This article was published well over a month ago, but I see from comments on my blog, on my Facebook page, and in my email inbox that some of what it has to say is still relevant, so I link to it:   http://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/19/14662244/trump-sweden-terrorist-attack-fake   But here’s another word on the topic:   Some have been claiming, over the past few days, that I deny that there are any problems in the Islamic world, that I claim that there... Read more

    This short essay, written just over four years ago, strikes me as very insightful:   Rejecting the Living Prophets by Following Future Prophets   Of course, there are those out there — not a few of them, alas — who simply, flatly, reject the leaders of the Church because of ideological differences.  Commonly, these days, it’s over political disagreement.  And, very specifically, it’s very often about matters related to sexual morality or attendant issues.  A believer might say... Read more

    Here’s a delightful passage about Roman Catholicism from the 1835 work Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, written by Samuel F. B. Morse (Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, Class of 1810), painter, co-inventor of the telegraph, and co-developer of the “Morse Code”:   Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. . . .  They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been,... Read more

    I meant to announce this earlier.  I’m late, and I’m very sorry for that.   Anyway, if you’re in the Provo area, you should know that the superb recent Martin Scorsese film Silence is playing at BYU’s International Cinema tonight and tomorrow:   http://ic.byu.edu     Read more

      You certainly can’t complain this week that the Interpreter Foundation has left you with no weekend reading!   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/by-the-blood-ye-are-sanctified-the-symbolic-salvific-interrelated-additive-retrospective-and-anticipatory-nature-of-the-ordinances-of-spiritual-rebirth-in-john-3-and-moses-6/     Read more

    Two quite unrelated requests:   1.   If you live in the vicinity of Manchester/Palmyra, New York, or within a reasonable distance of that location, could you let me know whether there are leaves on the trees in your area?  I’m specifically interested in whether any leaves are visible this coming Sunday.   2.   That was an easy question.  This one’s a bit more ambitious:   If you live in Scandinavia (particularly Sweden, I guess), or Germany,... Read more

    The impressively energetic and prolific Irish Latter-day Saint Robert Boylan takes on a common anti-Mormon charge:   http://scripturalmormonism.blogspot.com/2017/03/when-prophet-says-it-that-settles-it.html   A strain of anti-Mormonism common to both the evangelical and secular species of that remarkable disorder is the claim that Latter-day Saints are, as Rush Limbaugh would put it, “mind-numbed robots.”  That we can’t think for ourselves.  Or, in one variant, that to some substantial degree at least, we’re believers because we’re sheltered from the wider world out there,... Read more

    A small number of people have been posting up a storm on my Facebook page over the past week or two — in some cases, these are professedly believing Latter-day Saints who challenge exhortations from the First Presidency and other Church leaders (and it sometimes appears, even from the Savior himself) to care for refugees.  In an effort to make their case, they use Sweden and Germany and France and Australia and Switzerland as admonitory examples, portraying them as essentially under... Read more

    I found his face arresting.  This could have been somebody I might meet on the street today.  I think it’s helpful to realize that pre-modern people were very much like us.  They were — they are — our brothers and sisters:   http://www.livescience.com/58380-archaeologists-reconstruct-medieval-man-face.html   Curiously, this article caused me to think of the great work of the redemption of the dead.  This was a man, like all of his contemporaries, for whom Christ died.  Not merely an abstraction, but... Read more

    Thanks to Nicholas Garaycochea for bringing this video (based on an event some months ago) to my attention:   https://www.facebook.com/nicolas.garaycochea/posts/10155140627782891?notif_t=like_tagged&notif_id=1490333390159644     Read more