Another passage from a book-in-preparation:   Furthermore, the ruling classes of Jewry, including the chief families of hereditary priests, had perished along with the temple and the state they had served. Roman administrators were busily monitoring, harrassing, and persecuting descendants of the Davidic line, including the leaders of the Sanhedrin, in order to prevent them from serving as the nucleus of any new revolt. The prophets were long gone. Only the rabbis were left to become the leaders... Read more

    This statement from the Prophet Joseph Smith has been on my mind today:   Love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God. A man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race. History of the Church, 4:227; from a letter from Joseph Smith to... Read more

    Three more passages from a book by Alister McGrath —  an Anglican priest who holds three Oxford doctorates: a D.Phil. in molecular biophysics, a D.D. in theology, and a D.Litt. in intellectual history, and who currently occupies the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford:   [T]his “science versus religion” narrative is stale, outdated and largely discredited.  It is sustained not by the weight of evidence but merely by its endless uncritical repetition,... Read more

    From my notes:   Jill Mulvay Derr and Karen Lynn Davidson have commented similarly upon the “simplicity and understatement” of the Joseph Smith’s 1838 autobiographical narrative of the First Vision and the circumstances leading up to it: Joseph Smith proposes simply to “present the various events . . . in truth and righteousness” [verse 2].  He begins his account not with a thundering prophetic declamation, but with simple truths, a list of easily verifiable facts—his birth, the names... Read more

    I’ve written previously about the prodigiously prolific Oxford scientist and theologian Alister McGrath, for whom I have enormous admiration.  (See here, for example.)   I’ve just begun to read Alister McGrath, The Big Question: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015).  Here are some passages from its early pages:   Science is wonderful at raising questions.  Some can be answered immediately; some will be answerable in the future through... Read more

    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