Three quick comments about Alma 3, the reading for today:   1.   This chapter raises the issue of dark skin color as a supposed sign of God’s curse.  Which, for many critics, immediately brands the Book of Mormon as racist, and particularly as a product of nineteenth-century American racism.   We believers sometimes respond quite defensively to this charge.  But there may be a middle ground:   Could ancient Nephites have been racists, by putatively enlightened twenty-first century standards?   Of course they... Read more

    Did you happen to notice this one?   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/100-million-plan-will-send-probes-to-the-nearest-star1/   It involves Stephen Hawking, space travel, and a Russian billionaire.  Gotta be interesting.     Read more

    The latest installment of my weekly Deseret News column is up:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865652157/Out-of-small-things.html   And the usual commenters have already begun to comment.   One of them faults the column for focusing only on the Abrahamic tradition.   It would have been nice to have included a few irrelevant chapters on Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, etc., I suppose.  They would have nothing to do with the thesis of the article, and nothing to do with the express faith-commitment on... Read more

    The militias that have sprung up to oppose the so-called “Islamic State” have my very best wishes in their fight:   http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35998716     Read more

    Frankly, some of these folks don’t seem to value freedom very much:   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433969/religious-liberty-tennessee-counselor-therapist-protections-hate           Read more

    What do you think?   I find the data here really interesting, and worthy of discussion:   http://national.deseretnews.com/article/18877/4-ways-to-tell-if-someone-is-highly-religious.html     Read more

    http://bmaf.org     Read more

    Everybody makes mistakes.  Even, it turns out, y’r obdt srvnt.   Tonight, I made a big one.   I was scheduled to give a fireside on the Book of Mormon up in Salt Lake City, and I totally spaced it.  I was busy with some pressing matters, and it completely fled my mind.  I didn’t think about it the whole day.  Not even once.  Unbelievable.   I’m told that a hundred or so people were there, patiently waiting.... Read more

  “By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer (executed on 9 April 1945)     Read more

    A bit sobering, but also very interesting:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865652032/At-UVU-Times-columnist-Ross-Douthat-says-future-of-religious-liberty-similar-to-19th-century-Mormon.html       Read more