Another Friday?  Yes.  So there’s another new article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, this one written by Dr. Matthew Bowen, of Brigham Young University’s campus in Hawaii:   “‘He Did Go About Secretly’: Additional Thoughts on the Literary Use of Alma’s Name”   ***   The latest installment of the biweekly Hamblin-Peterson column in the Deseret News:   “Impact of the Russian religious revolution”   ***   An interesting program on the Book of Abraham, in which... Read more

    There have been several negative responses to my blog post of the other day titled “Mormonism in the Middle,” in which I indicated my openness to the idea that Muhammad might have been a genuine prophet and my strong sense that, at a minimum, he probably received genuine inspiration.   Some of the responses have been mere regurgitations of pretty standard-issue anti-Islamic propaganda.  Some (I’m thinking of one particular message board) merely reflect the usual hostile (and thoroughly unserious) eagerness to... Read more

    I find the continual contrasts of science to religion made by certain atheists — including at least two who like to comment on my blog — exceedingly odd.  They incessantly point out that science has given us new technologies and cures for polio and other diseases, while theology hasn’t.   My response, on the whole, is “So what?”   To me, this is rather like criticizing the Houston Astros for their failure to score a single touchdown during the entire 2017 baseball... Read more

    First off, I want to express my gratitude for all of the good that so many of you do.  And particularly, today, I want to thank those who have been supportive of the Interpreter Foundation — as writers, donors, editors, media specialists, volunteers, and so forth.  I’m especially grateful to Bryce Haymond for the work he did, in remarkably short order, of designing our website and getting us up online and, for years, of running our online operations, and... Read more

Revised and reposted. Read more

    Happy Thanksgiving to everybody out there!   ***   My column for Thanksgiving Day 2017 has now been published in the Deseret News:   “The miracle of Thanksgiving pies”   ***   This is a Thanksgiving-season column that I wrote for Provo’s Daily Herald roughly ten or twelve years ago:   Modern people, especially city-dwellers, are often far removed from nature.  Pollution and the glare of city lights obscure the stars.  Air conditioning and automobiles allow us to... Read more

    This is the column that I published in the Deseret News on Thanksgiving Day 2011:   Autumn harvest festivals were and are common across Europe, and, as every American schoolchild once learned, our modern Thanksgiving celebrations descend from a meal shared between Massachusetts Pilgrims and Native Americans in 1621. It was not until 3 October 1863, however, that a uniform national holiday was established by presidential proclamation.  Writing well into the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln declared that The... Read more

    Some additional notes:   So, the impatient reader is asking by now, just what are we to think of Muhammad? Was he a genuine prophet, or was he not? My answer to that is a clear and resolute “I don’t know.” Or perhaps a decisive “Yes and no.” Parley P. Pratt, who was enthusiastic in his praise of Muhammad and Islam, observed that the blessings of the priesthood were not intended to flow through the line of Ishmael,... Read more

    This article is interesting not only for its main assertion, expressed in its title, but for its illustration of the drawbacks of scientific “compartmentalization” and of the benefits that can accrue when scientists from divergent fields talk seriously to one another:   “Ocean-covered planets may not be the places to search for life”   Here’s an additional related and partially overlapping article:   “Exoplanet hunters rethink search for alien life: Astronomers expand ideas of how chemistry and geology... Read more

    Here’s a column that I published in the Deseret News on Thanksgiving Day 2010:   Most modern Americans are so far removed from farming—we get our milk from cartons, our meat neatly packaged at the grocery store, our grains in cereal boxes, our cranberries in cans—that we easily forget the agricultural roots of Thanksgiving Day.  But Thanksgiving is a harvest festival, and similar celebrations of bounteous crops (always an uncertainty) have occurred for millennia in such places as... Read more