind of simple natural theology, an argument from apparent “design” in nature to the existence of God. It’s by no means a rigorous syllogism, but, rather, an appeal to “those with eyes to see” to draw the right conclusion from the wonders of nature about them, an assurance to those who want to believe that their desire isn’t contrary to reason. A typical passage is this one,... Read more
I liked this little essay, and I commend it to your attention: “LGBTQ and You” I don’t know that I can sign on to the proposition that “How we treat those who are LGBTQ is the defining challenge of this generation” — it seems to me that there are a number of other challenges (e.g., world hunger, challenges to religious liberty, issues of climate change, and so forth) that compete for that designation — but it’s... Read more
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