My friend Professor Louis Midgley has had a life-long love affair with New Zealand and, being here once again, it’s very easy to remember and to understand why. We arrived today at the Bay of Islands, on the northeastern coast of the North Island. Most specifically, our ship dropped anchor just off Waitangi, where the pivotal treaty was signed in 1840. Our private mini-bus tour took us to, among other things, a kauri forest, a kauri woodworking shop, the... Read more
I return briefly to Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s posthumously-published 2008 book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, which I recently re-read while flying over the Pacific. And, just to refresh memories, I again cite here the brief bio that appears at the end of that volume: Known as Lisby by her many friends and colleagues, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was an internationally known psychoanalyst, researcher, and clinician, the author of groundbreaking papers on female development, clinical... Read more
As discomfiting as it certainly is to our critics, the Interpreter Foundation continues to produce materials for the Latter-day Saints and for any who are interested in the Restoration, and to do so at an alarmingly non-glacial pace. Here are the most recent publications from the Foundation: “Second Nephi as a Legal Document,” written by Martin Oman Evans Abstract: Considering conventions of the ancient Near East, 2 Nephi can be understood as a legal document or legal archive. Factors supporting... Read more
We began the day with almost all of our group taking a multi-hour minibus tour of mostly eastern Sydney, looking at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the magnificent Sydney Opera House and including really good fish and chips and shrimp, followed by gelato, at Bondi Beach. As I sit down to commence writing this blog entry, we’re just emerging from Sydney’s huge and excellent harbor (harbour?). From our veranda of our cabin, I’m looking southward at the sheer cliffs... Read more
Amazingly, something new has appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation! It is “Conference Talks: Consecration and Sacrilege in Early Rabbinic Judaism” Avram Shannon spoke on “Consecration and Sacrilege in Early Rabbinic Judaism” at the fourth Temple on Mount Zion Conference, held on Saturday, 10 November 2018 in the Tanner Building at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. The presentations were filmed, and both video and audio recordings of each presentation are available. The videos are currently available both... Read more
Just in case anybody is out there who (a) might be interested and (b) is or will be in the vicinity of Sydney, Australia on the relevant date: It seems that I’m likely to be doing a fireside there on Thursday, 22 February 2024. I’ll try to post confirmation of this in the next few days, with precise time, topic, and so forth, but I think it’s almost certainly going to happen. If so, it will probably be held... Read more
On the flight from Honolulu to Sydney, I watched the 2015 film In the Heart of the Sea, about the disastrous final voyage of the Nantucket whaling ship Essex, which served as the inspiration for Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick. The movie was a box office bomb. I honestly don’t know why that would be so; I enjoyed it very much (if enjoy is really the right word to use for such a horrifying tale). I also read... Read more
Here are some notes about certain of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon — both official and unofficial — that I’ve drawn from the fourth chapter of Richard Lyman Bushman’s book Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023): Emma viewed herself as one who had never left the faith. “I know Mormonism to be the truth; and believe the Church to have been established by divine direction.” She knew she had “been... Read more
I sometimes encounter the complaint from some atheists that they don’t even desire immortality because, they say, eternal life would be unendurably boring. I don’t take the complaint very seriously. On any given day, if I were to be told that I could choose between my life ending at midnight, on the one hand, and, on the other, having at least one more day, I would always choose the latter. I would prefer to think of the next day,... Read more
The standard view of the origins of the Polynesians, and specifically of the Māori of New Zealand, is that they derive from the Lapita civilization of Melanesia and Micronesia. Here is a passage from Māori History: A Captivating Guide to the History of the Indigenous Polynesian People of New Zealand (2022), apparently written by Matt Clayton, that I found particularly interesting: It seems that for roughly one thousand years, the Lapita people consolidated some of the basic Polynesian cultural... Read more
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