Scott Petersen, executive director of the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology in BYU’s Marriott School of Management, took his audience through certain early Christian writings on issues such as the Trinity, human deification, and baptism for the dead that are of particular interest to Latter-day Saints.  His remarks were titled “Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today and Forever: A Restoration of Primitive Christianity.”   ***   Scott Gordon, the long-time president of FairMormon, spoke on the ever-popular... Read more

    Every week, the Deseret News publishes a 736-to-739-word-long display of vicious ad hominem attacks, shameless lies, and mean-spirited personal insults from me.  (With those descriptions, I summarize the work of a number of my anonymous online chroniclers.)  Today’s iteration of this shameful series of columns has now appeared:   “King Mosiah and human equality”   ***   We had lunch with friends from Arizona at a nearby Mexican restaurant, and then returned for the afternoon sessions of today’s... Read more

    Elizabeth Kuehn, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine, who works with the Joseph Smith Papers project in the Church History Department of the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offered a presentation on “Finances and Faith in the Kirtland Crisis of 1837.”  She provided a calm, informed, lucid, and empathetic treatment of both the faithful Saints and the dissenters embroiled in the rise and fall of the Kirtland Bank.... Read more

    I’m sitting at the opening session of the 2017 FairMormon conference.  Neil Rappleye is speaking.  His topic, as described in his PowerPoint slides, bears two distinct titles.  The first is “A Tale of Two Jerusalems.”  The second is the one also contained in the printed conference program:  “‘Put Away Childish Things’: Learning to Read the Book of Mormon Using Mature Historical Thought.”   I like his opening.  He describes the Amarna letters, which are a fourteenth-century BC archive,... Read more

    This is a very nice story, with both Muslim and, if you will, “feminist” connections:   “Born in a refugee camp, she’s now flying solo around the world”   ***   I’ve come across a very interesting pie chart of the world’s languages, and of their proportional representation in the world’s population.   It can be slightly misleading, though.  For example, English is probably much more important than its raw number of principal-language speakers would suggest, because, right now,... Read more

    We’re just back from an entertaining performance, at the Hale Center Theater in Orem, of the musical Tarzan.  I was somewhat into live theater long before I met my wife, but marrying a theater major has certainly made that interest a significant factor in my life.  For which I’m grateful.   I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it here again, and I’ll almost certainly say it again in the future:  The Hale theaters are a real Utah... Read more

Revised and reposted. Read more

    The New Yorker, which broke the news of Anthony Scaramucci’s incredibly foul mouth in the first place, continues its Pulitzer-destined reporting on this important story:   “Comedians Protest Anthony Scaramucci’s Ouster”   By the way, I’ve now served almost as long in a senior White House position as Mr. Scaramucci did.   ***   “Why Scaramucci had to go”   ***   I was speculating to my wife yesterday that it was John Kelley, the former Marine general who is... Read more

    There is a short YouTube video making the rounds — I don’t know whether or not it was recorded with his permission — in which Richard Bushman, whom I consider a friend, is shown saying that “the dominant narrative” of Mormon history is “false”:     Some critics take this to mean that, in Dr. Bushman’s mature judgment, after a highly respected career spent not only in Mormon history specifically but in American history more generally, and after... Read more