I’m just back from pre-recording an interview with Rachael Kohn of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for her ABC Radio National program “The Spirit of Things.”  This is, I believe, the third time that I’ve had an interview with her — once before in studio and, on another occasion, at a Sydney hotel down by Darling Harbour.  She also came to a conference of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) at BYU once, a while back, and may perhaps have interviewed me then.  Moreover, if I’m not mistaken, she was in Istanbul a few years ago for an ICLRS conference at which I was one of the speakers, but I don’t think that she interviewed me on that occasion.  She’ll be retiring at the end of this year, which I find personally a little sad; I like her, and she’s a very intelligent interviewer.

I think that the interview went quite well.  By which I mean that I neither revealed myself to be a fool nor exhibited the utter moral rottenness that my Malevolent Stalker and the less talented Mini-Stalker like to pretend to see in me.  I try to follow the dictum, loosely derived from the Hippocratic Oath, of Primum non nocere:  “First, do no harm.”  After that, if I do any good, I’m delighted.  Some good may have been done today.  I hope so, anyway.

We — by which I mean my wife and I, along with Elder Robert Dudfield, of the Seventy, and Keith Thompson, an associate dean at the law school of the University of Notre Dame Australia — were scheduled to have lunch with a pair of Muslim professors from the law school of the University of Sydney, but there was evidently a miscommunication somewhere, so that didn’t happen.  Instead, though, we all went to a Malaysian restaurant located not too far away, which I really enjoyed.

***

An apostle in England:

“British Prime Minister Receives Family History from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland”

“At Oxford, Elder Holland lays out Latter-day Saint theology before religious scholars, students”

***

Don’t miss this one:

“The Book of Abraham, Revelation, and You”

***

On the Interpreter Foundation website, an interview with Thomas Wayment:

“A New Translation of the New Testament”

***

I like this piece, and commend it to your attention:

“This is what it looks like when the prophet speaks as a prophet”

***

I hope that you intend to participate in this effort:

“Service Emphasized in 2018 ‘Light the World’ Initiative: Global effort offers opportunities to follow the Savior”

Posted from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Early this morning, we flew northward to Cairns, and then drove from Cairns to Port Douglas.  We are, now, much closer to New Guinea than we are to Sydney or even to Brisbane.  This is an area of Australia that I’ve never seen before.  It’s tropical, and ot reminds us quite a bit of Hawaii.  Along the drive up, we stopped off at a place called Palm Cove for a bite to eat.  Absolutely gorgeous.  And a good place to look out over the Great Barrier Reef, about which I’ve heard all my life.

Incidentally, my anonymous Malevolent Stalker, who has devoted much of his life over the past fifteen years to inventing and then lamenting my many depravities, is now suggesting that my trip here may have been paid for by innocent donors to the Interpreter Foundation.

It’s a serious enough (and plausible enough) charge that I judge it to merit a flat denial:  My travels here are not in any way underwritten or supported — not even slightly — by the Interpreter Foundation.

My finances are none of his business, of course, but I’ll say this:  I’m delivering an invited lecture at a university in Sydney on 27 November.  That explains my being here in Australia, and partially pays for it.  My travel here also does not come at the expense of tithe payers.  My wife is paying her own way, and we’re both paying our own way for the goofing-off portions of this trip.  (We like to travel.)  Some of my expenses have been covered by a fund set up at BYU by a specific donor (whom I know very well) for the express purpose of developing and maintaining relationships between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Islamic world.  My remarks in Sydney will be directed to the question of Islam in Australia and the West, and she explicitly endorsed drawing on her fund in partial support of my coming here.

As always, my Malevolent Stalker’s suggestions of unethical or mercenary behavior on my part are malicious but wholly without merit.  This is what he does:  His online pseudonym is adopted from a character in a television crime show — a vengeance-obsessed sociopathic hacker, stalker, and serial killer who plays mind games in order to manipulate proxies into carrying out murders for him.  (My stalker can dream, can’t he?)  But I want people to understand very clearly that their donations of time, effort, and money to the Interpreter Foundation are not, in any way, supporting me, let alone supporting my wife.  Not so much as a cent.  My wife and I are ourselves donors to Interpreter — of money, labor, and time.  We don’t profit from it.  Quite the opposite.

The Interpreter Foundation’s expenses are visible, accessible to anybody who wants to look, online:

Expenses

We’re not playing tricks here.  There are no hidden funds for lavish travel.  No games.  Our editorial costs go for source-checking and page layout.  The content-editing is done by generous volunteers at no charge.  The principal leaders of the Interpreter Foundation are entitled, under our bylaws, to $500 annually in compensation; none of them has ever asked for so much as a dime of that possible reward.  Just so you know.

Posted from Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia

And they’re the same guy.

(Whether he ever actually went to bars, I have no idea whatever.)

Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky (1900–1975) was a prominent Ukrainian-American geneticist and evolutionary biologist — he came to the United States in 1927, at the age of 27 — who taught successively at Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Rockefeller University, and then — after the death of his wife, Natasha, and his own retirement — went out to join his former student Francisco J. Ayala at the University of California at Davis.   He was a central figure in developing the so-called “modern synthesis” in the field of evolutionary biology.

Dobzhansky was also a firm believer in a personal God, as well as a communicant member of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  He believed that God used evolution to create life in all of its varieties.

Here are some of his thoughts on both evolution and religious faith:

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” 

“Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts — some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.” 

“The evolution of life, and the evolutionary origin of mankind, are scientifically established as firmly and completely as any historical event not witnessed by human observers. Any concession to anti-evolutionists, suggesting that there are scientific reasons to doubt the facticity of evolution, would be propagating a plain untruth.” 

“Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.” 

“Nature’s stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.”

***

Again today, an anonymous critic has claimed that, no matter how much I deny it, I’m a young-earth creationist.

Now, of course, this is the same critic who has invented bogus quotations that he attributes to me online in an effort to embarrass me; invented demonstrable falsehoods about my appearance for his trusting audience; falsely claimed to have traveled with me and to have observed my allegedly bizarre behavior in Israel; repeatedly apologized to the world, online, for my cruelty, dishonesty, and absurdity; and so forth.  Moreover, since at least 2012 I’ve received a very large number of crude, personally insulting, anonymous emails, all recognizably from the same author, and, for whatever it’s worth, if I had to guess, he would (for several reasons) be my choice as the person most likely to have written them.

In my August 2018 remarks at the annual FairMormon conference, I apparently misspoke, identifying my Malevolent Stalker as the most probable candidate for the authorship of those emails.  (It’s possible, though not likely, that the transcription of my talk, which is extremely rough, got me wrong at that point.)  I’ve long thought, however, that, while the Stalker has plainly been engaged in an oddly focused personal vendetta against me for well over a decade, he’s also too highbrow (in his curious way) to have written such emails.  By contrast, his wannabe imitator shares that vendetta or even exceeds him in that department and, significantly, isn’t as bright.  Furthermore, his hostility seems more visceral — I have literally no idea why — and there are some distinct and specific thematic parallels between his online comments about me and the contents of the emails sent to me.

But don’t write him off yet, merely because he has a bizarre fixation on me and no scruples against lying.

He’s actually right.  I do believe in a young earth.

I believe that the earth is approximately 4.543 billion years old, which is very young compared to the approximately 13.8 billion years that have elapsed since the Big Bang.

And, once I’ve admitted that, there evidently isn’t any significant difference between me and, say, Ken Ham or Archbishop Ussher.

QED.

We’re just back from Cedar City where, today, we took in an afternoon performance of The Foreigner (in the Randall Jones Theater) and an evening performance of The Merchant of Venice (in the Engelstad Shakespeare Theatre).

This is at least the third time, and perhaps the fourth, that I’ve seen The Foreigner.  It’s a very — very — funny play.

The Merchant of Venice is powerful, eloquent, and, at points, distinctly uncomfortable for a contemporary audience.  Shylock is an often unappealing character, but the casually cruel anti-Semitism of those around him is painful to watch.  On the other hand, Shakespeare — or Edward de Vere, or whoever he was — who was almost certainly an anti-Semite by today’s standards, also makes Shylock a figure for whom we have empathy and emphasizes the common humanity shared by both Jews and Christians:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?  If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”  (Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice III.i)

Four, I think, of the masculine roles in the play were taken in this production by women — notably Leslie Brott as the merchant Antonio and Lisa Wolpe as Shylock.  Ms. Brott is a fine actress and a perennial favorite at the Festival, but I didn’t think she really worked in a man’s role.  It was distracting.  On the other hand, Lisa Wolpe was magnificent as Shylock — not, though, because she’s a woman but in spite of it.  Frankly, had I not known beforehand I might not have detected that he was a she.

On the whole, I don’t think having women play those roles added richness or extra layers of meaning to the play.  But the best parts in Shakespeare are, for the most part, men’s roles, so I guess it was a nice move to give these excellent actresses a shot at them.

I’ve already written about our first play yesterday, Big River.  Excellently done.  But I haven’t mentioned the play that we saw last night.  We were scheduled to see Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, but we rearranged our schedule so that we could see An Iliad, by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, instead.  (We’ll pick The Merry Wives up in a couple of weeks.)  There was, unfortunately, only a relatively small audience for An Iliad there in the Randall Jones, but it was a remarkable theatrical experience for everybody in attendance.  Essentially a one-man play — this production features Brian Vaughn, who is the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director and a hugely popular actor with regular Festival attendees — with minimal to nonexistent stage scenery, it’s a powerful anti-war play drawing on, but scarcely limited to, Homer’s Iliad, in the translation by Robert Fagles.  (There are a few scattered quotations from the Greek original and particularly from the opening line of the Iliad, which I was delighted to hear since, many years ago, I memorized the Iliad‘s opening lines, and I still remember them.)

The Poet — the role played by Brian Vaughn — is Homer, but more than Homer:  He has witnessed and chronicled every war in human history, from long before Troy, among the Sumerians, to today’s wars in Syria and Iraq.  And this play shows why Homer is still relevant today, still worth discussing.

Anyway, we’re now two thirds of the way through this visit to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and I repeat what I said yesterday: The Festival is a treasure.  There should be absolutely no empty seats at any performance.

***

Meanwhile, my Malevolent Stalker, who has been posting hostile pseudonymous comments about me for something on the order of fifteen years now — he’s missed relatively few days and very few weeks — spent part of his day today doing what he most enjoys: posting about me.  It seems that I’m “defined” by my dishonesty, my viciousness, and my lack of ethics.  (I’m surprised that my Stalker omitted mention of my perpetually seething hatred.  That’s usually one of his favorites.)

Posted from St. George, Utah

Nearly two weeks ago, having just returned from watching a documentary about the late children’s television host Fred Rogers, I remarked here on this blog that I had never been a fan of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, had probably never watched an entire episode, and didn’t really enjoy what I had seen:

“A movie-induced walk down memory lane”

That revealing admission seems to have stirred up yet another negative discussion about me (on a mostly atheist and apostate message board where, admittedly, negative discussions about me are regular, perhaps even mandatory, occurrences).  It’s an amusing conversation, and I think I’ll comment on it.

The thread or discussion was launched by my Malevolent Stalker, who has dedicated most of his online activity for the past decade or more to posting anonymous criticisms of me and to leveling anonymous accusations against me.

My Malevolent Stalker likes to charge me with such offenses as, to choose a few from among many, the deliberate destruction of other people’s careers, racism, slander, sexism, mercenary greed, anti-Semitism, libel, seething and uncontrolled anger, voyeurism, intentionally destroying families, dishonesty, a propensity to violence, and fascism.  For a while, he spent his days combing through publicly available Internal Revenue Service documents in an effort to demonstrate that I’ve earned large sums of money from seeking to defend the claims of Mormonism.  At one point, he triumphantly produced a Christmas wishlist posted on Amazon years before by my youngest son (when that son was about six or eight) in order to illustrate some aspect or other — I’ve forgotten the exact specifics — of the psychologically dangerous consequences of growing up in my family.

Several years ago, one of his themes focused on my bland, unadventurous, vanilla tastes in art, literature, music, and drama, which stem from my manifold aesthetic and intellectual inadequacies.  (So far as I’m aware, we’ve never met.  But he knows such things about me.  He knows.)  This time, though, my stated lack of interest in Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood — a program that has often been criticized as, precisely, bland, unadventurous, and very vanilla — reveals my defective character and my moral depravity.

Because, you see, it’s not just that I didn’t like the show.  I actually, even “coldly,” “hate” Mr. Rogers himself.  (Curiously, until I read my Malevolent Stalker’s analysis, I imagined that I found the man himself quite likable, a judgment that had just been reinforced by the recent documentary.)  I despise Mr. Rogers’s goodness, his niceness, and his kindness.  I disrespect him because he was Christlike — for the simple and sufficient reason that, when it comes right down to it, I don’t actually like Jesus, either.  Moreover, Fred Rogers was and is a painful reminder to me of my moral failures and an exemplar of decent behavior, which I loathe.

The concurring opinions arrived almost immediately:

Peterson, observed one of the Stalker’s respondents, cannot comprehend genuine kindness and affection, and, consequently, had no time for either Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood or Fred Rogers himself.

Another offered Fred Rogers as an example of genuine Christian discipleship — he actually was, by the way, an ordained Presbyterian minister — which is enough to explain why I would hate him.

Yet another — perhaps trying to be more sympathetic to me — offered the insight that, since my fellow defectives and I spend our lives trying not to face reality, we don’t have much energy left over for being nice.  Later, a second sympathetic commenter explained that I don’t “understand” Mr. Rogers because, unlike Fred Rogers, I’m afflicted with a “hardness” in my character that apparently forces me to judge and condemn others.

A subsequent commenter pointed out that what separates me from Fred Rogers is that, unlike Mr. Rogers, I lack sincerity and authenticity.  Fred Rogers was kind, authentic, accepting, sincere, and loving, while I . . . Well, does it really need to be pointed out that I’m none of those things?  She went on to remind the others that nobody has ever, ever, detected even a trace of human empathy in me.

My Malevolent Stalker’s “Mini-Me,” a distinctly odd fellow who likes to flatly invent shameful quotations and attribute them to me and who, for a year or two, falsely claimed to be a serving (but unbelieving) LDS bishop and to have accompanied me on a tour of Israel, where he purportedly observed my viciousness and laughable incompetence at first hand and up close, arrived then to announce that he was unsurprised that I hold Fred Rogers in utter contempt.  Why?  Because, unlike Mr. Rogers, I’m absolutely consumed with perpetual hatred, anger, and virtually uncontrollable rage.

One of the reasons behind my visceral disgust at Fred Rogers, offered still another commenter, might be that he was Presbyterian.  That’s right, commented a different participant in the discussion.  Mr. Rogers, after all, didn’t have the priesthood.  A third participant agreed: Peterson has an exclusivist view of religion; in Peterson’s view, there’s nothing valuable outside of Mormonism.

One man joined in just to compliment my Malevolent Stalker on his brilliant opening post and to call me an “[crude expletive deleted].”  (Presumably, I’ve offended him by my lack of niceness and kindness.)

Perhaps, opined another participant in the discussion, I hate and despise Mr. Rogers because, in my worldview, the idea that a non-Mormon might be a good, decent human being is deeply threatening.

Basically, the discussion appears to have concluded, people like me just plain hate and fear love.

And all of this because I wasn’t a fan of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  (I’m guessing that mine wasn’t the only television set in America that wasn’t tuned in.)

But why on earth should I have been?  I also never watched the Cosby Show, the Lawrence Welk Show, or Alias Smith and Jones.  Truth be told, I didn’t watch much television at all.

Moreover, according to Wikipedia, the target audience for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was preschool ages 2 to 5.  But when the show came on the air in 1968, I was already fifteen years old and just two years away from the university.  Should I have skipped my high school classes to watch it?

At one point in the discussion, even Professor Louis Midgley is cited as someone whose poor character is demonstrated by the fact that he didn’t watch Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (as he himself acknowledges in a comment following the blog post of mine that inspired the conversation described above).  But Dr. Midgley is (literally) old enough to be my father.  (There’s no shame in that, of course, as, for some, there would be in actually being my father.)  Should he have cancelled his university lectures on political philosophy and on the Federalist Papers in order to stay home and watch the show?  Should he, perhaps, have had his classes watch it?

I find myself thinking, in this context, of Puck’s exclamation to Oberon in William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.ii.115:

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

(Shakespeare was a Mormon, right?)

Posted from Newport Beach, California

I’ve quoted the great G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) several times lately.  This has apparently disturbed some of my critics.

One of them suspects that I may be unaware of the fact that Chesterton was a Roman Catholic apologist who probably didn’t think very highly of Mormonism.

And, indeed, it stunned me to learn this.

A Catholic!  Who wouldda thunk it?

Having never, myself, been more than three miles outside of Fountain Green, Utah, I didn’t realize that there still were Catholics!

But it certainly explains some of what was going on in his Father Brown mysteries, to saying nothing of books like Saint Francis of Assisi (1923) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933) — all of which I own and have enjoyed.

Another critic then cites a passage that actually suggests Chesterton’s opinion of Mormons and Mormonism:

The basic Mormon belief is one that comes out of the morning of the earth, from the most primitive and even infantile attitude. Their chief dogma is that God is material, not that He was materialized once, as all Christians believe; nor that He is materialized specially, as all Catholics believe; but that He was materially embodied from all time; that He has a local habitation as well as a name. Under the influence of this barbaric but violently vivid conception, these people crossed a great desert with their guns and oxen, patiently, persistently, and courageously, as if they were following a vast and visible giant who was striding across the plains. In other words this strange sect, by soaking itself solely in the Hebrew Scriptures, had really managed to reproduce the atmosphere of those Scriptures as they are felt by Hebrews rather than by Christians. A number of dull, earnest, ignorant, black-coated men with chimney-pot hats, chin beards or mutton-chop whiskers, managed to reproduce in their own souls the richness and the peril of an ancient Oriental experience. If we think from this end we may possibly guess how it was that they added polygamy.

Again, I’m amazed.  To think that there were Englishmen born and raised in the late nineteenth century who knew little about Mormonism, didn’t think highly of it, and failed to convert to it . . .  well, suffice it to say that I find that absolutely shocking.

Of course, I’m going to conceal from you what Chesterton had to say about the Latter-day Saints, because, as my Malevolent Stalker reveals in response to the two critics mentioned above, I regard you all as “morons.”  I suspect that I want you to go on imagining that absolutely everybody out there admires us and secretly wants to convert to Mormonism — or, indeed, that everybody already is Mormon.  Whatever you do, don’t leave Fountain Green!

Posted from Newport Beach, California

Postscript:  An alert reader, posting (as he should!) from Fountain Green, Utah, reminds me that I had previously hidden G. K. Chesterton’s critical attitude toward Mormonism from my readers — including the very passage above — on 7 June 2015:

“A passage from the great G. K. Chesterton, on Mormonism”

I’m very consistent!

On Monday night, my wife and I enjoyed a Thai dinner with friends — Thai is one of my very favorite cuisines — and, last night, we attended a touring Broadway performance at the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City of the Gershwin-inspired musical An American in Paris.  Life can be very good.

***

You may have noticed that I like to help the hobbyists, out there, who are zealously adding to their already bulging “Religion is Evil” and “Mormonism is Evil” files.  In that spirit, here are some additional items that they may have missed:

“Church Provides 17,000 Meals to Feed the Hungry in Virginia”

“Hurricane Irma and Maria Updates”

From the Lowell [Massachusetts] Sun:  “Mormon Helping Hands volunteers 1,000 hours”

“Mormon churches shelter California fire victims; members assist those who lost homes (+video)”

You can join in this anti-social Mormon wickedness here, or by contributing here.

***

Meet the Mormon Harvey Weinstein!

On rather a different note, one of the exceedingly strange and deeply anonymous folks who’ve been stalking me and maligning me for a decade or so online has now pronounced me a Mormon parallel to Harvey Weinstein.  Among other things, this particular character has scrounged through IRS records trying to find discrediting financial dirt on me, and even, once, managed to locate a personal website on which somebody had recounted a humorous story from our student days in Jerusalem years ago, before my marriage; my ever-hopeful stalker felt that the anecdote could be used to make me look like an anti-Semitic bigot.

***

Some of you might enjoy this interview with Dr. John Gee, author of the new volume An Introduction to the Book of Abraham.  The interview begins at about the 45-minute mark.

If you want to learn something more about the very, very sad story that is mentioned at the beginning of the podcast — and, perhaps, if you want to contribute something or to help — please read this:

“LDS Mom of 6 Killed While Driving Home After Visiting ‘Miracle’ Twins in NICU”

This is one of the worst things that can happen in mortality.  Just awful.

I’ve lost close friends to drunk drivers.  I hate these stories.  Life can be very bad.

***

You might find this article, by Grant Shreve, thought-provoking.  Or provoking.  Or something:

“How Mormons Have Made a Religion Out of Doubt”

Here’s an interesting item about its author, Dr. Shreve, that will help you to understand where he’s coming from.

“I fell hard for the Book of Mormon but did not convert to the LDS Church”

Quite by chance, I actually caught a few minutes of the first episode of Quantico, in re-run.  I saw what happened to the Mormon character, though I wasn’t quite as irritated by it as advance notice had suggested that I, as a Mormon, might be.  (I mean, I don’t think it’s altogether impossible that a returned missionary could have some dark secret to hide and, eventually, trying to protect it and ridden by guilt, turn into a homicidal loon.  After all, as my Malevolent Stalker would point out, look at me.)

Of course, I wondered how he could have done all of those things on his mission without his companion noticing.  But non-Mormon writers rarely get the companion thing right.  Consider, for example, the opening moments of the smash Book of Mormon musical, in which Elders Price and Cunningham are at the Missionary Training Center.  Elder Cunningham is hoping to be assigned to Orlando, Florida.  Instead, though, the two are paired as companions and sent from the MTC to Uganda.

The nuances are just a bit off, wouldn’t you say?

But that’s nothing compared with the sloppy research of some other writers.  I recall looking at one mystery novel several years ago — I never read it, and have long since forgotten both title and author — in which the heroine, looking at the Salt Lake Temple, was trying to figure out exactly why the building left her with such a creepy feeling.  And then it dawned on her:  It had no windows!  It’s like a solid block of granite!

Speaking of the Salt Lake Temple, I missed the part in Quantico, alas!, about the wedding reception held there.  That would have been very enjoyable.  I wish my wife and I had known about the possibility of reserving the temple for receptions back when we were planning our wedding!

Novelists and screenwriters rarely get the Mormons right.  (Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 A Study in Scarlet, in which he introduces a detective named Sherlock Holmes, wasn’t the first grossly inaccurate representation, and it certainly hasn’t been the last.)

One of my favorites is a 1970 novel by “Henry Sutton” (David Slavitt), entitled Vector.  I came across it on my mission in Switzerland, of all things.  It’s been literally decades since I’ve seen the thing — I really need to look at it again — but, as I recall, a virus has been mysteriously released upon a small town in the desert west of Salt Lake City (called “Tarsus,” I think).  People are dying in droves, but there’s a government cover-up.  The hero, a biologist from (natch!) outside Utah, is trying to find out what’s going on.  Unfortunately, though, as his contacts in Salt Lake explain to him, the people of Tarsus belong to a religious group called “Mormons.”  And Mormons don’t cotton to outsiders.  So that complicates the hero’s task considerably.

Another one from many, many years ago:  For reasons that I no longer remember, a friend and I had dinner with Peter Bart just after his 1981 novel Thy Kingdom Come appeared.  He was genuinely puzzled as to why Mormons had, almost universally, panned his story.  I tried to explain that he got us wrong, time after time after time.  He just hadn’t understood what it’s like to be a Mormon.  For example, a crucial element of the plot (as I remember it nearly four decades later) revolves around an affair between the Church’s General Relief Society President and the official spokesman for the First Presidency.  I recall telling Bart that his depiction was essentially impossible.  That those two Church officers could have an affair, of course, was conceivable, if unlikely — humans are flawed — but that they could simultaneously be (a) deeply devout, believing, orthodox, and utterly sincere members of the Church and (b) completely without any sense of guilt or remorse or hesitation about their extramarital liaison was, to me, unthinkable and wildly implausible.  And that was just one of many problems.

Oh well.