I’m pleased to read that President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Presiding Bishop Gerald Caussé, and Elder J. Devn Cornish (a member of the Seventy) have paid a visit to the struggling Saints in southeastern Texas:   “President Uchtdorf Visits Texas in Hurricane Harvey Aftermath: Bishop Caussé and other leaders lend support”   And I can scarcely express my delight at living in an era when the second counselor in the First Presidency, visiting Texas from Salt Lake City in the... Read more

    I would like to call your attention to a lecture this coming Wednesday evening, 6 September 2017, in the Jordan Event Center located behind the Cruise Lady office at 9112 South Redwood Road, West Jordan, Utah.  It will run from 7 PM to 9 PM.   The speaker will be Hany Tawfik, and his subject will be “The Wonders of Egypt.”   Permit me to say a word about him:  I think that I’ve accompanied Cruise Lady tours to Egypt twice... Read more

    First:   Fresh, buttered corn on the cob and a really great cantaloupe are among the glories of summer.  One of my chief regrets about traveling so much during recent summers has been the fact that I’ve been able to eat so little of them.   ***   Yesterday, we had a Gospel Doctrine lesson on the pioneer trek to the West.  (I didn’t teach it; my team-teaching colleague did.  It’s one of the few times that I’ve... Read more

    Well, it was gratifying to see Robert Cundick: A Sacred Service of Music finally up on television.  I had not fully realized, before we began work on the film, how much work goes into every minute of a movie.   You can watch and listen to a performance, by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Orchestra at Temple Square, of Brother Cundick’s oratorio The Redeemer (1:22:23 long) here:     There are several passages that nearly reduce me... Read more

    Don’t forget the screening of the Interpreter Foundation’s new film, Robert Cundick: A Sacred Service of Music, that will occur today (Sunday) at 3 PM Utah time on BYUtv.   ***   Just back tonight from a really enjoyable performance of the comedy Pillow Talk (famously filmed with Doris Day and Rock Hudson) at the Hale Center Theater in Orem.   I neglected to mention, last week, that we attended a production of The Heart of Robin Hood... Read more

    You might find this latest installment of the bi-weekly Hamblin/Peterson Deseret News column of some slight interest:   “Reformation and counter-reformation”   ***   One of the most interesting writers of classical Islam is the Anatolian poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (AD 1207-1273).  He is also known as a jurist and theologian, and as the head of a mystical community.  But he is most famous today as the author of a huge collection of rhymed Persian... Read more

    Something that I hadn’t known about a well-worn anecdote — an especially popular story among atheists — that I’ve known for many years:   “Both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens quote an exchange between the emperor Napoleon and the brilliant French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace.  Laplace had taken Newton’s work and extended it in a substantial way to the entire solar system, presenting his results in Celestial Mechanics, first published in 1799.  Newtonian physics was thus shown to... Read more

    Here’s a letter that I wrote yesterday to the Interpreter Foundation’s donors and volunteers:   1 September 2017   Dear friends of the Interpreter Foundation:   I want to alert you to the premiere public showing of Robert Cundick: A Sacred Service of Music, which will occur at 3:00 PM (MDT; Utah time) on Sunday, 3 September 2017, on BYUtv.   (Please note that BYUtv is a cable and satellite channel that is distinct from KBYU-TV, which is Brigham... Read more

    This is one of the most wonderful translation failures that I’ve ever seen:   “Hotel tried to label meatballs in English but ended up killing a man named Paul”   (Thanks to “Chet Chareth Cutestory Manly” for bringing it to my attention.)   ***   I’m obviously not a Catholic, and I don’t aspire to be one.  But I’m a sympathetic outsider, and something of a devoted observer of things Roman Catholic.  So this article caught my attention:... Read more

    I recently came across this summary of four elements of the fine-tuning argument.  It occurs in the printed text of Alister McGrath’s 2009 Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland:   1. If the strong coupling constant were slightly smaller, hydrogen would be the only element in the universe.  Since the evolution of life as we know it is fundamentally dependent on the chemical properties of carbon, that life could not have come into being... Read more