A conclusion to the story: A community of Latter-day Saints now exists in the Holy Land. It is not a community of agriculturalists and canal-builders, as our ancestors had pictured, but a community of scholars, teachers, and students. In a very real sense, I believe it fulfills the dreams and aspirations of the early missionaries who labored so faithfully in the Near East to build outposts of the kingdom of God in that historic but tortured land.... Read more
On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, Brigham Young University’s very significant International Center for Law and Religion Studies (in connection with which I participated in a conference at the law school of the University of Jordan back in April) will be hosting its 2018 Religious Freedom Annual Review: https://religiousfreedom.byu.edu The theme this year is “Religious Freedom and the Common Good.” As part of the gathering, I will be chairing a workshop on “Religious Freedom Issues... Read more
It has been suggested that I re-post the following, since the available places on the tour are evidently going fast. And, frankly, the Nile cruise ship that we want to use has limited space; if we don’t claim it, somebody else will. So, if there is anybody out there who’s thinking about signing up for this trip to Egypt, it may be vitally important to get on the list as soon as possible: From 26 December 2018... Read more
On and on and on it goes . . . For some time thereafter, no matter how careful we were, some new and usually rather ridiculous charge would still occasionally surface. One amusing instance of this was the accusation published by an Orthodox Jewish newspaper in both Jerusalem and New York during October 1987 that the nefarious Mormons were using their building’s highly visible location to impose a large illuminated cross on the nighttime horizon of Jerusalem.... Read more
I taught 1 Samuel 9-17 in my ward’s Gospel Doctrine class today. Memorable stories. The account given in 1 Samuel 15 in particular, though, is a very difficult one. The total annihilation of a people is painful to read about, particularly when the directive to do so is said to have come from God himself. It’s an issue well worth discussing, but I don’t want to get too deeply into it right now. Suffice it... Read more
An interesting and calendar-appropriate article in a non-LDS venue by two professors at Brigham Young University: “Living Into Fatherhood” *** The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is commonly mocked for its supposedly outdated and prudish notions of chastity and sexual self-restraint. Here’s a relevant reflection from Will and Ariel Durant, written after they had completed ten of the eventual eleven volumes of their Pulitzer-Prize-winning work, The Story of Civilization: No one man,... Read more
Perhaps the most serious threat to theistic belief is the problem of evil. If God exists, and if God is both good and all-powerful, evil is difficult to explain. Again assuming that he exists and that evil exists, God is either not good or he is not all-powerful. He either cannot prevent evil or chooses not to do so. (Perhaps, indeed, he even wills it.) This is a thorny problem, and I won’t pretend to resolve it... Read more
More, regarding the construction of the most visible Latter-day Saint landmark in the Middle East: On 4 March 1987, occupancy permits were issued for the not quite-completed center and, on the recommendation of both the Church’s legal staff and its local lawyers, students and faculty immediately moved into the twenty-million-dollar structure. On the eighteenth of May in the following year, President Jeffrey Holland of Brigham Young University signed a forty-nine year lease for the land on which... Read more
As I’ve explained a few times, I maintain a blog for many reasons. One of them is purely personal: It’s a kind of journal for me, and, even more particularly, it’s a way of remembering things, and especially of remembering people, whose memory I refuse to allow to be wholly lost. So, for instance, I’m afraid that readers of this blog will have to put up with my regular yearly memorials to my brother and my... Read more
We who are associated with the Interpreter Foundation and its weekly publication, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, are pleased to be able to share with a Latter-day Saint audience an important article by Noel Reynolds that first appeared in the Scottish Journal of Theology 68:2 (2015), 218-34: “The Gospel According to Mormon” *** The 10 June 2018 episode of the Interpreter Radio Show is now available for your listening convenience on the Interpreter Foundation’s principal website. This... Read more
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