A passage from a manuscript with which I tinker from time to time:   In an article entitled “An Angel Told Him: Joseph Smith’s Aged Sister Tells about Moroni’s Talk,” the 11 April 1895 Kansas City Times reported a speech given by Katharine Smith Salisbury about the same event.  “Mrs. Salisbury,” the newspaper’s correspondent told his readers, “is a very old woman now—83 years of age.  But she claims to recall the time of the wonderful vision as... Read more

    A few days ago, I discovered that David Grandy, now an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University and the author, previously, of books on such topics as Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization (2003), The Speed of Light: Constancy and Cosmos (2009), and Everyday Quantum Reality (2010), had dropped off a new, self-published book of his (Worlds Without Number: An LDS Perspective on Infinity) at my office.   Here are some notes drawn from one... Read more

    I received the following from my former BYU colleague Don Holsinger, via my former BYU colleague Ted Lyon, on behalf of the LDS International Society, which is headquartered at BYU.  With their permission, I repost it here in case any of my readers might be interested or might know of someone who would be:   Volunteer Position in Human Rights Education The Geneva Office for Human Rights Education (www.go-hre.org) seeks a newsletter editor and website manager to assist the... Read more

    Continuing with my notes from John W . Welch, et al., eds., Knowing Why: 137 Evidences That the Book of Mormon Is True (American Fork: Covenant Communications, 2017):   “Did Lehi Quote Shakespeare?” (66-67) Almost immediately after its publication in 1830, some critics pointed out that the Book of Mormon anachronistically quotes from the Shakespearean play Hamlet: Lehi speaks of the grave, “from whence no traveler can return” (2 Nephi 1:14); Hamlet speaks of death as “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller... Read more

    A note from George Johnson, Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005), 7-8:   [A]stronomers can say with some confidence that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is more than 100,000 light-years from end to end and that Andromeda, the galaxy across the street, is 2 million light-years away.  These and several other galaxies form our “Local Group.”  The... Read more

    Further notes from John W . Welch, et al., eds., Knowing Why: 137 Evidences That the Book of Mormon Is True (American Fork: Covenant Communications, 2017):   “What Kind of Ore Did Nephi Use to Make His Plates?” (55-56) At 1 Nephi 18:25, we’re told that Nephi found “all manner of ore, both of gold, and of silver, and of copper.”  Then, in 1 Nephi 19:1, the text records that he made “plates of ore.” There is no text between 1 Nephi 18:25... Read more

    My regular Deseret News column has appeared:   “Appreciating eyes that see, fingers that feel and ears that hear”   ***   Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, in his book How It Began: A Time-Traveler’s Guide to the Universe (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), 218-219, on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field:   Let’s try and get a sense of this incredible image.  Hold a... Read more

    Every year, in connection with the annual Sundance Film Festival, the Sundance Institute — joined by Zions Bank and the World Trade Center Utah — sponsors a “Thought Leader Symposium.”  This year the focus of the symposium was on “Israel and Palestine,” and it took the form of a three-person panel discussion that was held this morning at the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City.   I participated as one of the three panelists, along with Tarek... Read more