I’m adding these two passages to my notebook, from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010): The first systematic study of near-death experience was written in 1892 by the Swiss geologist Albert von Sankt Gallen Heim. In the Yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club, under the heading “The Experience of Dying from Falls,” Heim described a total of thirty cases that were told to him in person; among them are the... Read more
Just back from seeing Mama Mia! Here We Go Again with friends. My wife’s idea. It was fluff with muddled morals, but enjoyable and, surprise!, featuring catchy music. *** More than two decades ago now, I spent a summer in Berkeley, California, participating in a small seminar led by the preeminent student of comparative religions Huston Smith (1919-2016) and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was an extraordinary and memorable experience on... Read more
Some years ago, when Hillary Clinton published her book It Takes a Village, many conservatives hotly denounced the title, which purportedly came from an African proverb holding that “it takes a village to raise a child.” They saw the title — correctly, for all I know — as a call for greater government involvement in childrearing. I certainly understand objecting to that. However, although I’m a very serious conservative and not even remotely an admirer of... Read more
From an as-yet incomplete manuscript: It is worthwhile examining the contrasting character of the experiences reported by the Three Witnesses and the Eight, since, I believe, their very difference reinforces them.[1] First of all, the experience of the Three, as they report it, was suffused with the glory and power of God. In a brilliant light, an angel came down and showed them the plates. They heard the voice of God testifying that the translation had been... Read more
“NDE,” writes the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, “pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness, and the mind-brain relation.” In support of that, he offers considerable material, including the following three quotations, taken from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), pages 162-163. The first is from Dr. Bruce Greyson: The paradoxical occurrence of heightened, lucid awareness and logical thought processes during a... Read more
In the book on Islam that I’m intending to publish for a Latter-day Saint audience, I also plan to include a few words about the Druze and the Bahá’í Faith, both of which (historically speaking) represent offshoots of Islam. Here’s a first, hasty draft of the beginnings of the latter discussion: The Bahá’í Faith, which was founded by Bahá’u’lláh in Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1863, emerged out of Shi‘ite Islam, but quickly diverged so far from mainstream Shi‘ism that... Read more
Farid al-Din Attar was a Sufi (that is, a Muslim mystic) who died in the early thirteenth century in what is today Iran and who is widely considered to rank among the greatest of all Sufi writers. The title of his most famous literary work, a lengthy allegorical poem called — in both Arabic and, derivatively, also in Persian — the Mantiq al-Tayr, is typically rendered in English as The Conference of the Birds or else as The Parliament of... Read more
A few more notes from my virtual “notebook”: “At the fundamental level,” observes physicist David Gross, “nature, for whatever reason, prefers beauty.”[1] Science writer K. C. Cole says that “the same properties that make a snowflake appealing underlie the laws that control the universe. Truth and beauty are two sides of a coin.”[2] “The selfsame symmetries . . . appeal to the senses in art and music and natural forms like snowflakes and galaxies. The fundamental... Read more
This is good news: “New Marriott rooms across the globe will get Bible, Book of Mormon” *** Have you seen this interesting series of articles? “Inside the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: The Ministry of President M. Russell Ballard and His Brethren” “Inside the Quorum of the Twelve: What It’s Like to Be a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” “Inside the Quorum of the Twelve: The Divine Calling Apostles Share with Missionaries” ... Read more
Nearly a year ago, an article appeared in Time about New Zealand’s then-new and quite young ex-Mormon prime minister, the politically progressive Jacinda Ardern: “Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s 37-Year-Old Leader, Rolls Up Her Sleeves” I missed that article when it was first published. However, a reader of this blog in New Zealand who goes by the moniker of Kiwi57 — I’ve met him, been in his home, and know his actual name, but I don’t feel authorized... Read more
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