An excellent little essay by Stephen Smoot, who has been permitted temporary home leave from his exile in Toronto, near Canada’s national igloo:   http://www.plonialmonimormon.com/2017/04/on-internet-libraries-and-seeking.html   I couldn’t possibly agree more strongly.   I can’t count the number of times, for example, that I’ve been told by anti-Islamic internet commenters that I ought to learn something about the history of Islam, that I ought to read the Qur’an, and so forth.  (I regularly teach about the history of Islam.... Read more

    A number of common assumptions about education and religious belief seem to be, at a minimum, open to question:   https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/education-church-attendance/524346/   Many years ago, a friend of mine who was completing a Ph.D. at UCLA while I was also there challenged my lament about losses among the educated class.  It’s the working class that we should be most worried about, he said.  I’ve thought about his comment ever since, and have long since concluded that he was... Read more

    If this hypothesis is true, it really messes up the current consensus view of how humans arrived in the Americas:   https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/science/prehistoric-humans-north-america-california-nature-study.html?referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F   Thanks to Cody Quirk for bringing this article to my attention.     Read more

    It will be interesting to see how this goes:   http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/26/world/pope-egypt-mission/index.html   I’m pleased to note, by the way, that Gabriel Said Reynolds, who is prominently mentioned in the article above, published a significant work some years ago in BYU’s Islamic Translation Series, a project with which, prior to the Purge of 2012, I was once . . . umm, very deeply involved.     Read more

    My wife and I watched a very well-done performance of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Hale Centre Theatre in West Valley City tonight.  It’s a story that I love.   Here are a couple of quotations from the play:   “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway... Read more

    This week’s Thursday Deseret News column:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865678716/An-early-reference-to-the-First-Vision.html     Read more

    From The Onion, America’s premiere journal of scientific research:   “Scientists Capture Audio of Beetle Colliding with Paper Clip for First Time”   Once, when asked what the study of nature had taught him about God, the legendary biologist J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) quipped, “The Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.  He made so many of them.”     Read more

    I know people who regard Google as a massive conspiracy to put us all under surveillance and rule the world.  I’m wondering what they’ll make of this:   “Angel Moroni Missing from New Google Earth Pics of Salt Lake Temple”     Read more

    Despite its exceptionally high concentration of what some critics of Mormonism contemptuously dismiss as “Mor(m)ons,” “Morgbots,” and “Utards,” the state of Utah is apparently not the worst place on Planet Earth, nor perhaps even the most benighted of the fifty United States:   https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-25/want-a-formula-for-success-study-utah     Read more

    My take on Ann Coulter is pretty much that of the editors in this piece.  I’ve found her witty and often right, but . . .   I also share the editors’ view of the fascist mob and the spineless administrators at the University of California:   “Cowardice at Berkeley”   See also this:   “At Berkeley, the Mob Wins Again”   I’m just old enough to vaguely remember the so-called “Free Speech Movement” that roiled the campus of... Read more