We spent all day today filming for our Becoming Brigham documentary series. It was tough going. At one point, we checked the temperature and found it to be a bracing 31°F (approximately -0.6°C), with a windchill factor of 9°F (roughly -12.8°C). The day was blustery, too, and, especially in the morning, fairly serious snow was falling. (My wife and I were in Hawai’i just a few days ago!). I found myself thinking of the greatest film ever made,... Read more
My wife and I drove around today to look at the Eastman School of Music, from which two of our friends graduated, and at the University of Rochester and its medical school (where a former next-door neighbor earned his medical degree). We crossed the Erie Canal several times and went to the former home of Susan B. Anthony, in the parlor of which, in 1872, she was arrested for violating the law that prohibited voting while female. She was... Read more
It was exhilarating to watch President Russell M. Nelson, well into his hundred-and-first year, announce fifteen new temples this afternoon. “Some say, ‘I do not like to do it, for we never began to build a temple without the bells of hell beginning to ring.’ I want to hear them ring again.” (Discourses of Brigham Young, 410) During our flights yesterday, I read Impressions of Near-Death Experiences: Quotations from Over 100 Experiencers, by the researcher Robert Christophor Coppes, who... Read more
Owing to our travel schedule, we missed both of the daytime sessions of General Conference today, and we’ll miss this evening’s session. I regret that. I feel bad about missing any part of Conference. Since my mission — and apart from the four pre-internet years that we spent living in Egypt — I think that all of the conference sessions that I’ve missed could be counted on one hand, with several fingers left over unused. As we were... Read more
I haven’t checked on my retirement savings for a while, but I’m beginning to think that I left my job much too early. Or, to put it in a slightly different way (and with credit to the movie Airplane), “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Today being Friday, a new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. It is “The Covenant Path of the Ancient Temple in 2... Read more
As I closed out my undergraduate degree in classical Greek and philosophy — both highly marketable fields that, I’m sure, thrilled my long-suffering parents — I was very briefly but seriously tempted to change my field altogether and seek to go to graduate school in economics. It’s a an area that has long interested me. And, now as then, I lean strongly toward free-market viewpoints. I’ve long fantasized, for instance, about how desirable it would be to make Henry... Read more
Many years ago, my good friend Lou Midgley and I drove up to the Salt Lake Valley one Sunday night to spend the evening at an evangelical Protestant church. The good folks there were showing an anti-Mormon film of some kind, and Lou and I wanted to see it. We hoped simply to sit quietly in the back and watch. However, we had committed an elementary, naïve, and obvious mistake: We went to the event dressed in conventional Latter-day... Read more
Monday was our last full day in Hawai’i, and we spent it quite thoroughly immersed in Polynesiana. As I mentioned previously, we spent some considerable time in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, which is the Hawaiʻi State Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Founded in 1889, it is the largest museum in Hawaiʻi and apparently has the world’s largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts and natural history specimens. (I’m not sure how it compares, in that regard, to Te... Read more
Please make a note of this: Annual FAIR Conference — August 7-8, 2025 Mark your calendars for our FAIR Conference this August at The Barn at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah! We are thrilled to host a variety of speakers, scholars, and experts who will provide faithful responses to challenging questions. Some of the speakers will include: Come Back Podcast, Adassa, Al Fox Carraway, Matthew Godfrey, Benjamin C. Peterson, Josh Coates, Zach Wright, Matt Christiansen, Dan Peterson [sorry about... Read more
This afternoon, we made a pilgrimage to Pearl Harbor, and, very specifically, to the USS Arizona Memorial. It was sobering, as always. We also spent time in the exhibits there and watched a couple of films about the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941. That horrible event happened nearly eighty-five years ago, and there are, surely, few if any survivors on either the Japanese or the American side still alive today. To my shock, though, I found myself almost... Read more
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