Last night, we attended a session in the still relatively new Indianapolis Indiana Temple with the local friends who are hosting us here.  (He is one of the temple recorders.)   I have to say that the temple is more beautiful than photos of it had led me to expect.  And the interior is very, very lovely.   ***   I hope that the estimable Ed Gantt won’t mind my quoting a very good point that he made the other day in... Read more

    In company with several prominent local Latter-day Saint leaders, my wife and I visited the headquarters of the Islamic Society of North America, which is located in Plainfield, Indiana.  We stayed through the Friday noon prayer, including the khutba or sermon, which was delivered (on the subject of good deeds and righteousness) by Ahmed M. Elhattab.   I especially liked his quotation of a hadith, or statement, attributed to Muhammad:  “He does not believe!” the Prophet is said to... Read more

    Notes from a manuscript:   Drawing on principles enunciated by the great German scholar Friedrich Blass, Hugh Nibley has argued that, in examining the authorship of a document whose authenticity is in dispute, the initial presumption should always be that the document is what it claims to be. Lightly assuming the existence of a genius forger is, for a number of reasons, not a sound scholarly method.[1] Yet, of course, that is precisely what is most commonly done... Read more

    Two ways of looking at the cosmos: A tiny planet floating amidst the vastness of an impersonal cosmos that truly does not care.  Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”  Still, he thinks, science can bestow upon us a fleeting and ultimately meaningless dignity in the face of utter cosmic nihilism.  “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a... Read more

    My friend Safi Kaskas, of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (whose remarkable and groundbreaking annotated English translation of the Qur’an I heartily recommend for your consideration), posted the entry below on his Facebook page earlier today.  With his kind permission, I reproduce it here — though with apologies for the slight weirdness in the Arabic line, which I somehow could not eliminate — because I believe it makes a very good point:   Some ignorant people, Muslims and others, read this... Read more

    As a conservative, I’m far from displeased with everything that has been done by the Trump administration.  But I continue to be very concerned about Mr. Trump himself.   You may or may not be able to gain access to it — I can’t give you access, legally — but this Wall Street Journal article by Peggy Noonan is an important one:   “What Bob Corker Sees in Trump”   In case you haven’t followed what Senator Corker... Read more

    From some notes toward a future book:   As Melvin J. Thorne has observed, “there are features of the Book of Mormon that make it so complex that it is simply not credible that Joseph Smith could be the author of the book in any normal sense. It is too complex to have been written by Joseph in the manner and in the amount of time described by witnesses.”[1] The Book of Mormon discusses scores if not hundreds... Read more

    Continuing with one of the manuscripts:   It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the old power and beauty had gone out of the Qur’an by the Medinan period. Passages like the so-called “Light Verse,” which some modern commentators believe refers to the lighted altar of a seventh-century Christian church, conclusively demonstrate that this was not so: God is the Light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein... Read more

    From another of those unfinished manuscripts:   The Book of Mormon is remarkably complex. For instance, it claims to be the work of multiple authors, some of whose writings have then been redacted and abridged by a later one. The first of these authors is named Nephi, and he probably wrote his book late in his life, looking back at the events he had witnessed. He is trying to explain why he, the fourth of six brothers, was... Read more