This week’s new article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture has appeared:   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/scriptures-with-pictures-methodology-unexamined-assumptions-and-the-study-of-the-book-of-abraham/#more-10302   Posted from Twin Falls, Idaho     Read more

    It’s time again, perhaps, for one of my favorite poems.   I’m very fond of the excellent second-tier English poet A. E. Housman (d. 1936), who, along with writing such works as “To an athlete dying young,” from A Shropshire Lad, was a distinguished classicist at the University of Cambridge.  The melancholy mood of many of his poems speaks to me.  I’ve even made a minor pilgrimage to his grave.   Housman was an atheist, and sometimes a hostile one.... Read more

    As we move into the season of Easter and Easter Week, this is a timely topic for discussion:   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/lds-perspectives-podcast-jewish-holy-days-with-gale-t-boyd/     Read more

    Want an interesting read?  Here’s a remarkable sacrament meeting talk delivered in Shanghai by the redoubtable Jeff Lindsay:   http://mormanity.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-creation.html     Read more

    You can add Mr. Trump’s cruise-missile attack on the Syrian airbase as another arguably good thing that he’s done.  (Along with, most notably, the Gorsuch nomination.)  Certainly I don’t lament it.  We simply can’t stand by while the Syrian regime uses poison gas on innocent civilians.   That said, I’ve maintained all along that Mr. Trump isn’t a conservative but rather a reflexive and unreflective authoritarian nationalist whose positions will, sometimes, coincide with those of conservatives.   Here’s something for people... Read more

    In pre-modern times, when Christians rarely met non-Christians — oh, they might have known some Jews, who could be ghettoized or dismissed as “Christ-killers,” but they seldom if ever met Buddhists or Hindus or Sikhs or Jains or Confucians or practitioners of Shinto and only encountered Muslims as political and military foes — it was easy not to worry about the salvation or damnation of non-Christians.   In today’s world, by contrast, where our neighbors and co-workers might... Read more

    A typically fine speech by one of Mormonism’s finest speakers (who was a major influence on my life and thinking at a pivotal time), the late Truman G. Madsen.  It runs about 35 minutes:   https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/truman-g-madsen_know/     Read more

    Pretty harsh language, and not how I would have said it.  But it is what it is:   “I think only an idiot can be an atheist.  We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.” Christian Anfinsen     Read more

    “And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a ‘new man’ and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply... Read more

    A marvelous new tool for teaching and learning:   https://www.lds.org/church/news/visit-jesuss-jerusalem-with-virtual-new-testament-app?lang=eng&_r=1     Read more