I have to say that, on this issue, I’m very proud of my adopted state and of my co-religionists:   https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-mormon-problem-thats-not-000000099.html   I do sometimes wonder, though, whether Mr. Trump, who is well known for holding grudges and for seeking to punish those who fail to genuflect before him with sufficient enthusiasm, might — were the Republic foolish enough to entrust the White House to him — seek to get even with areas and groups that opposed him.... Read more

    I know that I sound like a broken record: I’ve said this many times.  But the Hale theaters are a Wasatch Front treasure.   With a friend tonight, my wife and I enjoyed dinner at the Market Street Grill in South Jordan and then attended a first-rate performance of the musical Big River — based on Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — at the Hale Centre Theatre in West Jordan.   Here’s a recording of “Worlds Apart,” one... Read more

    I’m working on an introductory book about Islam and Muslims that I’m aiming at a Latter-day Saint audience.  (It will be a heavily revised version of the second edition of my earlier Abraham Divided, but so substantially altered and updated that I don’t regard it as merely a third edition; it will bear a different title.)   I’ve decided to try to bring my writing and my blogging together by occasionally posting drafts of passages from the book here,... Read more

    In his treatise Cato Maior de Senectute — generally called, in English, On Old Age — the Roman orator, master Latin prose stylist, philosopher, and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero writes about a semi-legendary figure from even earlier Roman history by the name of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus.   Widely respected in Rome for his successful battle to save the Roman Republic from the conspiracy led by Catiline to overthrow it, Cicero was eventually assassinated in 43 BC by order of Marc... Read more

    A news report this morning says that Mr. Donald Trump is thinking seriously about breaking with tradition at the upcoming Republican national convention:  He may speak all four evenings.   Good grief.  If this doesn’t demonstrate the fact that Trumpism is a weird political personality cult, that it’s an American instantiation of the Führer-Prinzip,  that it’s all about The Leader, I’m not sure what would.   And, the report said, Mr. Trump wants to make the convention a... Read more

    Robert M. Bowman, Jr., is a professional Evangelical polemicist often writes and speaks against Mormonism.  To his considerable credit, he’s both much brighter and substantially nicer and more civil than many in his profession, and my interactions with him have been relatively pleasant.   Here, though, are three pieces in which the redoubtable Robert Boylan responds to Dr. Bowman:   http://scripturalmormonism.blogspot.com/2016/06/response-to-robert-bowman-part-1.html   http://scripturalmormonism.blogspot.com/2016/06/response-to-robert-bowman-part-2-sola.html   http://scripturalmormonism.blogspot.com/2016/06/response-to-robert-bowman-part-3.html   Seeing these replies reminds me that I’ve been invited to participate in a... Read more

    A new book is out, anthologizing essays by the Latter-day Saint Russian scholar and playwright Thomas F. Rogers.   Tom has been a friend of mine since I was a student and he was the director of BYU’s Honors Program.  My wife, while an undergraduate, directed his stage adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find.  For years now, too, we’ve belonged to a monthly reading group of which he and his wife are also members.  (We... Read more

    Just a quick reminder of yet another publication from the Interpreter Foundation:   https://www.amazon.com/Science-Mormonism-Questions-Cosmology-Evolution/dp/1890718416?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0   We hope that many will enjoy and profit from this volume.     Read more

    A brief note on Alma 22:   As I pointed out a couple of days ago, forbearance and charity can have a huge impact on others.  It’s so in this case, where Lamoni’s father, the high king, who had unsuccessfully sought to kill Ammon in Alma 20, is now open to the preaching of the Gospel.  “I have been somewhat troubled in mind,” he says in 22:3, “because of the generosity and the greatness of the words of thy brother Ammon.”  ... Read more

    I grew up believing that there were nine planets.  And then, partially thanks to our Vatican astronomer friend Dr. Guy Consolmagno, who spoke to the Interpreter Foundation conference on science and Mormonism earlier this year, Pluto was demoted, kicked out of the planetary club.   Of late, though, people are again talking about nine planets in our solar system.  But Pluto isn’t among them.  Instead, a much larger and vastly more distant planet — not yet named after... Read more