Continuing my excerpts from a manuscript:   By the year 632, Muhammad had subdued all of the Arabian penin­sula. The revelation of Islam was complete. “This day I have perfected your religion for you and completed My favour to you,” says the Qur’an in the voice of God, in what many believe to be the last verse of the book to be revealed. “I have chosen Islam to be your faith.”[1] The tribes were now united, and the question arose,... Read more

    My wife and I have just returned from a performance in the de Jong Concert Hall at BYU by the violinist Joshua Bell, who was accompanied by Alessio Bax on the piano.   You may recall Joshua Bell from the famous “Washington Post Subway Experiment”:     He played Felix Mendelssohn’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Major (1838), followed by Edvard Grieg’s Sonata No. 3 in C Minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 45.   After an... Read more

    More notes:   For all that it criticizes the unbelievers of Arabia, though, the Qur’an does not spare Muhammad either. He was never allowed to forget that he too was human. At one point, for example, despite all the Qur’an’s denunciations of the wealthy, Muhammad seems to have shown too much deference to a rich man. He had violated one of the cardinal tenets of true Islam, the equality of all men before God and before his Prophet:... Read more

    An interesting suggestion from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof of CNN and the New York Times (who, by the way, according to his Wikipedia entry, holds degrees from both Harvard University and Magdalen College, Oxford, and who claims to have visited at least 150 different countries):   “Utah may well be the most cosmopolitan state in America. Vast numbers of young Mormons — increasingly women as well as men — spend a couple of years abroad as missionaries... Read more

    I want to call your attention to an extremely interesting — and provocatively titled — article in the November 2017 issue of First Things, written by a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay area by the name of William A. Wilson:   “The Myth of Scientific Objectivity”   Here’s a lengthy teaser quotation from it:   According to the popular understanding, science is simply the comparing and ordering of sense data originating from experiment or from the... Read more

    I announce to you a great joy:  The Interpreter Foundation has a new website!   You can admire it here.  Please bookmark it for future reference.   I would like to thank all those who worked to make this a reality.  I don’t have all the names and I apologize for that, but I do want to mention Allen Wyatt, Alan Sikes, and Ryan Knowlton and to acknowledge all of the excellent work that they’ve put into this.... Read more

    Brian Thompson has asked my opinion of a Prager University video done by Ayaan Hirsi Ali:   “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?”   It’s an interesting video, about 5:10 minutes long, and I recommend it for your viewing.  (More than thirteen million people have already watched it.)   Here’s my brief response:   I see little in it with which I disagree.   I concur, for  example, that Islam should not be called a “religion of peace.”... Read more

    Once again, a few notes from an eventually forthcoming book:   The vast majority of the Arabs on the eve of the rise of Islam were pagans. But this statement, true though it is, requires some careful explanation. Not all Arabs were pagans. There were Christians and Jews in some parts of the peninsula who had considerable influence. Furthermore, the paganism of the majority was clearly an apostate remnant of earlier revelations. For example, the pre-Islamic Arabs knew... Read more

    Yesterday, in an entry titled “Radicalism defined,” I cited the late Russell Kirk’s definition of radicalism.  Here are his “six canons of conservative thought,” from his classic 1953 book The Conservative Mind:   (1)  Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.  Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.  A narrow rationality, what Coleridge calls the Understanding,... Read more

    You may be aware of the recent minor flap over a garbled quotation from a review (“Should We Apologize for Apologetics?”) recently published by Steve Densley in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture.  I’ve posted about it — in chronological order — here, here, and here.  (I understand that I’ve made it a huge issue and I’m informed that I’m very, very upset about it.  You’ll probably be able to detect that from the hysterical and enraged tenor of... Read more