The 2017 personal Christmas guest essay from the Interpreter Foundation has now appeared:   “Christmastime: When Our Souls Can Sing”   ***   Tomorrow — Saturday, 23 December 2017 — is the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet Joseph Smith.  In that connection, my friend and Interpreter Foundation colleague Dr. Jeffrey Mark Bradshaw, who is currently serving a mission with his wife in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sent me a video testimony of the Prophet.... Read more

      Here’s  a Deseret News news column that I published on 15 December 2017:   The Book of Mormon is something worth noting at Christmas time: It’s a second witness for Jesus Christ. It begins, on its title page, by declaring that it comes forth “to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations.” The magnificent chiasm of Alma 36 is literally centered on Christ. The most important event... Read more

    Today is the twenty-first day of the “Light the World” campaign, sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The theme for today is   “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat.”   An excellent way to act on today’s theme can be found at the Liahona Children’s Foundation.   You know that I’ve been urging donations — even small ones — to the Interpreter Foundation.  It’s a cause in which I deeply,... Read more

    Back in 2014, Bill Hamblin and I published a Deseret News column titled “Is Islam a primary cause of international violence?”  It was focused upon (and inspired by) a book by the former CIA political analyst (and Kabul, Afghanistan, station chief) Graham Fuller.   Here are some quotations from that extremely stimulating book:   “Islam seems to offer an instant and uncomplicated analytical touchstone for most affairs in the Middle East, by which to make sense of today’s... Read more

    A quotation from astronomer and astrophysicist Seth Shostak, extracted from something that I read earlier today:   Ever since Galileo, astronomers have somberly charted a universe that is stupefyingly large, bitterly cold, and implacably hostile.  As every schoolchild knows, we occupy a small planet around a common sort of star, itself just one of a hundred billion suns in a rather ordinary galaxy.  Our cosmic situation is insignificant, and life, particularly intelligent life, might be only an accident of... Read more

    We’re approaching the anniversary of Joseph Smith’s birth.  (He was born on 23 December 1805.)  It’s seldom noticed by Latter-day Saints, which is probably fine, but I also think that mentioning it is appropriate.  Here’s a column that I published in the Deseret News back on 14 December 2011:   In January 1819, Joseph Smith Sr. and his eldest son, Alvin, initiated a lawsuit against Jeremiah Hurlbut, the eldest male member of a prominent founding family in Palmyra,... Read more

    My Christmas column in the Deseret News for 2018 has now appeared:   “Christmas and Christ’s ‘mortal tabernacle'”   ***   “Elder Holland: To My Friends Who Want to Believe”   ***   Last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a policy change that will permit holders of the Aaronic priesthood (overwhelmingly, young men) to perform baptisms and serve as witnesses to vicarious baptisms for the dead in the Church’s temples.  Young women of... Read more

    Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to Him. George MacDonald  ... Read more

    Thanks to Tom Pittman for creating this brief but very helpful video:   “How to Use Amazon Smile to Make Donations”   Folks, there is absolutely no reason not to use this.  It costs you absolutely nothing.  Nothing.  And yet it can benefit causes that you choose.   Now, on one level, it doesn’t yield huge revenues.  It generates half of one percent of your purchase price.  So, if you buy something for a hundred dollars through smile.amazon.com —... Read more

    I published this Christmas-related column on 22 December 2016:   Behind the tinsel and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, beyond Santa Claus, Christmas represents an enormously serious claim — the incarnation of God or, literally, God’s “enfleshment.” “And the Word was made flesh,” says John 1:14, “and dwelt among us.” It’s a proposition unique to Christianity among the Abrahamic religions; Judaism and Islam make no such claim about the divine. In the first chapter of Genesis, God repeatedly observes that... Read more