The stars may be light years away from us and apparently wholly distinct from us — and yet we’re deeply connected with them.  They create the material out of which we’re made.  They’re our ancestors.  And we’re their children.  Star children.   Stars shine for millions, even billions, of years, but they’re not eternal.  They’re mortal.  When they’ve used up their supply of fuel, they collapse in a cloud of gas and dust out of which new stars and... Read more

    I’m pleased to report that the audio version of Richard Gardner’s new article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture — “Consecration Brings Forth Zion, Not Just Disaster Relief: An Examination of Scholarly and Prophetic Statements on the Law of Consecration” — is now up.  You can find a link to it (under the button labeled “MP3 Audio”) in the column to the right.   The audio of this article is four hours long.  Many thanks to Richard Flygare... Read more

    By now, you may have heard about the violence at an alt-right demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia:   “Virginia governor to white nationalists: ‘Go home … shame on you'”   Now, I will admit to ambivalent feelings about taking down monuments to Confederate generals and leaders.  Was slavery an evil?  Yes.  Absolutely.  (Please, I hope nobody will use this post as a weapon with which to paint me as excusing slavery or justifying it.)  Were those Confederate leaders and generals... Read more

    First of all, though:  My wife and I went out to dinner last night with our dear friend Louis Midgley, one of my very favorite people.  Tonight, with colleagues from my department and elsewhere at BYU, we’ll participate in a retirement dinner for another one of them.  Dilworth Parkinson has been a friend, a mentor, and a colleague for most of my life.  This is the end of an era for BYU’s Arabic program, an era that has... Read more

    Just a few quotations that I culled from a book that I didn’t expect to find so persuasive:  Graham E. Fuller’s A World Without Islam.   Fuller is a former career officer with the Department of State and certain, ahem, other organizations.  (He was, for example, the CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan.)   “Islam seems to offer an instant and uncomplicated analytical touchstone for most affairs in the Middle East, by which to make sense of today’s... Read more

    When I was growing up in southern California, some eons back, the theory that Native Americans had arrived by traveling by foot across a now-lost Bering Straits land bridge was (so far as I could tell, anyway) universally accepted outside Mormon circles.   Moreover, both non-Latter-day Saints and many Latter-day Saints shared the assumption that the competition between the Book of Mormon and the theory of a Bering Straits crossing was a zero-sum game.  Either the one was true, or... Read more

    It’s Friday, so a new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture:   “Consecration Brings Forth Zion, Not Just Disaster Relief: An Examination of Scholarly and Prophetic Statements on the Law of Consecration”   Because of the considerable length of the article, the audio for it is taking just a bit longer to produce.  We hope that it will be finished this weekend.   ***   Here are a few relevant sites — by no... Read more

    The motto at the bottom of a friend’s emails always used to read “Where are we going?  And why are we in this hand basket?”   If you were on board with the logic used to redefine marriage as including same-sex couples, I’m not quite sure how you can reject Matt Walsh’s logic in this little article:   “If All Love Is Equal, This Incestuous Mother And Son Couple Should Be Celebrated”   And, if you’re okay with... Read more

    Modern science has made enormous progress.   But, sometimes, it’s wise to remember how limited we and our knowledge are.  In even basic things.   Consider, for example, an insight offered by the Polish-born Franco-American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010):   Using Great Britain as his specimen, Mandelbrot noted that the British coast becomes longer the more precisely we measure it.     Using a fairly crude measurement — say, as Britain might be viewed from a high-altitude aircraft or,... Read more