Jordan shelters most of the Mideast’s Arab Mormons?   Yes, it does.   It’s not a huge group, of course — as several braying jackasses predictably pointed out on the Tribune website in response [sic] to the article  — but the number is higher than some might imagine.  I know several.  I had two of them in one of my classes last term.   In any case, this is an affecting piece:   http://www.sltrib.com/home/4966919-156/jordan-escape-hatch-for-fleeing-syrians#disqus_thread   Posted from Hilo, Hawaii     Read more

    A while back, there was a flurry of attention given to a study purporting to demonstrate that children raised in religious households were actually less kind than children from secular families.  This counterintuitive finding was immediately employed as yet more evidence of the evils of religion.   In that light, Ron Thompson called this article to my notice:   http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2016/october/are-religious-kids-meaner-or-nicer.html   Thanks to him for an interesting read.   Posted from Waikoloa, Hawaii     Read more

    Another passage from H.A.L. Fisher (on whom, see here), this one regarding the Emperor Constantine and his legitimation of Christianity, which paved the way to its establishment as the Roman Empire’s official creed:   “Nobody would be bold enough to contend that this vigorous and capable soldier was a Christian character.  If he did not actually, as is attested, throw German captives to the beasts, he certainly put to death his wife and his son.  But in a... Read more

    Just moments ago, I received a note from yet another overconfident religious skeptic who thought that he could stun me with his list of astonishing supposed parallels between Jesus, Isis, Muhammad, Krishna, Ba‘al, Tammuz, and etc.   I guess it’s time to trot this May 2012 Deseret News column out yet once more:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765576518/Parallels-of-prophets-not-parallel.html   Posted from Waikoloa, Hawaii     Read more

    More crack investigative reporting from The Onion:   http://www.theonion.com/article/trump-staffer-grateful-work-so-many-people-he-coul-55321   If you would like to have the presidential fanfare “Hail to the Chief” playing in the background while you read the article — I’m always looking out for you! — just click on this link:     Posted from Waikoloa, Hawaii     Read more

    I wasn’t aware of Milo Yiannopoulos until quite recently.   I wish I still weren’t.   Here are a couple of items about him:   “What Is a Conservative?”   “Free Speech Has a Milo Problem”   I despise the “alt-right.”  The uncomfortably cozy links between Trumpism and the alt-right were among the many things that told me — nay, screamed to me — that I could not, in good conscience, board the Trump train.  They still worry me... Read more

    I missed this article when it appeared at the end of November last year:   http://www.sltrib.com/home/4650074-155/utah-lawyers-step-up-to-protect   Thanks to Anne Palmieri for calling my attention to it.   Posted from Waikoloa, Hawaii     Read more

    There have been many responses from believers to Jeremy Runnells’s unfortunate (and, in too many cases, unfortunately destructive) Letter to a CES Director, an unoriginal grab-bag of attacks on Latter-day Saint belief and the claims of the Restoration.   Here, for example, is a transcript of my own hasty fifty-minute reaction to the Letter at the 2014 FairMormon conference.   And here is a section of the FairMormon website devoted to the Letter, the effect of which has... Read more

    What’s the oldest thing alive today?   Contrary to popular opinion, it’s probably not me:   http://www.livescience.com/57941-what-is-the-oldest-living-thing.html   Posted from Waikoloa, Hawaii     Read more

    Just for the heck of it, I’ve lately been reading H.A.L. Fisher’s work A History of Europe, vol. 1, From the Earliest Times to 1713.  Fisher had been a member of Parliament, a British cabinet minister under the prime ministership of his close friend David Lloyd George, and, after the end of World War One, a delegate for two years to the League of Nations.  In 1926, though, he became the warden of New College, Oxford, where he found... Read more