At least half, and probably more, of the flights that I’ve taken in the past year or two have ended up being substantially delayed or altogether cancelled. (Back on 1 August of last year, in a blog entry here, I celebrated a wonderful day on which I spent nine hours traveling from my house to my house while trying to give a fireside in Irvine, California; my journey included some wonderful views of Las Vegas from a circling... Read more
Two new review-articles appeared earlier today (Friday) in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “A New and Most Welcome Resource for Book of Abraham Studies,” written by Quinten Barney Review of Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “A Guide to the Book of Abraham,” BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022). 302 pages. Abstract: The new and special issue of BYU Studies containing “A Guide to the Book of Abraham” provides a welcome and easy-to-read... Read more
An article of mine appeared in Meridian Magazine last evening: “A Mind Built to Believe.” I hope that somebody will read it. Also . . . “The religious term you should try to stop using: A growing group of scholars, journalists and others recommend against labeling a faith group as a cult” I blush to admit that I already said exactly the same thing a long, long time ago, in a book entitled Offenders for a Word: How... Read more
Jeff Bradshaw, one of the vice presidents of the Interpreter Foundation, and Russ Richins and James Jordan — respectively, the producer and associate producer of the Interpreter Foundation’s Witnesses film and our Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon docudrama and our short “Witnesses” video features — are over in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the moment, where they are gathering material for what we currently conceive as a series of short videos about the people... Read more
Dr. Mario Beauregard, a Canadian cognitive neuroscientist who is currently affiliated with the University of Arizona’s Department of Psychology, was a member of the faculty of the Université de Montréal when, with Denyse O’Leary, he wrote The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York City: Harper Collins, 2007). On page 10 of The Spiritual Brain, Beauregard and O’Leary recount a story that I had forgotten about the terrible crash of an Air France airbus... Read more
I’m late in calling attention to this brief article, which went up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation on Friday, 5 May 2023: “Interpreting Interpreter: A Dark Mark,” written by Kyler Rasmussen. This post is a summary of the article “Understanding the Lamanite Mark” by Clifford P. Jones in Volume 56 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/. The Takeaway: Jones argues that descriptions of the Lamanites’ dark... Read more
“In all areas except religion,” Richard Dawkins claimed in a blogged panel discussion back in 2010, “we believe what we believe as a result of evidence.” By contrast, he went on to say, religion is “a nonsensical enterprise” that “poisons everything.” It is a “delusion,” he wrote in, well, The God Delusion ([New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008], 28), a “persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.” According to his fellow New Atheist Sam Harris... Read more
From time to time, whether on the internet or in pamphlet form or even in a triumphant personal email sent directly to me, I run across dismissals of the story of Jesus as purely fictional — on the grounds that all of the important facets of his life were merely (and obviously) borrowed from the legends of other dying-and-resurrecting gods, etc. I wrote a column back in mid-2012 in which I briefly responded to this fairly common atheist... Read more
A new article has appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: “Understanding the Lamanite Mark,” writtten by Clifford P. Jones Abstract: The Book of Mormon describes a dark mark on the skin that distinguished people who rebelled against God and his laws from those who obeyed God. The Old Testament refers to a mark that fits this description and has nothing to do with natural skin color. The law of Moses prohibited the Lord’s covenant... Read more
Godfrey J. Ellis has published a really nice piece about Interpreter in Meridian Magazine. I commend it to your attention: “Ten Hidden Gems from the Interpreter Journal” I wrote here yesterday about “An Interfaith Gathering at the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Focused on the Old Testament Tabernacle.” The LDS Church News has also published an article about that event: “Elder Pearson at interfaith fireside: Religions ‘add immeasurably to the quality of life’: Elder Kevin W. Pearson, Utah Area president,... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In