I’ve never been overly interested in paranormal phenomena — what’s sometimes called psi — such as clairvoyance, ESP, and spiritualism.  My worldview doesn’t demand that they be authentic or true.  Pretty obviously, though, their authenticity, if confirmed or even strongly evidenced, would tend to undermine certain reductionist materialist dogmas in a way that would be congenial to things that matter much more, and much more directly, to me.   In recent years, I’ve begun to wonder whether I... Read more

    Part of one of the other chapters that I’m working on:   The first question that comes up when we begin to discuss “the Arabs” is what, exactly, we mean by the term Arab. As the word is used today, it refers to people whose primary language is Arabic. This Semitic language, a relative of Hebrew, is the native language of at least three hundred million people and is the official tongue of countries from Iraq in the... Read more

    Another bit of my book manuscript:   Muhammad in Mecca Within a few years of his birth at Mecca in 570 A.D., Muhammad, the future prophet of Islam, became an orphan. He had been born into an important clan of the Quraysh, known as the Banu Hashim. (That is why Jordan, whose king claims descent from the Prophet, is even today officially known as “The Hashemite Kingdom of Jor­dan.”) But, though the Banu Hashim were important, by this... Read more

    In his foreword to Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Brian Schmidt, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, writes as follows:   “Like a Bach fugue, the Universe has a beautiful elegance about it, governed by laws whose mathematical precision is meted out to... Read more

    Two items for your already-bulging “The Church doesn’t care about non-Mormons and it’s a malign, harmful influence in the world” file:   “Faith Key to Rebounding from Refugee Status, Apostle Says”   “While Irma raged, 11,000 Mormon volunteers worked to save Texas homes”   As the late great Christopher Hitchens loved to point out, “religion poisons everything.”   ***   I came across an amusing item today.  Posting about a week ago, an apostate on a mostly atheist... Read more

    I’ve been reading a book by Brian Clegg titled Are Numbers Real? The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016).  It deals with a really interesting topic that, in my view, may point suggest the falsehood of materialist/reductionist views of the universe.   I’ll share just a few passages from it:   “Would numbers exist without people to think about them, or are they just valuable human inventions, the imaginary inhabitants of... Read more

    I’m revising a book that I once published, and thought that I might blog it — or, anyway, part of it — as I proceed:   On 23 September 1855, Elder George A. Smith of the Council of the Twelve stood up in the Bowery in Great Salt Lake City—the Taber­nacle had not yet been built—and delivered what was, for the time and place, a very well informed and astonishingly positive sermon on Islam. “I am aware,” he... Read more

    As has been noted, today is the sixteenth anniversary of al-Qa‘ida’s lethal attacks on the Pentagon in Washington DC and the World Trade Center in New York City and of its failed attempt to use United Flight 93 for an attack on either the White House or the United States Capitol.   Oddly, I have a particular song going through my mind — Nanci Griffith’s rendition of “From a Distance.”  Bette Midler had a hit with the same... Read more

    Today, of course, is the sixteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,996 people, injured more than 6,000 others, caused over $10 billion in damage, and fundamentally changed world history.   Some of you may be unaware that, for the tenth anniversary back in 2011, President Thomas S. Monson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wrote a reflective piece about the lessons of 9/11 for the Washington Post:   “9/11 destruction allowed us to spiritually... Read more