Once again, today’s reading — Alma 16 — is simple and straightforward.  And yet it’s also dramatic.   The people of Ammonihah, who boasted of their strength and claimed that their city was too powerful to be destroyed, were in fact annihilated and their city left not only a ruin but a byword.  The catastrophe occurred so quickly that the Nephite armies were unable to save them.   Pride, arrogance, smug and overweening self-confidence, is a profoundly dangerous... Read more

    I owe a debt of gratitude to the inestimable Robert Boylan for calling my attention to this groundbreaking example of rigorous, fearless, no-holds-barred critical scholarship:   http://babylonbee.com/news/historical-critical-scholar-doubts-authorship-paper-wrote/     Read more

    It’s one of the odder phenomena in our solar system, and we may begin to learn much, much more about it this very month:   http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/jupe-spot/484910/     Read more

    Two very good essays released by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:   Civil Society: The Art of Human Connection   Civil Society: Engaging the Differences Among Us   A third article — third of three in this series — is slated to appear on 8 June 2016.   I wrote a short column on the same topic, even citing from one of the same authors, nearly a month ago:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865654071/Living-in-a-world-with-many-different-religious-views.html?pg=all     Read more

    The remarkable Jeff Lindsay continues with his devastation of a newly proposed modern source for part of Lehi’s dream in the Book of Mormon:   http://mormanity.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-iron-rod-inspired-by-aqueduct-in.html       Read more

    Ramesh Ponnuru has published a thoughtful piece on the options facing conservatives in this disheartening election year:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436103/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-conservatives-grim-choice   I’ve signed the #NeverTrump pledge, and there is virtually nothing that the presumptive Republican nominee could possibly do that would make me break it.  (Nor does he seem inclined to try.)  But I understand those who intend to hold their noses and vote for him:  The thought of Hillary Clinton as president is, truly, depressing.   I also,... Read more

    I had lunch yesterday in BYU’s Hinckley Center with some folks from the Wheatley Institution — which, along with the International Center for Law and Religion Studies, I regard as one of the most interesting centers or institutes currently operating on the campus of Brigham Young University.   We were discussing a conference, entitled “Permission to Believe,” that will be held at BYU under Wheatley sponsorship on 22-23 September 2016.  It will comment on the challenge posed by contemporary... Read more

    My Deseret News column for this week is now up:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865655451/A-practical-way-to-remember-the-departed.html   It was inspired by Memorial Day, and by thinking of the hundreds of millions of people who have gone on before.     Read more

    A somewhat longish but genuinely remarkable story in the New Yorker by a winner of the Pulitzer Prize:   http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/06/zarif-khans-tamales-and-the-muslims-of-sheridan-wyoming   Wyoming, murder, vendors of tamales, anti-Muslim bigotry, successful stock market investing, ballet — it’s all there.   I found this piece really astonishing.   I could imagine a great movie coming from it.     Read more

    All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation; and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every... Read more