An interesting exchange.  A forthright and brave Arab woman.   I don’t agree with everything here.   Shams Bandar — that’s her name — is a Saudi/Kuwaiti singer.  In this interview, she’s somewhat mischaracterizing and oversimplifying 1400 years of Islamic history, for instance, and contrasting it too starkly with much of Europe’s history over the same period.  The West hasn’t always been that good.   And the interviewer’s notion that it’s the West that has caused all of... Read more

    Maybe you did, but I never heard the sequel to the report of that attempting airline bombing.   Here it is, though.  And I couldn’t help but chuckle:   http://worldwarwings.com/news-suicide-bomber-on-plane-sucked-out-himself-as-only-casualty   I know.  I know.  I’m not very Christian.  Not very charitable.  I shouldn’t really laugh at anybody’s death.  But . . .  It’s almost worthy of a Darwin Award.  And, horrible person that I am, I laugh at those, too.     Read more

    When the weather becomes hot in the summer, this could become an attractive vacation spot.  Think extreme sports, too!  Running in reduced gravity across seas of frozen nitrogen, scrambling to be the first atop a peak of ice . . . Only, I suppose, to meet Dora the Explorer there.   http://www.ksl.com/?sid=38413092&nid=1012&fm=home_page&s_cid=topic     Read more

    http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/02/02/office-for-national-statistics-well-being-data_n_9138076.html   It’s imperative that we religious people avoid reacting to this with anything remotely like the smug sense of superiority that so many militant atheists direct at us.   That shouldn’t be difficult.  It’s a very low bar.     Read more

    Today’s reading, 2 Nephi 20 (= Isaiah 10), focuses again on the international political situation of Isaiah’s day.  I’ll be brief, but I think that a few notes might be helpful:   Verses 1-2 refer once more to the greed and injustice of Judahite society, in which the poor are oppressed by the rich.  Although Isaiah himself seems to have been a part of the ruling class of Jerusalem, he saw their evil clearly.   In verses 5-6, the Lord... Read more

    “Forever is composed of nows.”  (Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886)   I suppose that one of the points to be taken away from this comment by the famous Belle of Amherst is that we shouldn’t always be living for the future.  Not that we shouldn’t prepare for the future at all, but that we only really ever live — and only really ever will live — in successive present moments.  So we shouldn’t defer goodness, truth, and beauty for some indefinite... Read more

    When I’ve been able to live the Sabbath properly — and, frankly, even Sabbath-observant Latter-day Saints have a hard time keeping the day sufficiently uncluttered, unhectic, reflective, open for visiting family and the sick and the needy, available for scripture study — I have loved it.   The Sabbath is now an official emphasis of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Proper Sabbath observance has always been a teaching of Mormonism, but it’s receiving renewed attention... Read more

    I was sitting in my high priests group meeting earlier today, and, as I looked around, I thought what a good group it was to be with.  I counted at least eleven or twelve former bishops sitting around me, for example, and I know of many remarkable acts of service associated with most of them.  I’ve known several of these men for decades now.   The lesson for the meeting focused, among other things, on service.  It included a... Read more

    It’s a worthy effort.  The article, published by a newspaper based in Columbus, Georgia, has — as could easily have been predicted — brought out a number of haters and religious bigots.  But it’s a decent article, in and of itself:   http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/living/religion/article58805308.html   Of course, neither the book nor the article was written for bigots or haters.  There are sane, decent people out there — the “silent majority,” as it were — and they’re the real audience.... Read more

      Here’s a column that I published nearly six years ago in the Deseret News, about one of my favorite biblical sites in the land of Israel:   http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700038919/Capernaum-bears-witness-of-Christ.html?pg=all     Read more