Including one Australian Latter-day Saint:   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-3584198/Sacrifices-religious-athletes-refuse-compromise-faith.html   Posted from Venice, Italy     Read more

    Some claim that that’s all it is.  But their position, in my judgment, is unsustainable:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865633921/Is-religion-merely-outdated-failed-science.html   Posted from Venice, Italy     Read more

    I’m hearing the mantra, now, that I ought to support Mr. Donald Trump for the presidency because, as a spectacularly successful financial and real estate entrepreneur, he would bring business approaches and skills to the White House.   Well, maybe.   Here’s something that I posted on that topic roughly two months ago:   Do you intend to vote for Donald Trump because he’s a brilliant businessman?   If Mr. Trump would have been richer had he simply... Read more

    Rodrigo Duterte has just been elected president of the Philippines:   http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36253612   Five days ago, Miguel Syjuco explained why he was likely to win:     There is much food for thought in Mr. Syjuco’s analysis — none of it very comforting.   Some have complained about my perception of similarities between the emergence of Trumpism and the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.  Accordingly, I won’t mention the parallels that I see between the... Read more

    “It is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as [Sir Fred] Hoyle has done, than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done.  Both statements are metaphysical and outside science.  Yet it seems that scientists are permitted by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not the reverse.  This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an... Read more

    A few of you may be unaware of, or may have forgotten, some of the interesting materials that were published in the very first volume of Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture when it appeared in late 2012.  Here’s one of those intriguing articles:   http://www.mormoninterpreter.com/i-have-revealed-your-name-the-hidden-temple-in-john-17/   Posted from Venice, Italy     Read more

    Thanks to Robert Boylan and his valuable blog for bringing this comment to my attention, from the non-Mormon historian (and biographer of Brigham Young) John Turner:   ” . . .  it no longer makes sense to consider Mormonism a ‘new religion,’ a ‘new world religion,’ or even a ‘new religious tradition,’ if that implies a supersession of or definitive break with Christianity. Instead, Mormonism is a vibrant new branch of Christianity, one in which temples, ordinances, and... Read more

    http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/10/politics/donald-trump-london-mayor-ban/   http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/11/politics/uk-sadiq-khan-trump-amanpour/   And, of course, he’s right to do so.   Mr. Trump’s position on Muslim entry into the United States is not only indefensible and unconstitutional but plays directly into the hands of the Islamist loons who would love to foment a death-struggle between Islam and the West.   The people with whom I’ve spoken in Jordan, Israel, and Italy have, without exception, been incredulous that Mr. Trump will soon be the presidential nominee of a... Read more

    “The theorist who maintains that science is the be-all and end-all — that what is not in science books is not worth knowing — is an  ideologist with a peculiar and distorted doctrine of his own. For him,  science is no longer a sector of the cognitive enterprise but an  all-inclusive world-view. This is the doctrine not of science but of scientism.  To take this stance is not to celebrate science but to distort it by  casting the mantle of its... Read more

    Today, we use the term ghetto to refer to an urban area in which — typically because of social, legal, and/or economic pressure — members of a minority group are concentrated.   The original Ghetto, though, was the named district of the city of Venice to which Jews were restricted and segregated.   It’s not coincidental, I expect, that William Shakespeare’s great play The Merchant of Venice features as a prominent character a Jewish moneylender named Shylock, although the play’s... Read more